Well I don't really understand why everyone jumped on the 'app bandwagon' and spent millions if not billions of dollars developing said apps.

If I could have a regular mobile reading experience using my browser, pray tell why I would want to switch to your awesome app (TM) ? I detest "download our app" popups with a passion. The worst part is that most of these 'apps' just have the same experience packaged into them but are located under yet another icon on my iPhone/iPad. It just doesn't make any sense.

The only other place that I read besides the browser is Pocket.

With responsive design and HTML5 (Geolocation, Canvas, etc.) there really isn't that much more that an app can do - that a browser cannot.

Also, asking to me repeatedly download your app (tripadvisor, you're guilty!) is probably going to alienate me even more from it.

A good example of an app doing less than the website: Until recently I couldn't use the hotels.com app to score/redeem welcome rewards. Yet, when I would go to the site I would either be:

a) Limited to the mobile site

b) Treated to a heinous app download popup.

Way to go!

My suspicion is that apps provide for an enhanced-user experience ... for the app vendor. That is, they enhance the user-data available for demographic and marketing targeting.

1. File upload

2. Offline access

File upload is only now coming to iOS6, and wasn't in Android for a long time. It used to be in Windows Mobile, and was apparently pulled last year, IIRC.

Offline access - being able to function properly when no network is around is important for a lot of functionality required by applications. Some of this could be done with browser-side caching, but probably at a performance cost (at the very minimum).

When you load up Gmail on a mobile device it does some pretty aggressive browser side caching. Works really well! But file upload is definitely an important reason to have apps. However, the article is talking about reading the news and those don't have much to do with file upload..

I'd also like to second the point regard the advertising of apps. Advertising your own app to me in a pop-up is pretty much the death-knell for my usage of any site.

In most cases, it's another avenue to make money.

Yet most news-sites apps are free. I suspect it's just because nobody has done a comprehensive study of their (non-)effectiveness.

When the original iPhone launched, the mobile browser wasn't anything like as good as it is now, and it regularly blanked pages when you switched to other apps. Even just offline support was a huge thing to have, and you could only get it in an app.

Hence the bandwagon.

I own a blog network and the most common reason touted to me for building an app is to gain access to the fancy ad units available on apps.

If you are interested in this are I recommend reading the actual study and not a yahoo republication of an article from mashable about a study on Pew's website.

"The Future of Mobile News" (The actual study) http://www.journalism.org/analysis_report/future_mobile_news

PDF: http://www.journalism.org/sites/journalism.org/files/Futureo...

"The Future of Mobile News – A PEJ Infographic" http://features.journalism.org/2012/09/30/the-future-of-mobi...

Yes. And subscribe to PEW, as you'll get Mashable's news before they do. They frequently republish PEW research.

News is a particularly good fit for a mobile browser. Structured text + images is actually much easier to render with HTML than with native APIs and the limited interactivity most of these apps require can be added easily enough with JS.

The whole HTML vs native thing is another one of those false dichotomies we waste so much time debating. They both have their place and neither of them are going anywhere.

HTML5 and all that can be used for games etc., but I think its real future is in stuff like mashups. We're basically creating the best open multimedia mashup platform, and it's insanely powerful.

So please don't put a popup asking me to install your shiny app between me and the actual news.

The worst was cbs who (used to?) forward me to the main mobile site instead of the article. I still completely avoid cbs on my phone.

I don't get why mobile has to be so complicated for publishers. I realize they may be struggling to monetize but they shouldn't make the experience so much worse that users will leave.

The whole native mobile app kind of parallels with Flash on the web back in the day (funny how I could say "back in the day" with Flash). Flash -- from what I understood -- used to give a richer UX that HTML/CSS couldn't. The only problem was that Flash was one more thing that needed to be installed on top of the browser.

However, as JS frameworks matured and HTML5/CSS3 was introduced, the browser offered comparable UX, which ultimately lead to Flash losing relevance. I still think mobile browsers have a long way to go in terms of performance. However, this article suggests that native apps are experiencing the same market resistance as Flash once did. Once mobile browsers catch up, we might just experience another tech renaissance ala Web 2.0.

1. Why do a survey when you could measure user behavior directly?

2. It sounds like the survey was concerned with the various newspapers' first party apps, but what about third parties? For instance, I read most of my news on my iPhone via Twitter (app), Reddit (app) and Hacker News (app). Oh, and let's not forget Instapaper (app).

If I had to bet, I'd say that these results have nothing to do with HTML5 or the capabilities of the mobile web, and everything to do with the rise of aggregators and social networks.

