I'm going out on a limb but I'd wager you're not exactly representative of the general userbase for which apps are developed.
People rebelled. A lot of people rebelled. No one wanted to install their app to comparison shop. People just went to the Amazon site and bought whatever they wanted, knowing that at most, there would be a minor difference in price. Shopping on Amazon's site using a mobile browser was a breeze compared to Flipkart. The whole app-only strategy was a disaster.[3]
Flipkart admitted their mistake[4], and decided to re-instate their mobile website in November the same year. But the damage had been done. By August 2016, Flipkart had lost its leading place in the Indian e-commerce space to Amazon[5]. They never recovered, and to this day, they're still playing catch-up.
Not everything in the entire debacle can be attributed to Flipkart's app-only strategy. Undoubtedly, there are others aspects - like Amazon's prime being better than Flipkart's version, etc. But the app-only strategy definitely contributed significantly to Flipkart's uncrowning, and provided Amazon the much-needed entry point to becoming the market leader.
1. https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/flipkart...
2. https://www.livemint.com/Industry/J9VeQxowSOlHU8ZMUParUL/Fli...
3. https://www.techinasia.com/flipkart-myntra-app-only-disaster
4. https://trak.in/tags/business/2015/11/10/flipkart-u-turn-mob...
5. https://www.livemint.com/Companies/c6vY9ta120G7cwewrCg6bI/Ha...
My non-technical retired mom also only uses about ten apps, for basically the same reasons, although she doesn't have the vocabulary and jargon we have to succinctly explain the same concepts. AFAIK its the same for my wife, aunt, and sister (different people, LOL) who mostly use Facebook app, being middle aged women.
HN users are far from representative.
App adoption and use, overall, is low.
Consumers Spend 85% Of Time On Smartphones In Apps, But Only 5 Apps See Heavy Use https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/22/consumers-spend-85-of-time...
App Download and Usage Statistics (2018)
The total number of mobile app downloads in 2017 – 197 billion (a forecast)
That's an average of about 50/user, with an 80%+ abandonment rate, and a median all but certainly far lower.
How many Android apps are there now? Well, by June of 2017 it reached 3 million Android app mark! The current rate of its growth is more than 1,300 apps a day.
This is not a good thing.
..despite the sea of choice for mobile apps available for both iOS and Android, in real life people tend to use on a daily basis only a few. Here is how much exactly – 10 apps a day on average or 30 apps on monthly basis.
http://www.businessofapps.com/data/app-statistics/
77 percent of users never use an app again 72 hours after installing
https://www.androidauthority.com/77-percent-users-dont-use-a...
How Many Apps Do Smartphone Owners Use? Most apps are not even retained for a full day
A Localytics survey, conducted by Research Now in October 2015, reports that 49% of US smartphone app users use six to 10 smartphone apps each week.
https://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Many-Apps-Do-Smartphon...
New data shows losing 80% of mobile users is normal, and why the best apps do better
https://andrewchen.co/new-data-shows-why-losing-80-of-your-m...
197 billion app downloads? You don't have to be a researcher to know that the number is a "little" far-fetched. And maybe I'm delusional to the fact that might be possible. After all, I have only ever used Android and only with the default apps it comes packaged with. Other than the exception for WhatsApp and Messenger.
But honestly, in the markets that I work with, I see such blown up statistics that it makes me throw up on the inside. E.g. In 2018, 20% of all web searches are done using voice (assistant, Siri, smart speakers, etc.), and by 2020 that number is "going to be 50%".
Holy macaroni... I can already picture the dystopian reality where people walk around airports all talking to their phones just to look something up.
All that aside, mobile apps suck! I prefer a well-designed mobile website over an app at any time of the day.
Is it? I'm a highly technical user, CS degree and all, 20 years experience, and I still downloaded around 20-25 apps last year. Of those, I kept like 4-5 on the phone, but the downloads are still there.
~3 billion * 20 = 60 billion app downloads already. And younger people are not as mission driven ("need to find an app for a specific task") and picky as me. Add to that casual apps and games, where people can download a new one every week (I rarely play games).
