Improving Ubuntu's application upload process [LWN.net]

Improving Ubuntu's application upload process

Posted Sep 5, 2012 20:11 UTC (Wed) by mattdm (guest, #18)
Parent article: Improving Ubuntu's application upload process

Apps like the beer-festival interactive advertisement are an artifact of the iPhone app store environment and the relatively limited features of mobile Safari. Such a thing is handy on one's phone, because it can provide an optimized user interface for a small space. Because of this and because of the mania over "there's an app for that", phone app stores are full of event-of-the-week apps — like for example LinuxCon for iPhone.

On a desktop or laptop, is there a point in making these things be "apps" rather than web sites? There are significant disadvantages in the app approach — all the things this project is trying to work around. The primary advantage is the app-as-info-channel expectation smartphone users have come to expect. Maybe that alone makes this worth doing, but since web sites are cross-platform and web browsers already widely deployed, I'm not convinced it's the best approach for this kind of thing.

Don't get me wrong — I'm all for making an easier interface for end-users to find and self-install applications. I'm just skeptical about that whole class of apps on non-phones. It's probably a more useful channel for games....

(Log in to post comments)

Improving Ubuntu's application upload process

Posted Sep 6, 2012 11:28 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

Agreed. The craze for repackaging Web content as "apps" may excite the producers of these things along with willing (and perhaps also ignorant) consumers, but apart from third-party attempts to make the user interfaces to sites better (and even that can be dubious if someone's "app" is acting as a middle-man), indulging the craze seems like an inefficient throwback to "hit parade" thinking and a time when only new applications could deliver new functionality.

Surely the retort to such things should be, "Steve, there's an Internet for that."

Improving Ubuntu's application upload process

Posted Sep 6, 2012 19:01 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

remember when "having a website" was not much more than converting a company brochure to HTML and putting it up?

many "apps" are in that state now, and just like this has largely faded away (or rather, become so useless that nobody cares about your site if that's all you do), these apps will probably fade away as well.

Part of the problem is that Web bookmarks are so clumsy to use on mobile devices that there really isn't a good way to distribute and use them.

Improving Ubuntu's application upload process

Posted Sep 9, 2012 12:58 UTC (Sun) by valhalla (subscriber, #56634) [Link]

The process to provide informations on current event such as the beer festival can be improved from the website / website_wrapped_in_an_app model, but I don't think that improved custom apps for each event is going to be what is best for the users.

Of course, if your aim is to let me spend more and more time ignoring[esc]bdwawatching ads, or to prevent me from getting informations from your competitor, locking me into an app is a good solution, but this is definitely not good for me.

On the other hand, something that would be useful for the user is improving websites with rss feeds and an rss-like way to subscribe to time/space based informations (with the ability to choose between server-side sorting to save bandwidth, or client-side sorting to save privacy), displayed by a choice of apps both on the desktop and mobile devices.

Improving Ubuntu's application upload process

Posted Sep 9, 2012 17:43 UTC (Sun) by jwarnica (subscriber, #27492) [Link]

I'm not sure that a pamphlet-as-an-app is a bad thing. I'm not sure the dev tools for such things (personally, my research has been from the more software dev viewpoint more than a content creator). Do things like Dreamweaver have a "publish to app store" button?

Anyway. The requirement for web content is that it is continuously updated. Even and especially the old content. People don't use CMS systems to make todays content fit in todays template, they use CMS systems so content from 5 years ago magically fits in todays template. Exaggerating and simplifying for effect, but you get the point.

If you ship an pamphlet-as-an-app, its done, and its done forever.