The Web Is Beautiful, Mobile Is Beautiful

[samholmes]

It's a beautiful thing having the internet in my pocket where ever I go. I can access virtually any information I want by just pulling my mobile device out of my pocket.

It's a beautiful thing, the web. I can access a constantly growing network of information, and I can even add information to it. I can use and build systems that do amazing things with this information, without too much friction.

Why can't these two beautiful things work well together? Why is it that the state of mobile platforms doesn't take advantage of the power of the web platform? Sure, my phone has a web browser, but how often do I use the applications built on the mobile web vs native mobile? Not often. Why? because the mobile web is less capable (I think intentionally). Why must it be this way? What can we do to change it?

The desktop world enabled freedom to hack any app you want. Your computer is your tool. This isn't the same for my phones.

Why am I not seeing a mobile app that allows me to access a strong web platform that gives these web apps the power of the native platform (much like Chrome for the desktop). That way I as a developer could create an app and release it to the world much like a website is released into the world (without a walled garden–app store).

Will this ever be, or are we doomed to always have these mobile devices closed and controlled by big companies with their own interests?

[bobajeff]

Well part of the problem is that mobile browsers just aren't very good. This is changing. I find that Chrome's integration with the task manager makes using web apps more convenient now.

Still my instinct sometimes tells me to look for the mobile app first. This might be because on mobile I am often forced to a ghetto, broken mobile site. Maybe there are some things I expect more from a phone app like GPS/Maps based applications. Sometimes I get tired of dealing with sites that don't care that I'm using a touchscreen to enter text.

Google has made attempts at addressing this issue by rewarding mobile friendly sites but in my experience it has led to more sites forcing broken ghetto mobile sites on me.

The big issue is that there is a lot of big sites out there with lots of legacy code that assumed a desktop. And now that it's wrong many sites have adopted a strategy of having 2-5 different versions of their site. With the desktop site taking priority and mobile site sometimes being fourth place behind iOS and Android. All maintained by different teams and with separate frontends. This is obviously a big mistake since many sites can scarcely manage the development one version of their site (looking at you eBay) let alone 4.

[rebekah-aimee]

I think it's getting better. Tablet-like devices are still a relatively new platform, and improvements like what you're asking for are inevitable as more hackers gain expertise in the platform and all its nooks and crannies.

Browsers in particular improve by necessity, because of the issues with security. In particular with mobile devices! And of course if the code isn't allowed to become stagnant--if it's always being changed in some way--other improvements will likely show up too. Of course, we can speed up the process of making a better browser. Firefox for Android is a thing, albeit one I haven't personally tried yet; maybe it does a better job with things like web forms (which are a pain to fill out on phones).

The browser is only part of the problem, though. The fact that web site maintainers would rather have you download an app client than let you just work off their site (on a young platform they aren't really familiar with yet, remember) is nothing new. I think it often makes things easier on them, programming-wise. But the problem becomes that they compete for space on users' phones. I don't keep a lot of apps on my phone, and I don't like downloading new ones for services I'm ambivalent about or won't use often.

It's worth remembering what happened to email clients. Most people don't use them any more on their laptops; they use Gmail, which is online. Yet on phones, we're back to using email clients (probably because the browsers are pretty awful). The space problem will, I think, help cause demand for better browsers, and then website apps will shift back online.

Also, there's this. https://xkcd.com/1174/

There are certain apps that should be apps, though. Some apps can be web sites, and that'd be a good thing. Other apps--the ones that are useful when you're not connected to the Internet (which is infrequent but happens)--should stay apps. It's nice to be able to disconnect the Wi-Fi and still play Tetris.

I wouldn't mind a BuzzFeed app if it downloaded and compressed certain articles based on filters I defined, and let me access them offline to kill time in a doctor's office or whatever (this is probably way beyond the BuzzFeed folks, though--just an example). I wouldn't mind a HN app that downloaded the top stories as cached/compressed versions, either. Again, this would be the shape of an email client, but convenient time-killers always have a market.

This might be a good startup idea if anyone wants to take a crack at it: a content aggregator that stores articles (based on user-defined filters) from certain sites, as compressed archives on your phone. I'd do it myself, but I'm already working on something!