Posted by wmanley 8 hours ago
[1]: https://infrequently.org/2024/10/platforms-are-competitions/...
But I'm probably an outlier because I spend most of my time on websites, even on phone and tablet.
It would be nice to see this broken down by market segment. I don't see any banks in the list. I use my bank's app for certain reasons like depositing checks and Zelle.
Meanwhile our users are clamoring for app version of our web app, even though it's just a web wrapper. I guess some people just have a "there's an app for that" mentality.
I personally think that the most responsible “father” is finance. The article states that there is more money with the web, but in my experience it’s far easier to lock down payments through apps. I agree that part of this is because native apps are better on mobile, but they are also much easier to work with and consume. It’s not easy to make payments function well on the web while in a native app it’s just a click with well powered api behind it. Serving both users and developers. Now, it probably could be easier on the web, but who would deliver it? The article calls out Apple and to some degree Google as guilty of not making browsers competitive with mobile apps, but why would they? If anything it’s in their best interest to keep the web shitty on mobile.
As opposed to what? Server side rendered pages with random jquery snippets sprinkled around for interactivity? I prefer the reactive model far more than manually trying to update the page myself.
Maybe if we had HTML6 we wouldn’t be in this scenario. HTML5 was great but form building on the web (without JS) is a second-rate experience. And it’s even more miserable once JS is in the mix, but hey developers can provide a much better UX for end users than HTML and CSS alone could possibly provide.
Sorry Alex, but without JS the web would have died a decade ago as phones took over. It’s only JS that keeps us in the ring.
The web of semantic documents died years ago, it's an application platform now and that means JS. HTML is naught but a payload carrier.
I agree though it’s very odd that desktop web apps are serviceable, while they universally are horrible on mobile.
Specifically because they can't claim 30% of revenue from web apps.