Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps

+1 for the article<p>As a web vs. app proponent I love this. I do have a few apps installed on my Note 4 but I prefer getting Twitter, FB, etc. as a web site.<p>Web standards like HTML5 are wonderful so let&#x27;s use them and make the web awesome.<p>My brother and one friend each have a few hundred apps installed on their phones. I am sometimes surprised that their phones still function with so much cruft installed, never mind the privacy considerations.

As a user, I dont really care about it being an App or Mobile Web. It needs two things,<p>1. An Icon on my Springbroad, so i can easily view it whenever I want to.<p>2. It should be butter smooth and dont warm my pants after reading. ( i.e lots of CPU cycle. )<p>Native Apps does better in both department. And whenever users gets a choice most would likely prefer the App version. HTML5 or Web has definitely improve, and it could or will do better then the web if we dont have the Ads constantly loading in the background. ( Ad blocker is another topic )<p>I guess atavist already have their group of loyal customers it makes sense for them to change.<p>Personally I see the article mostly complain about the Distribution and Discovery Problem. And some App Store Approval process.

The web is a great publishing medium for magazines and news outlets. Apps are for doing stuff beyond passive browsing.

I&#x27;d add that if you intend to maintain a web site then adding support for apps (presumably multiple since cross-platform is still hard) then you are throttling your bandwidth to actually improve features and stability. I&#x27;m thinking of certain food delivery app that had enough bugs on their Android app, then I fell back to their mobile site and haven&#x27;t looked back. They could have saved themselves probably a few million bucks and just kept their mobile site looking spiffy.

Well, the most important thing you gain from moving your apps to the web is owning the relationship with your users. And that is HUGE.<p>With the Apple iOS App Store you are isolated from your users, it is very difficult and nearly impossible to build a list and keep in touch with them in a meaningful way. I am sure there are cases where this isn&#x27;t true, but I think I can say this is probably the case for the vast majority of apps out there.<p>By being on the web it is your business, your platform and your users. Not Apple&#x27;s (or whoever).<p>And, yes, depending on your niche, building an audience could be very difficult. Guess what? The vast majority of apps on the app store fail. I think we might actually be able to say success on the web might actually be easier.

As a consumer I can relate to this. I subscribe to many monthly magazines including GQ and Esquire. I enjoy the publication as it is meant to be viewed, ads and all. Of course, now they&#x27;re piled up and so I want to switch to digital. Sounds like a great solution.<p>GQ has a digital app or I can use iOS news stand. This was not a great experience as each issue took at least 20 minutes to download a gig of content. Of course, once the content is there the experience is rich and fantastic.<p>Based off my experiences, I really think a mobile web experience is best for reading magazines. Only the page I&#x27;m interested in would load and I shouldn&#x27;t have to take up a whole gig of precious space to read an issue.<p>Just my two cents.

As an Android user I&#x27;m very fond of native apps as long as they integrate into the OS well via activities, intents, content provider interfaces etc, all stuff you can&#x27;t really do with web apps (though I know someone is going to want to chime and and talk about WebIntents or whatever other thing nobody actually uses because it just doesn&#x27;t deliver the same sort of flexibility as what I&#x27;m talking about).<p>So I&#x27;m sticking with native apps where it makes sense.<p>Having said that, for the type of site this actual post is discussing, eh... web is probably just fine. Go ahead and use it... I have no issue with the linked article, but some of the people discussing this here and other places seem to be nudging this into a discussion about &quot;mobile web is ready to replace all native apps&quot;, which IMO is a ridiculous statement.

But isn&#x27;t this an &quot;App&quot; which shouldn&#x27;t have been an App in the first place (I think they write something like this in the article).<p>That&#x27;s really one of my pet peeves. I don&#x27;t like installing apps just to read an article. A good mobile site is much preferable in my opinion. But I&#x27;ve started a little bit later than most to the smart phone game and I&#x27;m a little bit quirky - so that may be just me.

I suspect the reason many think they prefer apps is the one-click launch and the automated bookmark created on your screen.<p>If a mobile browser behaved like an appstore (Search for website, See results, Click to Install, i.e. bookmark), you would have the same behavior, downloads, and most people would not be able to tell whether they are using an app, web app, or website.

This is great! Mobile apps have taken our age back to the age where everything is platform dependent, the Internet was invented so that devices from multiple manufacturers could communicate with each other, but with Android and iOS we have created a new niche of platforms, now it is devices with specific Operating Systems, and they are pushing our age back!<p>There is a trend in Indian startups to abandon the web altogether and go &quot;app only&quot;, among other reasons it defeats the entire purpose of the Internet as we know it, kudos Atavist!

It looks like the folks at Atavist did the right thing. As far as I can tell they created a publishing platform that lets folks format thousands of words of text and photos and videos, which is a very good use case for a web browser. Plus, contributors can add links, italics, subheds, captions, etc. This is not the best use case for mobile apps.<p>They have a beautiful digital magazine that doesn&#x27;t need to live in a native app -- and had no compelling reason to.<p>When we started building our smart news app ( more info at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;recent.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;recent.io&#x2F;</a> ) we considered creating a non-native web app and took a few steps in that direction. But we rely on touch gestures a lot, require no keyboard input except for searching, update news recommendations minute-by-minute, and wanted to appear in the app stores, so we went down the iOS and Android paths instead.

the article does not mention this but publishing an app for iOS is drastically more costly in time and efforts than publishing for android.<p>It is the worst publishing process I have ever seen. sluggish certificates, keys, provisionning profiles, iOS lack of retro-compatibility, apple lack of communication on what the major versions are changing and apple lack of judgement when reviewing apps with guidelines that are changing every day.<p>Frankly I don&#x27;t even understand how can developers enjoy working on developing apps for iOS it is lackluster in every part.

