I'm not sure if I would call it a mobile "downturn" since mobile is here to stay and may already be more important than desktop. I only see mobile growing, especially with huge numbers of people still to get online via smartphones in India and China. So mobile for sure has a great future ahead. However, there definitely seems to be a maturation of mobile. It's no longer the great "gold rush" that it was back in 2008-2010. It's much more difficult to get traction on native apps if you're starting out, and even if you have a successful app there isn't as much growth in new users as there was prior.
I think one sign of mobile's maturation is that people now see mobile as part of a bigger integrated picture of distribution. For example, it's essential (more than ever) to have a strong strategy to be on mobile, on desktop, and in social channels. I think this makes it more challenging for small startups since they typically don't have the manpower to do everything well. So you've got to prioritize and go with what gives you the most bang for your buck. Sometimes it's mobile; sometimes it's desktop; sometimes it's social.
* Downloading a new app has lost its novelty. It used to be "there's an app for that", now it is more "is it compelling enough to load an app to do that?"
* Mobile web is good and continuing to get better due to better phones, browsers, and web sites. This is making apps less necessary and thus less compelling.
Personally, I treat my phone like my house. I am vary particular about who I invite in.
I wish it was that way. Apps are still growing strong the way I see it. EasyTaxi is the greatest example in Brazil. You want to have it installed and with your credit card data already there before you go out and leave your wifi/cards.
(Thinking if I should move to mobile development..)
Downloading hasn't lost it's novelty (though it is still high barrier compared to mobile web). It's discovery which is the problem. New publishers are mostly doomed to fail. Apart from that, apps have short half lives. If someone doesn't use your app everyday, it's basically toast.
Mobile web is getting better, but i'd still rather use facebook's app and airbnb's app vs their adequate mobile web experiences. It's just a better UX. For things like uber, you don't even have that choice. On the other hand, if you're experience is not task intensive, mobile web is just fine.
>Mobile web is getting better, but i'd still rather use facebook's app and airbnb's app vs their adequate mobile web experiences.
I've uninstalled the facebook android app and switched to a chrome shortcut. Works just as well and even gets notifications. Not to mention the better battery life.
When I got my most recent phone I declined to install the app and it's definitely noticeable. Even though I had app notifications off (I just get an email if someone directly messages or tags me) it liked to run in the background all the time and additionally, I got tired of it constantly trying to push secondary apps for messaging and such.
Currently I use "Tinfoil" which is essentially just a wrapper for the mobile site with a bit of sandboxing and tweaking. Not perfect but then again, I prefer it to a constantly running, resource hogging, frequently nagging app when all I want is to occasionally look at Facebook and see what friends and family have posted.
I always hear that discovery is the problem, but it always seems like a problem creators have, not a problem/need for users.
Since the bar is already very high - people only care about 20-30 high usage apps , if comes an app that passes that barrier it would be very useful, so knowledge about it would spread virally in the relevant communities.
On the other hand, i do agree with you that native offers better experience - but maybe the way forward is to offer a platform that has the quality of native but the deployment benefits of the web ? I.e. Google's acquisition of a native app streaming startup:
* People made a bunch of things that should have been websites apps. Still happens way too often. This sucks.
* More recently, people have been making things "mobile web apps" that should be websites. This sucks.
Mobile apps are a mess and the mobile web keeps getting worse, IMO. This won't stop until people quit pretending Javascript/DOM performance — including power drain and memory footprint — is acceptable on mobile. It's even bad on laptops!
I think mobile Javascript/DOM performance is acceptable while being in bad need of improvement. When looking at the state of web applications on mobile, I don't think we should say, "it's horrible and hopeless!", but rather, "it's horrible and we should improve it!".
I'm not sure how it could improve much. Without major changes to the language it'll be hard to reduce memory use much.
Tons of resources have been thrown at e.g. v8 to get us where we are today, but the biggest gains were years ago and the pace of performance improvement has slowed. There's only so much you can do with a highly dynamic, interpreted language.
