Comments on: Stop obsessing over native mobile apps

By: bgrggfe

bgrggfe — Sat, 26 May 2012 02:08:00 +0000

Worldwide more than $100 billion worth of counterfeit products, from Louis Vuitton Replica Handbags to Rolex watches, are sold every year. I have developed a great idea, which will allow shoppers to check the authenticity of the product by using their smartphone before they buy the Louis Vuitton Replica. It will add only a fraction of the cost of the product for the manufacturer, who will be more than happy to pay this little extra cost to protect their brand and increase their sales. However, I do not yet have a working prototype, which requires significant investment. I do not know how and who to approach for venture capital funding. I am so confident about the success of this idea that I feel like selling my house and investing in this technology. Your advice will be very much appreciated.

By: boagworld

boagworld — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 08:45:00 +0000

Good point Chris. As I touched on briefly in the presentation (although admittedly not in much depth), HTML5 has some capabilities for offline storage. This may go some way to solving your problem.

By: Chris Mann

Chris Mann — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 23:32:00 +0000

Nice round up of a situation that I believe a lot of businesses are not taking the best approach to.

However, one objection that you didn’t touch on in the discussion of RWD is web connectivity – specifically that a native app can download content and store it locally for offline use. What options are available for a responsive website?An example: I work for a healthcare company. We need to deliver content to doctors, nurses and other clinical practitioners whilst they are in hospitals where there is rarely WiFi coverage and little or no 3G. I agree that there is a visibility challenge in the native application ecosystems of both Apple and Android; however at least if I build a native app and 100 people download it I know they can access what they need to. I’m not sure of HTML5′s offline capabilities right now, and sadly my boss won’t listen when I say “but the standards are still evolving!”

By: Matt Lawson

Matt Lawson — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 08:22:00 +0000

Totally agree with you Paul. I wrote a similar article for Smashing Magazine as I felt that a lot of clients wanted to jump on the mobile bandwagon but didn't know how or even why! The presentation certainly helps to clarify the different options available.

By: Nicolas Embleton

Nicolas Embleton — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:23:00 +0000

I think that apps are a good way for a company to get a competitive advantage. The visibility is a problem, but there are numerous ways to overcome that. And the companies that can put in efforts of overcoming it will be real winners. But of course it depends on what you propose in your app.

By: Cesc Vilanova

Cesc Vilanova — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 19:30:00 +0000

Hi Paul.

I love your site, first of all. Both content and presentation are great.

About the talk, I think you are missing a couple of important points.

These are, imo, 2 crucial advantages that native apps have over web apps.

1. Monetizing: If you want to sell your app, whether it’s via an up-front purchase or through in-app purchases, you need to go native. As far as I know, there’s no easy way of getting users pay money for a web app without using options like Paypal, which require having an account or adding your credit card details. That means enormously bigger friction vs Apple seamless payment method.

2. Graphical capabilities: You can’t create content like Infinity Blade with a web based app right now, and if you could, you would still have to download a huge amount of data every time you play the game. For example, Infinity Blade takes 791 mb of your iPhone hard drive.

Lastly, I don’t agree either that visibility is worse in an app store than in the web. App stores can’t provide space for too many apps, and it’s enormously difficult to appear on the top charts or being promoted by Apple or Google.

But when that happens, you get a visibility you don’t obtain on the web. Donwloads hugely increase at that point. That means that people doesn’t always look for apps, but rather find them browsing the apps tore. On websites, Google let’s you search, but that it’s only useful if you know what you are looking for.

@Cesc_Vilanova:twitter

By: Ash Mann

Ash Mann — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 13:05:00 +0000

Hi Paul, do you think the mobile web has – or will soon – reach a speed (that is widely available) that will mitigate, I’d say justifiable, concerns around bandwidth issues with responsive sites? As there isn’t currently a way of detecting bandwidth capacity for whatever device is accessing your site you could potentially still be serving a fairly ‘heavy’ site to devices with widely varying connection speeds and thus offering a fairly variable UX?
I do very much share your overall view of the situation as it currently exists though but I think this is a point that does need to at least be discussed!