>But honestly, in the markets that I work with, I see such blown up statistics that it makes me throw up on the inside. E.g. In 2018, 20% of all web searches are done using voice (assistant, Siri, smart speakers, etc.), and by 2020 that number is "going to be 50%".
Yeah, that sounds like just BS PR from from SEO article pushing for some voice related product or service. Absolutely there are those too.
https://bgr.com/2017/02/09/google-play-store-app-privacy-pur...
Not that I agreed with the website vs. app debate, but with all respect, that "userbase of 99% of the apps" was likely made up by those people who would also begs for bigger keyboard on their phones so they can send SMS a bit faster back in 2006.
But webapps are not some novel development they're not aware of. They are what existed before apps and during apps, and exists still, and people still spend most of their time on mobile apps.
I think you've been mislead by the current situation where everybody is using apps on their phone. But really, the "mobile app" it's just another thing that is attractive to them.
If you lock somebody in a room with only a TV inside, eventually that person will turn on the TV and start watching, even the TV only plays China Central Television channel one (FYI: It's boring like hell).
It's basically the same effect, the only twist here is that people chose to be addicted to their phones.
Don't let that effect blind you :)
Yeah, no!
I think your intuitive judgement failed you here
Young kids seem to install apps all the time, but parents quickly learn not to let them spend any money on in app purchasing.
Those don't matter much for the concerns of TFA, as they're unlikely to use some new fangled web app either...
While he is not the type to install new apps, all my friends are, and never ask me for any advice.
Anecdotal, but I think HN users do not have all the power you think they have.
I'll buy a game once in a while (just got Civ 6 on the iPad and it's outstanding), but that's about it.
So much this.
To add insult to injury, reddit intentionally degrades the site's experience in mobile devices with tons of dark patterns pushing users to their shady mobile app.
Facebook is my #1 example of this.
The app bloated up like it's primary purpose was to take up space on your phone. So I removed it and used the mobile website.
At first you had to refresh the page to get new messages. No big deal, but a bit annoying.
Then they updated and didn't even need to refresh the page to get an update to the thread you were in.
Then a few years back they decided you can't get messages in the mobile website, you must use their app. Later I learned about mbasic.facebook.com and have to switch to that when friends message me.
I agree that reddit might not need an app in the same way, but I'm sure there are ways they could improve their user experience by further leveraging mobile hardware in ways that don't relate to tracking.
I prefer "Reddit is Fun" which seems to load faster than mobile web reddit and notify me on comment replies.
That's a problem that reddit creates for itself as it purposedly degrades the site's experience on mobile devices with tons of dark patterns to try to push users to install the company's official mobile app.
Do you think that web apps are better in that regard?
Think of it like this: If Hacker News required a fat client to function on your desktop, would you actually be here at all?
EDIT: I can, awesome. If anyone has a good theme to suggest, that would be fantastic.
HN essentially is a service that provides only a couple of text views to list and read submittions and their discussions, and requires zero processing or interaction. That's hardly a challenging problem that requires a fat client.
If however we were discussing an application that required significant data processing, access to your personal data, or even access to photo ir video input... You'd hardly be able to implement something with HTML+CSS.
Case in point: twitter is very usable as a website but instagram is not.
Instagram users only use instagram because it provides access to those functionalities.
<input type="file" accept="image/*" capture>
That's irrelevant. It doesn't matter that making a fat client for HN isn't necessary; that's completely beside the point. You're looking for reasons to ignore the stated premise of an analogy rather than accepting that the premise would be true.
It's like this. Say you were beginning to explain how network services work with an anecdote: "Say you need to go to the market to get a carton of milk." Suddenly your listener stops you and says, "But I don't like milk."
If your response to the above paragraph is, "But I don't know how network services work," then, congratulations, you can look forward to an exciting career in either comedy or politics, depending on whether or not you were serious.
It certainly isn't that the app provides functionality that isn't avaliable through the browser, but somebody decided that it was worth spending development time and nagging users over. So yes, there are things that can't be implemented through the browser and require an app, but it's incorrect to state that nobody develops an app unless they absolutely need to.
As web applications get more powerful, they will become a greater and greater source of the issues that currently plague mobile apps.