[EDIT] as for being acceptable, ever looked at how much memory Slack or Atom or any of those other JS-on-the-Desktop applications use? It's insane. Batshit crazy. A Google Inbox tab? Nuts. And try keeping an eye on what they're doing to your laptop battery some time.
"Acceptable" is arguable and subjective. Every day when I open multiple web applications on my phone, I tacitly accept the performance, as does everyone else who does the same. But, of course, we would also all love everything to be faster and for our batteries to last longer. Those desires are being attacked from different angles with different trade-offs all the time. I'm not at all convinced that the pace of improvement has leveled off, but that's just my gut feeling, and I would be interested in seeing analysis. I'm also not convinced that, assuming evolutionary improvement has indeed leveled off, there isn't still plenty of potential for new techniques that bear more fruit. One area of research I'm aware of targeting further improvement to performance is increasing concurrency, which the servo project[0] is exploring. Perhaps things like asm.js and webassembly will also make an impact.
I'm not a complete web apologist and I'll freely admit that you may well be right that it is inevitably a resource hog, but it is an incredibly useful platform, and I think giving up on it would be "throwing the baby out with the bathwater".
(I also find it pretty crazy that things like Slack and Atom spin up a full web rendering environment, and I would rather see us have better tools for making nice cross-platform desktop applications where they make sense.)
There's another thing I kept thinking while reading this article: while I'm not a software developer or involved in the startup/entrepreneur community in any direct fashion and probably not the target audience for the article, isn't the whole approach sort of backwards?
If you have created a valuable service/tool/game/etc that people really want to use and is also a good fit for mobile use, people will download the mobile app. But the conversation is all about "how do we come up with apps that people want to use and can compete with the top handful?" Isn't that just a solution in search of a problem?
Maybe those top 10-20 mobile apps that get the lion's share of relative adoption are the 10-20 things that people find worth doing with apps on a mobile platform. The mobile apps that I always install and continue to use/reinstall on new devices are the ones that address an existing need. I only have so many of those needs that can be reasonably addressed by mobile apps.
I need something to jot down quick notes wherever I am? Notes app. I want to see what amusing things my friends are up to on Facebook? Facebook app (not really in my case but as an example). Same for Skype or Uber or any other service. I want the service first and since it makes sense to access those services from my phone or tablet, I get the app.
I don't just go looking for apps randomly because I feel like (outside of games) there is a limited set of things I want to be able to do on my cell phone. The only time that set gets larger is when someone comes up with a really useful or desirable new service. Not because someone came out with a really cool and well-designed app.
We just took $1M from a client to build an iOS-only app that can be done just as easily on mobile web. It would support deep-linking, be cross-platform and we could deploy at will and it would have cost about the same. But this way, we get in the app store for as long as Apple permits us.
nothing in the past decade has been here to stay. I dont know what the next decade holds, but i highly doubt it will look like what we now call 'mobile'
mobile and mobile apps are just an access point. You still have to build something people want. the fact you have an app buys you nothing itself (though maybe it used to back in the early days of the app store).
Part of the problem is that Apple and Google will steal any successful idea and incorporate it into the OS. Categories that could be thriving competitive markets are subsumed and the category killed. Huge potential markets like notes, calendar, voice recording, video conferencing, fitness tracking, game leaderboard/achievements. Even little utilities like flashlight. Some categories are outright prohibited, like phone apps or app stores on iPhone.
Basically the game is rigged, apps are just a testing ground for ideas that Google and Apple can ripoff at their will. If you're extremely successful and lucky the best you can hope for is an acquihire. But usually they just steal the idea and kill the market.
> steal any successful idea and incorporate it into the OS
Your idea is worthless. Execution is what matters. If Google and Apple can integrate your idea that easily into their ecosystem, its overvalued as an idea.
> Your idea is worthless. Execution is what matters.
