Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50

Re:Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50 by overcast on Thursday February 02, 2017 @08:23PM (#13556839)

I think we're really starting to see the saturation point with native apps, particularly on phones. I am so sick of having to install yet another mobile app, for something that basically shows me a bunch of text, pics, and like buttons. 90% of these shouldn't exist. There is a time and place for it, but I think there is going to be a shift to the web app with more OS integration stuff.

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Re:Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50 by niftich on Thursday February 02, 2017 @08:39PM (#13556911)

This has been happening for a while. This 2012 article from Nielsen [1] wrote that while app downloads were up (in 2012), user time spend in all apps was flat. It also notes that the 4 of most popular apps were Facebook, YouTube, Google Search, and Gmail.

This 2014 recap [2] of a comScore report notes that more than half of all smartphone users download 0 new apps a month -- this started the catchphrase that "the average user downloads 0 new apps a month", which has both been supported and challenged by additional analyses on old and new data every year since. Whether it's 0 or 1.5 [3] isn't the point -- the growth is measly.

Aside from a select runaway hits, most of today's most used apps are the same as 4, 5 years ago. The app boom has been over for a long time. Occasionally, one can still strike it rich, but it's the exception, and not the norm.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/02/19/exclusive-...

[2] https://www.quora.com/How-was-WhatsApp-built

[3] https://www.tune.com/blog/no-the-average-american-does-not-d...

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Re:Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50 by overcast on Thursday February 02, 2017 @08:43PM (#13556933)

Agreed! Thanks for the sources.

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Re:Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50 by flukus on Thursday February 02, 2017 @09:47PM (#13557241)

We've got the worst of both worlds a lot of the time. Tiny little apps that would be just fine as web pages, and web/electron apps that should be real apps.

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Re:Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50 by sidlls on Thursday February 02, 2017 @08:59PM (#13556996)

Aren't most of those "native" apps just webapps packaged standalone with some framework anyway?

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Re:Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50 by pjmlp on Friday February 03, 2017 @02:55AM (#13558449)

Not really, not the majority of the ones that people really care about and don't drain their battery.

Even those that are, they can access the full spectrum of OS APIs, instead of a document model bended to be a VM.

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Re:Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50 by overcast on Thursday February 02, 2017 @10:01PM (#13557310)

Just furthers my point.

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Re:Mozilla closes Connected Devices division, lays off 50 by tybit on Friday February 03, 2017 @02:51AM (#13558433)

Hard to tell, Android Instant Apps and the like may solve those problems and keep native apps ahead of web apps.

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