Platform specific "apps" vs. HTML-based "apps"?

Posted Dec 12, 2012 20:45 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Platform specific "apps" vs. HTML-based "apps"? by dowdle
Parent article: A simulated FirefoxOS experience

Whatever happened in the war to make everything a web-application?

In short? AppStores happened.

In it's heart the fabled "web applications" is a mixture of mediocre-yet-mandatory programming language, mediocre-yet-mandatory presentation layer and crippled API.

You can ask: Why all this mediocrity ever gained any traction?

Well, web-application have one but important property which was unprecedented for a long time: the deliverability.

It's easy to deliver web application to the end user - and s/he can easy to remove it if she does not like it (just close the web browser window).

Every time web application were tried where they had no such intrinsic head start… they failed. All these active desktops and things like Adobe Flex were failures. Well, some people managed to use them to repackage popular web applications and offer them as kinda-native applications, but in most such cases everything started with success on the web and only later it was converted to native application.

And of course with AppStore deliverability is no longer the problem… so why would you tolerate awful restrictions of webapps if there are no upside? If you just want to show HTML you can easily embed appropriate control in your app, after all.

Some analysis of various apps in apps stores shows that the vast majority of them (75% or more) are almost never downloaded/purchased and just gather digital dust... and that the vast majority of mobile app purchases go to a mob of 25 development houses.

And this is different from what happens on desktop, console and other places… exactly how? Most application were failures in the previous decades, too. Well, there is one difference: now, when a lot of applications are in one place you can easily do such measure while previously it was much harder, but is it such a big difference?

That will mean the OS has to offer both a good desktop and mobile experience. I guess a few people are working on that... but I don't really see iOS and Android morphing into a good desktop anytime soon.

Why not? As you've said yourself all contemporary OSes deep down are just Xerox Alto on steroids. Why do you think Android or iOS can not be extended to become usable on desktop, too? It's kind of chicken-end-egg problem (there are few Android devices which can be used in desktop mode), but I don't see anything fundamentally limiting.

Platform specific "apps" vs. HTML-based "apps"?

Posted Dec 13, 2012 0:28 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link] (2 responses)

so why would you tolerate awful restrictions of webapps if there are no upside?

Because as I said, a significant number of "apps" are really just front-ends to web-based services that should work fine in a browser. Having to maintain custom builds for each environment is the opposite of what is desired by developers.

And this is different from what happens on desktop, console and other places… exactly how?

Because Apple (and Android to a much lesser degree) is/are constantly referring to the large number of apps they have... and that there is "an app for that". We just don't hear "there's a webapp for that" when it is really also the case.

There is also a mis-perception that making mobile apps is a potential gold mine... but I think the gold rush is mostly over.

Google with their Chrome browser is trying, I believe but perhaps I misunderstood, to offer a binary runtime environment so they can distribute binaries that run in the browser so browser-based applications don't necessarily have to be HTML/javascript-based.

Why do you think Android or iOS can not be extended to become usable on desktop, too?

It is probably easier to take a mature desktop OS and scale it down for small screen with touch features... than it is to scale a simple GUI shell up to a full-blown desktop environment. That is obviously just conjector on my part. Of course we know that Android has a (modified) Linux kernel underneath. The main features for developers are the APIs and various libraries for things. I haven't really seen any serious productivity apps for Android (Softmaker Office and the stylus apps from the Samsung Galaxy Note perhaps?) but I'm sure they do exist. From what I understand the vast majority of games for Android are written in C++ and completely avoid the Java bits. So I have no hard evidence other than Colberting.

Platform specific "apps" vs. HTML-based "apps"?

Posted Dec 13, 2012 9:10 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

Because as I said, a significant number of "apps" are really just front-ends to web-based services that should work fine in a browser.

True.

Having to maintain custom builds for each environment is the opposite of what is desired by developers.

I'm not so sure. Form-factors are too different. It's really hard to produce single GUI which works for smartphone, tablet and desktop. And only desktop requires an webapp (because there are no similar delivery channel for traditional applications).

Google with their Chrome browser is trying, I believe but perhaps I misunderstood, to offer a binary runtime environment so they can distribute binaries that run in the browser so browser-based applications don't necessarily have to be HTML/javascript-based.

Sure. As one of NaCl developers I know that very well indeed. But if this is not an admission of webapps failure then I don't know what is. I mean: once you are starting to write "webapps" in C++ with Qt what's there left from the webapps hype? Delivery channel?

It is probably easier to take a mature desktop OS and scale it down for small screen with touch features... than it is to scale a simple GUI shell up to a full-blown desktop environment.

Again: why do you think that? It didn't work that way on minicomputers, it didn't work that way on desktop, why will it work that way on smartphones?

The fact of the matter: it's much easier to scale something up rather then to scale something down. Especially when FOSS is involved: when you need to scale up you just grab bits and pieces from the bigger things and attach them to the existing base, but to scale down you need to somehow cut out the fat yet keep the experience usable.

All the teams (GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, Windows) did that in the same fashion: destroy everything and build new experience from the bits and pieces. But this basically puts them at the beginning of the race again and gives Android huge headstart! Exactly the wrong way to win the race.

Platform specific "apps" vs. HTML-based "apps"?

Posted Dec 21, 2012 20:14 UTC (Fri) by markhb (guest, #1003) [Link]

I mean: once you are starting to write "webapps" in C++ with Qt what's there left from the webapps hype? Delivery channel?

For that matter, how is it functionally different from XUL, which the Mozilla team has been bending over backwards to get away from?