That strikes me as an overplayed sentiment.
Your execution can never be as good as one done at the OS level by the company that owns it. That does not mean your idea is 'overvalued'. In fact, quite the opposite - it usually means you have proved that your idea has enough value that it should be bundled up and given to every single person who uses the OS. You just won't benefit from it.
If you're unable to extract value from your idea, but someone else can, the idea has no value to you. Does it have value? In the right hands, probably. That doesn't entitle you to that value though.
Sure. But how do you know which ideas Apple will integrate into their OS and which they won't? That knowledge imbalance is paralyzing, and in effect means that if you take that path of thinking to its conclusion, there are extremely few apps worth making.
Doesn't this just mean that Apple, Google, etc., are rent seeking? If there's a creek behind my house where the community comes to get fish, that's value for those people. If I see them doing it and build a giant fence and start charging money for creek access and fishing permits, that's pure rent seeking. I didn't create the value or extract value from something where others couldn't extract value. I artificially prevented people from extracting value they otherwise easily could have, and then charged them for access.
It's mostly the same with apps that are copied into OS features. What entitles Apple, Google, etc., to the value of that idea beyond some kind of might makes right argument? They're big and they spend money on regulatory capture and legal battles, so that alone entitles them?
I mean, it does entitle them, at least currently, if we take only a very narrow understanding of "entitled" to mean "that which does actually happen and isn't prevented." But that's not really the spirit of the laws, public sentiment, or how this stuff relates to overall human welfare.
> Doesn't this just mean that Apple, Google, etc., are rent seeking?
I don't think so. Its subjective, of course, but they are consistently adding value to their platforms and services.
> It's mostly the same with apps that are copied into OS features. What entitles Apple, Google, etc., to the value of that idea beyond some kind of might makes right argument?
A patent is a license from the government to extract value from your idea for a period of time. If your idea meets the criteria for a patent, I encourage you to patent it. If your idea doesn't meet the criteria, tough. Apple and Google are then entitled to the value for execution, whereas you're entitled to nothing.
> They're big and they spend money on regulatory capture and legal battles, so that alone entitles them?
While a small amount of regulatory capture and legal battles have contributed to the development of Apple and Google's ecosystems, what entitles them to their value is the moat they've created through effort (engineers * time).
Its not a matter of execution. ISVs competing against platform providers have to compete against free. It just destroys markets rather than offers genuine competition.
The platform providers don't seek direct revenue, they just want to channel cattle in their hardware/advertising cages and killing off any ISV that could ever grow powerful enough to challenge them is a bonus.
I don't disagree. The solution would either be a) regulation (not going to happen) or b) build your own platform (HAH!) or c) deal with the status quo.
The only "wildly successful" Windows app company that comes to mind is Adobe.
Some instant messengers enjoyed success ( but were never as big as Adobe in terms of revenue) due to the fact that the OS makers (msft, apple, google) are typically incompetent in social.
Since Windows was considered a monopoly the government stepped in and prevented Microsoft from bundling too much or restricting access to the platform. In a way, Apple should be grateful to Android for keeping the government at bay.
A market share without profit is a useless metric Apple has nearly twice the app revenue Google is no where near a monopoly. Billions of cheap throw away devices matter very little. Apple isn't anywhere near a monopoly either.
That's irrelevant in our discussion. From a consumer or government point of view the revenue of each company doesn't matter. There's plenty of competition and consumers have choice.
Microsoft used to issue press releases about how they were going to build a product in category X, killing all venture capital in category X. In many cases they never built a product in category X or if they did it sucked. But they were able to cut off the air supply.
Apple and Google don't do that.
This may sound trivial, but it is huge- it means you have a couple years to build traction and a chance of getting acquired by Apple or Google (as say, SIRI was).