First of all, good for atavist. They recognize their market, and are following the path of greatest efficiency and effectiveness. Sounds like great business sense to me.<p>Now, on the other hand, I have to say, this kind of thing always bums me out. For a news distribution service, it does not matter so much I suspect, but in-general, the trend of putting more and more of the functionality I rely on daily into a web browser is distressing. Web browsers, despite all the innovation and work that has gone on lately, are still an enormous attack surface with the most significant likelihood of security breach (especially given that the rise of javascript has led us all to the point where we are almost allowing arbitrary code execution from untrusted sources on every page visit). Not to mention that web browsers were founded on the notion of conveying content, not functionality; HTML is a markup language (with &lt;canvas&gt; and JS and HTML frameworks, that&#x27;s not so concrete anymore), it was not meant to host alternatives to the power of native applications.<p>I often find myself wishing for the ability to use a text-based web browser and have &quot;The Web&quot; still work, but those days are mostly long-gone[1] till I finally get around to writing my own browser[2] (which seems like it should not be a necessary step just to be able to interact with a simpler Web).<p>I suppose I am just tilting at windmills at this point (and, as I said, this post is not really aimed at atavist since I think content-delivery is a perfect niche for being web-only). Ah well, a user can dream, I suppose…<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=r38al1w-h4k" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=r38al1w-h4k</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10072796" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10072796</a>

How do you deal with offline support? If I&#x27;m not connected and I want to read an article, where do I go? Can&#x27;t open the website.<p>Did you run metrics to find out how many people are going to miss offline?

This will happen naturally once we don&#x27;t have a word for apps and another for websites.<p>Icon on the home screen and finding the &quot;app&quot; on the store is what most users need (basically bookmarks).

It&#x27;s becoming increasingly clear that the future of publishing—for content providers—will be to relinquish control and publish their content directly to third-party distribution and engagement platforms.<p>See: Snapchat Discover &amp; Facebook Instant Articles.

The thing about potentially having to wait two weeks to make an updated app available, and the control over your business that implies, makes my testicles suck up into my torso.

It&#x27;s sad it&#x27;s taken people so long to realize it, but at least they&#x27;re starting to get a clue. Who&#x27;d have thought that an app that&#x27;s essentially a web browser tied to a single site was a bad idea that nobody would want to use?<p>If desktop and laptop users access your content&#x2F;game&#x2F;social network&#x2F;whatever from a web page, it&#x27;s probably best to have mobile users access it that way, too.

Could have used React and tried to share component source between iOS, Android and Web.<p>I mean since you&#x27;re going to fully go web, I don&#x27;t see the problem in this. It&#x27;s all JavaScript anyway, unless you want to start playing with the hardware APIs.<p>Yeah you would have to write some of the UI layer differently, but I think it isn&#x27;t that much. You can wrap your own UI components to use Android&#x2F;iOS&#x2F;Web internally.

The biggest problem with native apps is that there are a lot of native mobile developers. One in 20 or so are actually good.<p>So you have all these apps that were built by someone who has no idea on how to architect them. The company has already spent so much just getting it out the door that they refuse to rewrite it.<p>Native mobile dev is great. You just need to have good mobile developers run your team.

Ironically this article doesn&#x27;t render in MobileSafari for me.

Interesting that a smallish magazine is moving away from native mobile back to web while not too long ago I saw that some large retail company discontinued their mobile web site and require use of their native app (flipkart I think).<p>I don&#x27;t think expecting a new audience just because you have an app is reasonable. I&#x27;d be interested in seeing how many new users they generate with just the mobile web site - I suspect that ultra loyal existing readers may take the time to bookmark their site and come back, but would be very surprised if their overall usage doesn&#x27;t decline.

It depends on two things: do you make use of hardware and does your ux depend on touch gestures.

Sencha does this for enterprise apps too. For publishing, I wish RSS feeds had taken off. Would be great to visit a site and see that I could just subscribe to their RSS feed and see it in my own reader app.

Good. Using the app mechanism to deliver static pages was silly and inefficient. The only reason it caught on was because it came with a payment system.

Why not Meteor (meteor.com)? It has hot code push ability. No store approval required. Everything in JS.

Horses for courses; the web works well for content, apps work well for interactivity.

So content is king?

I was hoping it would say what their dev stack is.

i hear the same bullshit since the time when iphone was released ( and without apps support )<p>yet, there isn&#x27;t a single &quot;amazing&quot; case of webapp. ( the same for xamarin, phonegap, cordova, name_your_cross_app_development_here )<p>i call it laziness to learn how to code native apps.<p>the only cross development that works, is for games ( almost all top 10 mobile games are in unreal or unity ( or cocosx ) )

Native apps are just a momentary crutch until Web standards on devices get better. Especially since most so-called apps are merely glorified Web pages in custom browsers.

Lol, sure.

Good luck

Never heard of this website until today... maybe they should of advertised it some.