(I am aware that the Android app model has also promised some sandboxing, but apparently even in a low-permission mode, the protection seems to be rather anemic)
What are your 10 core apps if you don't mind sharing?
Apps of particular note that people could easily have missed are at the top of the list. Hope I kept lines short enough.
- TripLog Mileage in plug-to-start mode;
- Bouncer (auto-remove permissions from apps after you close them);
- DroidEdit Pro (multitab text and code editor);
- Join by Joaoapps (Pushbullet alternative);
- Meteogram Pro from cloud3squared (Weather widget);
- SMS Backup+ from Jan Berkel (pushes to GMail with label);
- Nine (multi-account Exchange client);
- Firefox (plus "Dark Background and Light Text 0.6.10" and uBlock Origin);
- Firefox Focus for untrusted links (no default browser set = always prompts);
- Microsoft OneNote, Office Lens and OneDrive;
- PocketCasts;
- Textra (for SMS) and Signal;
- Nova Launcher Prime plus Will Windham's Vintage icon pack;
- Swiftkey keyboard;
- LastPass;
- TimeClock Connect Pro from Spotlight Six;
- Ultimate To-Do List from Custom Solutions, but I recently dropped ToodleDo so this may drop away.
Personal Capital (finance), WhatsApp, Slack, Overcast (podcasts), Kindle, Dark Sky (hyper accurate weather app), Google Authenticator, Lyft, RENPHO (my smart scale’s app), 1Password
Everything else is very situational and totally optional.
Firefox, K-9, Signal, KeepassAndroid, Syncthing, FBReader, Fast Notepad, OsmAnd+, Revolut, OpenVPN.
I like trying new apps, and will often go through a lot of apps to find ones I like.
Got it.
I'm a pretty heavy user of it, and it was a godsend to have a nice official Android client that works well. Make use of the web lots on the desktop but it's probably 50/50 desktop/mobile. Love them both .
The only two things workflowy is missing is (1) being able to embed pictures and (2) being able to hyperlink to other nodes to make it act like a graph. It'd be the absolute perfect tool if it had that.
Embedding pictures sounds like a nice idea, but I can't imagine how they could do it and have it look good. If I were them, I probably wouldn't add images.
I kind of hope they resist the urge to keep adding features to Workflowy. It feels done to me and I like simple, focused tools.
Apps vendors should be discouraged from abusing access permissions, users should be warned if they probably do (in a visible and practical way) and be allowed to control them.
When a user clicks to install an app the system shows what rights does the app want and only gives choice to allow everything or just cancel. Instead it should disable everything by default, let the user turn particular permissions on explicitly and still install the app even if the user won't allow anything. It's the app vendor job to handle the cases when app can't access something.
As for TOSes - I doubt I understand why these should even be allowed by a platform. All the reasonable TOS terms are obvious and can be implied: the user can use the app for whatever is not illegal, the vendor can use whatever data the user enters the ways actually needed for the app to do its direct job (+ in non-personalized statistics calculation perhaps) and no other way.
That would be great for power users but it wouldn't work for "the average dumb user" since they would just enable every permission when asked to do so if they don't know what it means and how it could be abused. And power users already have that in Android forks designed for them. (I can't speak for iOS.)
> All the reasonable TOS terms are obvious and can be implied
That's your definition of reasonable. With a rule like this a platform would kill off both freedom- and privacy-minded software as well as spyware (the general trackery), thus pissing off almost everyone who cares about those kinda things.
At least I can firewall apps to mitigate any abuse they may engage in. That's much harder to do with websites.
I’m not security expert but seems to me if you clicked on something malicious, it costs you nothing as you’re not really exposing anything. Obviously don’t do your banking, etc on the same VM then go clicking around warez sites
VMs are another reasonable approach. I don't do that, though, because it's more hassle than it's worth to me.
> if you clicked on something malicious
That's not my primary concern. My primary concern is really to stop bad behavior that is very common across all websites (tracking, etc.)
you can get the add-on for Firefox mobile also. It can be a hassle for the lazy user, but the addon will provide visibility into scripts, cookies and services used by websites.
Most scripts are blocked by default which dramatically improves page load times and privacy.