...of course this requires developers to use it, but then so does App Clips.
Developers, web developers especially, often seem to forget that the browser is a _user_ agent. Instead, they force their aesthetic and functional preferences on me, when I have chosen fonts, colors, interactions and systems that I prefer to be able to use wherever possible.
As a good example, a parking meter app is simply there to collect money at the meter. An App Clip is small, which will be way faster to download than the full app, and enable a user to pay much faster than before. In a situation where you want people to get an app but know that they're time constrained and that app is how you get paid, you'll implement it because it'll make sense to implement.
I've personally given up on bike and scooter rental apps because the time to download and setup was frustrating. For those cases, this would be awesome.
A parking lot clip could use the time-based notification to warn you that your meter is almost up and give you the option to re-up. Without having to walk back to the lot to do it. I imagine this would be especially useful in a tourist-heavy area since somebody who isn't sticking around won't want to download a whole app for the purpose.
Any real world good or service would fall onto Apple Pay, which makes its money through a micro fee on the card issuer, basically to use the phone as a convenient, highly fraud-resistant card.
App vendors are only paid by the people who use the app, so they have every incentive to make it that much easier for some one to use the app than the ticketing machine.
The parking lots may be competing with other lots, but really they are most likely getting money either way, they want to decrease their overhead, hence apps.
The reality is that most parking lots do need to have fallbacks for these cases rather than telling people to drive off, and those fallbacks are often more expensive in terms of staffing/maintenance (which is why they added the app in the first place). Something where I point at a code on a sign, it pops up a payment button without me knowingly downloading anything will increase the cost savings beyond an app.
What I love is that we actually get access to a whole swath of people that want quick information but don't want to install a whole app for it. In fact, we want to make our stuff available on any platform, because our goal is to get as many people to use our system as possible.
When it comes to parking vendors, they get their money no matter what (either from a government contract or as a slice of parking fees, not from number of app installs), so it's in their best interest to INCREASE engagement.
Our main problem is that our mobile app is written in React Native, so I'm not sure how this would fit in near-term. We are loathe to add too many native features because the whole workflow in React Native is already a bit brittle.
A few questions: are you a nonprofit? And if not, who do you sell to? Do you sell to local governments to help them quickly bootstrap citizen involvement services? Do you develop solutions on an area-by-area basis or do you have a single product that tries to cover all of them?
We're currently involved in a lot of COVID related efforts in the eastern US (SMS delivery of test results, etc – we haven't had a chance to update our page, been too busy). Still a product but each customer has custom needs to integrate with their systems, which we do via APIs and custom data ingestion code.
We do guide local governments in bootstrapping all the data on our platform but it's a multi-tenant system and everyone's on the same platform.
You can also turn this around: what stops businesses right now from making extremely lightweight apps that don’t bother the user? The same forces that make companies slap tons of trackers and JS on their websites.
While this is sometimes true, I think it's more often the case the businesses make junk apps because they pay the lowest bidder to make them a bare minimum app.
See real estate apps or corporate travel apps for instance. A majority seem to be the same few practically unusable apps re-skinned.
One way to guess about what’s happening is to look at the app quality and update history: if it looks like it launched in the original App Store round or has a hideous UX which is never improved, it’s probably not actually doing enough to be worth spending more money on.
it seems like the opposite of that to me. right now, if there's some task you want to accomplish (order a meal, rent a scooter...) you have to install the app to do that. With app clips, you get the option of completing the task without installing the app. as a user i love this, but it's definitely not going to drive app installs.
I’m mostly just concerned that this will likely detract even further from web-based alternatives. GrubHub might decide that since they have App Clips, they can pull a Yelp and disable their mobile website completely.
Edit: definitely not claiming this will be a mass thing but it’s my gut feeling it would be.
+ it’s a less friction conversation of very difficult segment of customers. That might count for something for some companies.
Businesses want to offer apps so that they can collect more information on their customers, not because an app is the best solution to the problem at hand.
(this post represents my opinion only, and does not speak for my employer, my cat, or the flying spaghetti monster)
Because Apple is known to kick apps out if they don't like them?
I have an old iPhone that serves a particular task in a closet and I almost never interact with it.
Earlier this year I needed to do something physically with it, and noticed it was filled with dozens of parking, ride hailing, taxi, and transit apps I'd downloaded on my main iPhone over the last few years. (For those of you not in the iOS ecosystem, if two devices are on the came iCloud ID, downloading one can download the app to all of your devices.)
With app clips, I won't have to go through and delete all these short-time-use apps on all of my devices when I get home from traveling.
Edit for all those replying without understanding my situation: I don't want to disable app syncing entirely. Some apps I want to be synced on all of my devices. It's the one-time or short-term use apps I don't want. The ones that Apple is targeting with App Clips.
https://www.scmp.com/abacus/tech/article/3090269/ios-14-adds...
Even for interacting with your robot hoover or your headphones there's plenty of opportunities to create much better user interactions than your first step of onboarding to involve going to an app store.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/13/wildcard-raises-10-million...
It seemed like a really cool idea, shame it never took off.
https://blog.chromium.org/2016/02/the-physical-web-expands-t...
If there's one thing I've never heard the web platform accused of being, it's "slow and stale".
The web platform has plenty of features for doing this kind of thing. It already partly serves this use-case, in practice. There are two reasons Clips will have an advantage:
- Apple has done a lot to hamper Progressive Web Apps on its devices because they have a stake in platform lock-in.
- The web, at least on mobile, is still never quite as good an experience as a native app. There are lots of fingers that can be pointed at different parties for why this is, but speaking as a web developer, I will readily admit that it's just not quite the same on some subconscious level.
There are many of these, and we often don't want download these, or when we finally cave in and do download them the friction of notifications and eventual deletion is a pain.
With App Clips, and some of the features like "no install", 8 hours of push notifications and the ability to confirm a fixed location without location permissions, I think the UX is going to be significantly improved.