[custardcream]

As someone who is old enough to have written "programs" and sees the instant relationship to "apps", I vigorously disagree. Lets consider these points:

1. Firstly there are competing platforms on which to deploy your programs. This means there is little common ground between the three major sectors of the market. You either have to pick one and lose market share or pick all and increase cost. Nothing (yet) has solved this problem adequately without increasing cost or decreasing agility and/or quality and consistency.

2. Each of these platforms has many barriers to entry from subscription fees, having to buy specific hardware and learn how to use it, distribution and vendor costs, QA cost and the risks of rejection and having your product closed suddenly.

3. All of the markets are primarily consumer oriented which makes deploying things to corporate entities a pain in the backside requiring more hoops to jump through.

4. None of the programs have longevity, a stable platform to run on, security guarantees or predictable security evolution.

So at the end of the day, you're pitching programs sold behind a walled garden by someone who wants a slice of your cash and doesn't give a fuck if the device works after you've sold it versus a platform with zero entry cost, total ubiquity and importantly absolutely no distribution or sales model at all so you can build your own?

Nope.

People take apps because they're cheap, free or the vendor is pushing them. That's it. If it wasn't the case, the first thing we'd do when we unboxed a mac or a PC was download and install facebook. Which we don't do.

As for mobile first everything, not a chance.

[cognivore]

You make some excellent and valid points, to which I don't necessarily disagree. I just think the inertia is towards the use of native apps over web browsers as delivery mechanisms for software - both mobile and PC.

A couple of points:

"Firstly there are competing platforms on which to deploy your programs."

I see the major web browser as those competing platforms. The effort to make something work on different web browsers is huge, almost, or equal to, the difficultly of choosing a cross platform development tool and targeting multiple OSes.

"...the first thing we'd do when we unboxed a mac or a PC was download and install facebook".

A native facebook application might be pretty cool. Really, do I do something much different when I use Thunderbird and eschew Gmail?

[TeMPOraL]

A small tangent.

> and doesn't give a fuck if the device works after you've sold

Which is even worse on the web, where most of the time that someone also doesn't give a fuck about you at all and will just pull the product the moment he gets enough users to make an exit.

There are good things about having a working binary on your device; the author can't just take it away from you just because he doesn't care about the product anymore.

[Silhouette]

There are good things about having a working binary on your device; the author can't just take it away from you just because he doesn't care about the product anymore.

Tragically, in the modern software world, that often isn't true either.

Buggy junk gets shipped routinely even when people are paying real money for it. Software developers assume you'd love to have their regular updates, even if those updates also change interfaces and modify or even outright break/remove functionality however they feel like. If you don't apply the updates, you don't get security fixes either, so for any software that is at all involved with sharing data or communicating on-line many users have little choice. The idea of long term support for any stable software that people actually rely on is a joke for many projects. And that's before we even get to all the DRM/activation junk.

Ironically, the worst offenders are probably Chrome and Firefox. IME, the next worst offenders are often the supposedly high-end professional software that comes with a thousands-of-dollars-per-seat price tag -- assuming you can even buy a copy instead of renting it these days.

I'm mildly optimistic that a new generation of software seems to be arriving where people are expected to pay for good work but the prices are much more reasonable: not App Store peanuts, not Enterprice Pricing (call for a quote, because hell will freeze over before we publish any useful information publicly). A lot of these tools are relatively small or specialised, but they do their jobs well, they get very favourable feedback from users, and they have real, commercially viable development organisations behind them. Also, they rarely incorporate the user-hostile junk. So good work can still be done commercially, and of course for some of the important geek-friendly software like development tools and OS/server/networking infrastructure there are Open Source projects that are usefully stable, reliable and comprehensive. I look forward hopefully to a day when these kinds of projects are the norm for software we rely on, and we can all get on with using our computers without constantly fighting with them.

[custardcream]

Well considering most of these binaries are tied to app stores and talk to the web they're about as much use if the vendor pulls the plug.