Agreed. Apple/Google have a ton of engineers and they must make major improvements to their OS each and every year. The easiest fruit is just to copy what's been successful and incorporate it into the OS itself. The solution is to be better than Apple/Google with your app/business or to be in a niche that Apple/Google doesn't want to get into because it's too small.
Especially since a huge portion of those apps were malware of various kinds (why does a flashlight app need permissions for your location and address book?). I see Google finally adding a flashlight to the base Android as mostly an anti-malware mitigation measure, more than an actual feature addition.
We're obviously talking from an entrepreneurs perspective here. But, it was entrepreneurs that discovered that a flashlight is a very desired utility. I suppose the danger for users is that future entrepreneurs won't experiment if they can't reap any benefit.
The silly candy bar phone I had 12 years ago had a dedicated flashlight with a physical button. I think a bigger part of the explanation is that the camera feature race led to leds being in every phone.
You could have made the same invalid argument for Apple and Microsoft over the past 3 decades. If you're trying to make a living from a little app that could be "Sherlocked" you don't have much of a business model.
IMHO patents were to allow for providing solutions to problems that had expensive research and development costs, in order to provide for a more open nature. IE, not loosing the ability to make concrete for a millennia.
In terms of ideas implemented in software alone, it's trivial and the vast majority of ideas can be easily implemented by anyone working on the platform, thus not deserving protection. Anything obvious and trivial is not deserving of patent protection imho.
I know that he is talking about mobile apps as a business rather than the end user experience, but I am disliking mobile apps from a user experience more and more.
I access Twitter and Facebook on my Android Note 4 via their web apps - I like the user experience just fine, thank you, and I don't worry as much about giving mobile apps permissions that I don't think they need. I also logoff after using the web versions of Twitter and Facebook. Maybe with finer grained access controls in Android version 6 I might change my mind but probably not.
On my iPad, I find it much nicer reading GMail using the browser (not mobile) version of the web app, including access to the calendar. Use the apps: no thanks.
Web HTML 5 standards are fantastic - let's use them.
One "app" I would use is a browser plug-in that silences the "download our app!" bars on all of these sites when you try to just use them through the website from a mobile/tablet.
"i can’t think of many consumer facing mobile apps that have gained massive traction and sustained it in the past three
years. can you?"
Are there consumer facing web sites that have gained massive traction and sustained it in the past three years?
Is the problem really mobile specific or is it just that consumer space has become much harder in general as Facebook and messaging juggernauts capture a lion share of people's attention.
In 2005-2010, when social media was still young, there were a lot of cheap or even free marketing and distribution tactics that were not oversaturated, but now as the new medium has matured a bit, and even less nimble players start to understand the game, you need huge ad budgets to capture attention of consumers.
>The funny thing about all of this is that I don’t see any shortage of entrepreneurs walking into our offices with plans to build and launch consumer facing mobile apps.
This is the interesting thing to me. I tried to explain this to some friends who wanted to do something and they immediately wanted to submit themselves to the walled gardens… well, I'll watch them try, I could be wrong, and that's like Fred and their kindred that continue to let such people in the building… now I find that phenomena interesting as well and wonder why?
54 comments
[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 91.0 ms ] threadI think one sign of mobile's maturation is that people now see mobile as part of a bigger integrated picture of distribution. For example, it's essential (more than ever) to have a strong strategy to be on mobile, on desktop, and in social channels. I think this makes it more challenging for small startups since they typically don't have the manpower to do everything well. So you've got to prioritize and go with what gives you the most bang for your buck. Sometimes it's mobile; sometimes it's desktop; sometimes it's social.
My opinion:
* Downloading a new app has lost its novelty. It used to be "there's an app for that", now it is more "is it compelling enough to load an app to do that?"
* Mobile web is good and continuing to get better due to better phones, browsers, and web sites. This is making apps less necessary and thus less compelling.
Personally, I treat my phone like my house. I am vary particular about who I invite in.
(Thinking if I should move to mobile development..)
