[bloaf]

I think there is a fascinating split personality to the internet these days. On the one hand, there is a big drive to move traditional desktop application functionality into the web browser (e.g. google and microsoft's office web apps, photo editing, and even some computation in the case of Wolfram Alpha.) On the other hand, there is a big drive to push traditional internet content into standalone apps, as this author outlines. Currently it seems that the vast majority of the apps in the Windows 8 store fall into this category.

[dmix]

The long term push is towards html5 mobile apps period. The only problem is performance (which is improving), immature javascript programming libraries/communities and poor adoption of HTML5 mobile features by the OSes (such as being able to use datepickers and other essential APIs for building apps).

That's why native apps are still important. Once the above is figured out, I highly doubt companies will want to pay to develop on 2-3 different codebases in different programming languages than their website, to support native apps.

But iOS/Android make their money from native apps so I doubt they're particularly motivated to make mobile HTML5 apps the standard.

[codeka]

> That's why native apps are still important. Once the above is figured out, I highly doubt companies will want to pay to develop on 2-3 different codebases in different programming languages than their website, to support native apps.

But that's the thing: we're talking about forums and news sites here. Mobile browsers are perfectly capable of rendering news, blogs and forums as fast as you'd ever need. Companies aren't building these kinds of native apps for the performance.

[fusiongyro]

A better explanation is that apps are simply the fashion right now. Everybody and their brother doesn't need a web page any more than they need an app.

[kijin]

Another possibility is that companies think it would be easier to monetize apps than web pages.

If you take ads from a typical ad network and put them in a mobile web page, the page probably will look terrible, and a lot of people have ad blockers in their browsers anyway. (Mobile Firefox recommends AdBlock in its home screen.)

A lot of mobile apps, on the other hand, have ads that cannot be removed except by rooting your phone, and even then, many ads slip through. (I use Android with AdAway.)

Also, people are more used to paying $0.99 for apps than they are to paying for web pages.

[fusiongyro]

I doubt very seriously that ad blockers diminish ad revenue significantly. Mobile Firefox is the default browser on which devices? Defaults count for a lot.

I think we're both right: companies probably do believe they'll be better able to monetize an app than a web site, but they're probably wrong, and they probably think that for faddish reasons.

[jfoster]

Aren't forums generally all running the same software? I'll bet having a mobile app is just a feature of that suite of software. Probably because the company making the software heard from some of their customers that they wanted that as a feature.

[Evbn]

And yet that suite of software doesn't have a decent mobile friendly Web HTML/CSS package.

[dredmorbius]

The other ironic move I'll note is that true content is increasingly getting pushed to simpler forms such as ePub readers, Instapaper, Readability, Moon+Reader, etc.

I find it very difficult to actually read long-form material in a web browser, whether desktop/laptop, or phone/tablet, with all the competing features and distractions which are presented. HN is better than most, G+ is particularly bad, other sites fall at various places along that range.

The specific mode of advertising website-based apps via pop-up interstitials is typical of what I find really, really annoying about sites (persistent header, footer, or sidebar elements in particular).

When TBL's original WWW documents were posted to HN some months back, I was particularly impressed with how readable the pages were, largely due to the bare minimalism of their markup. For actually presenting information (which was, it turns out, what he was hoping to accomplish), the original HTML markup remains surprisingly good.