Yeah, if you're going to put up a Pop-Up touting your app, it had better be a heck of a lot better than letting me browse your news site and not just all about your having an app. What that sort of thing tells me is that you're not about your customer first.

And the same goes if you're going to have a "mobile" version of your site for my iPad: it had better be darned good and not a crippled, controlled experience.

I upvoted the article but can we please take a second before submitting to ensure that we are posting from the original source?

http://mashable.com/2012/10/01/mobile-tablet-news-consumptio...

Oddly, I cannot find the Pew study it is referencing, can anyone else?

Its interesting that the article was purely observational and most of the HN comments are highly technical or individual app UI oriented. I agree most app UIs are awful and none are consistent with other apps.

One point not mentioned is the Meta issues. I've got one main screen 4x4 icons and 5 total screens and I do a heck of a lot more with my phone than read one site's news. I do not have the screen space for an app for every website I've ever visited plus all the base load of apps (runkeeper, doggcatcher, kindle app, a dozen or so others). So a "bookmark" app needs to be important enough for me to delete another app or spend a long time scrolling the list to find it. The browser, on the other hand, is always and easily available.

The other issue is I have limited memory on my phone. Some people do not. But for some of us, its a constant battle to remove stuff. To install "really big app thats basically a incredibly bloated bookmark" I need to delete something else. Will it be runkeeper? Will it be doggcatcher? Don't think so.

Finally some apps have a smell about them. Go to "manage apps" "Running" and why, oh why, is my bank app running? To screw me over I assume, or waste my battery, or spy on me? After enough "problems" like this I distrust apps. Why does "tune in radio pro" waste ram and battery and probably do something nefarious by running 24x7? I can justify dropbox syncing in the background. I can justify doggcatcher polling my favorite podcasts periodically in the background. Why is google googles running 24x7, how does that benefit me? I mean benefit in reality, not marketing speak? This mis-behavior gives apps in general an icky repellent smell. If I install this app, how much battery life and privacy am I giving up?

Reminds me of the old days when people used to buy retail software, so to "gain market share" you would have giant boxes on the shelf with a tiny little CD and one sheet of paper inside the mostly empty box... literally push the competition right off the shelf... In the modern era a site is so desperate they need to use the same strategy on my phone, that site probably is not worth visiting, if it had value it wouldn't depend on dirty tricks to gain market share.

This isn't a big surprise. Who wants their browsing experience fragmented across a mish-mash of apps each with their own interface?

One thing I would like to see is more sites supporting Google currents. Currents gives you offline caching, etc. and pretty much everything the best website apps out there do, but it does it in a slick consistent interface. Supporting Currents evidently does take some effort because some news sites screw it up so badly (Forbes, I'm looking at you.). Broken links, truncated stories, missing pictures, etc.. I like Currents so much I'm actually finding that my reading time is starting to skew towards sites with good support for it.

For those who had no idea what this Currents thing was: http://www.google.com/producer/currents

If you recall the interview mark zuckerberg did at techcrunch he described how many more people use fb mobile than the app, but clearly apps have value. News apps deliver much the same media as fb, but they chose native for a reason. Until the mobile web offers the same feature set and comparable performance to native apps, they will always have a place.

This is coming from a fan of phone gap and web apps.

It's more shocking to me that half of these news readers actually preferred apps to browsers.

It would be cool if the developers of iOS and android did a better job at integrating the web onto their devices instead of trying to convince us for the opposite (Oddly, iOS has a better overall browsing experience over google's android)

guardian has a great app (at least on android), the text is super-readable, and it downloads stuff for offline usage, so I open it when I feel like it, and it's one news app where I can sincerely tell an app can gives a lot of added value instead of being a slow reader with another layout.

the rest I read mostly through pocket or through a link on twitter, which lauches [drumroll] a browser, where I'm almost always pissed off as they work poorly on a small mobile screen. first they don't care about a good mobile experience, then they complain that tools like pocket exist and strip off their ads.

A case for FirefoxOS

>News organizations have invested significantly in native apps for iOS, Android, WP7 and even, for a time, webOS -- yet nearly three times as many tablet owners and twice as many smartphone users access news primarily through browsers rather than apps, according to a Pew Research Center study released Monday.

Sorry, but the interpretation of this as "mobile browsers trump apps" is BS.

Of course MORE readers "access their news primarily through mobile browsers".

For one, there are THOUSANDS more news sites that are only available through the browser, compared to news sites that have native apps (and have them on both major mobile platforms).

A relevant question would be "what is the breakdown for a news site that has BOTH an app and a website?". The New York Times, for example.

And this is also focused on "news". What is the breakdown for non-news sites that also have an app. E.g Facebook?