Mobile web is getting better, but i'd still rather use facebook's app and airbnb's app vs their adequate mobile web experiences. It's just a better UX. For things like uber, you don't even have that choice. On the other hand, if you're experience is not task intensive, mobile web is just fine.
I've uninstalled the facebook android app and switched to a chrome shortcut. Works just as well and even gets notifications. Not to mention the better battery life.
Currently I use "Tinfoil" which is essentially just a wrapper for the mobile site with a bit of sandboxing and tweaking. Not perfect but then again, I prefer it to a constantly running, resource hogging, frequently nagging app when all I want is to occasionally look at Facebook and see what friends and family have posted.
(app in question, not affiliated: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danvelazco...)
Since the bar is already very high - people only care about 20-30 high usage apps , if comes an app that passes that barrier it would be very useful, so knowledge about it would spread virally in the relevant communities.
On the other hand, i do agree with you that native offers better experience - but maybe the way forward is to offer a platform that has the quality of native but the deployment benefits of the web ? I.e. Google's acquisition of a native app streaming startup:
http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/18/report-last-year-google-sec...
* People made a bunch of things that should have been websites apps. Still happens way too often. This sucks.
* More recently, people have been making things "mobile web apps" that should be websites. This sucks.
Mobile apps are a mess and the mobile web keeps getting worse, IMO. This won't stop until people quit pretending Javascript/DOM performance — including power drain and memory footprint — is acceptable on mobile. It's even bad on laptops!
Tons of resources have been thrown at e.g. v8 to get us where we are today, but the biggest gains were years ago and the pace of performance improvement has slowed. There's only so much you can do with a highly dynamic, interpreted language.
[EDIT] as for being acceptable, ever looked at how much memory Slack or Atom or any of those other JS-on-the-Desktop applications use? It's insane. Batshit crazy. A Google Inbox tab? Nuts. And try keeping an eye on what they're doing to your laptop battery some time.
I'm not a complete web apologist and I'll freely admit that you may well be right that it is inevitably a resource hog, but it is an incredibly useful platform, and I think giving up on it would be "throwing the baby out with the bathwater".
(I also find it pretty crazy that things like Slack and Atom spin up a full web rendering environment, and I would rather see us have better tools for making nice cross-platform desktop applications where they make sense.)
[0]: https://github.com/servo/servo
If you have created a valuable service/tool/game/etc that people really want to use and is also a good fit for mobile use, people will download the mobile app. But the conversation is all about "how do we come up with apps that people want to use and can compete with the top handful?" Isn't that just a solution in search of a problem?
Maybe those top 10-20 mobile apps that get the lion's share of relative adoption are the 10-20 things that people find worth doing with apps on a mobile platform. The mobile apps that I always install and continue to use/reinstall on new devices are the ones that address an existing need. I only have so many of those needs that can be reasonably addressed by mobile apps.
I need something to jot down quick notes wherever I am? Notes app. I want to see what amusing things my friends are up to on Facebook? Facebook app (not really in my case but as an example). Same for Skype or Uber or any other service. I want the service first and since it makes sense to access those services from my phone or tablet, I get the app.
I don't just go looking for apps randomly because I feel like (outside of games) there is a limited set of things I want to be able to do on my cell phone. The only time that set gets larger is when someone comes up with a really useful or desirable new service. Not because someone came out with a really cool and well-designed app.
nothing in the past decade has been here to stay. I dont know what the next decade holds, but i highly doubt it will look like what we now call 'mobile'
Basically the game is rigged, apps are just a testing ground for ideas that Google and Apple can ripoff at their will. If you're extremely successful and lucky the best you can hope for is an acquihire. But usually they just steal the idea and kill the market.
Your idea is worthless. Execution is what matters. If Google and Apple can integrate your idea that easily into their ecosystem, its overvalued as an idea.
That strikes me as an overplayed sentiment.
Your execution can never be as good as one done at the OS level by the company that owns it. That does not mean your idea is 'overvalued'. In fact, quite the opposite - it usually means you have proved that your idea has enough value that it should be bundled up and given to every single person who uses the OS. You just won't benefit from it.
If you're unable to extract value from your idea, but someone else can, the idea has no value to you. Does it have value? In the right hands, probably. That doesn't entitle you to that value though.
E.g. Facebook, or Gmail.
It's mostly the same with apps that are copied into OS features. What entitles Apple, Google, etc., to the value of that idea beyond some kind of might makes right argument? They're big and they spend money on regulatory capture and legal battles, so that alone entitles them?
I mean, it does entitle them, at least currently, if we take only a very narrow understanding of "entitled" to mean "that which does actually happen and isn't prevented." But that's not really the spirit of the laws, public sentiment, or how this stuff relates to overall human welfare.
I don't think so. Its subjective, of course, but they are consistently adding value to their platforms and services.
> It's mostly the same with apps that are copied into OS features. What entitles Apple, Google, etc., to the value of that idea beyond some kind of might makes right argument?
A patent is a license from the government to extract value from your idea for a period of time. If your idea meets the criteria for a patent, I encourage you to patent it. If your idea doesn't meet the criteria, tough. Apple and Google are then entitled to the value for execution, whereas you're entitled to nothing.
> They're big and they spend money on regulatory capture and legal battles, so that alone entitles them?
While a small amount of regulatory capture and legal battles have contributed to the development of Apple and Google's ecosystems, what entitles them to their value is the moat they've created through effort (engineers * time).
The platform providers don't seek direct revenue, they just want to channel cattle in their hardware/advertising cages and killing off any ISV that could ever grow powerful enough to challenge them is a bonus.
But it didn't stop companies from becoming wildly successful building desktop software.
Some instant messengers enjoyed success ( but were never as big as Adobe in terms of revenue) due to the fact that the OS makers (msft, apple, google) are typically incompetent in social.
Microsoft used to issue press releases about how they were going to build a product in category X, killing all venture capital in category X. In many cases they never built a product in category X or if they did it sucked. But they were able to cut off the air supply.
Apple and Google don't do that.
This may sound trivial, but it is huge- it means you have a couple years to build traction and a chance of getting acquired by Apple or Google (as say, SIRI was).
MS did do some of what you describe but it seems much more prevalent with mobile OSes.
In terms of ideas implemented in software alone, it's trivial and the vast majority of ideas can be easily implemented by anyone working on the platform, thus not deserving protection. Anything obvious and trivial is not deserving of patent protection imho.
I know that he is talking about mobile apps as a business rather than the end user experience, but I am disliking mobile apps from a user experience more and more.
I access Twitter and Facebook on my Android Note 4 via their web apps - I like the user experience just fine, thank you, and I don't worry as much about giving mobile apps permissions that I don't think they need. I also logoff after using the web versions of Twitter and Facebook. Maybe with finer grained access controls in Android version 6 I might change my mind but probably not.
On my iPad, I find it much nicer reading GMail using the browser (not mobile) version of the web app, including access to the calendar. Use the apps: no thanks.
Web HTML 5 standards are fantastic - let's use them.
Are there consumer facing web sites that have gained massive traction and sustained it in the past three years?
Is the problem really mobile specific or is it just that consumer space has become much harder in general as Facebook and messaging juggernauts capture a lion share of people's attention.
In 2005-2010, when social media was still young, there were a lot of cheap or even free marketing and distribution tactics that were not oversaturated, but now as the new medium has matured a bit, and even less nimble players start to understand the game, you need huge ad budgets to capture attention of consumers.
This is the interesting thing to me. I tried to explain this to some friends who wanted to do something and they immediately wanted to submit themselves to the walled gardens… well, I'll watch them try, I could be wrong, and that's like Fred and their kindred that continue to let such people in the building… now I find that phenomena interesting as well and wonder why?