The fact that browser apps replaced desktop apps eventually kind of proves that the same on mobile is inevitable once computing power and efficiency is sufficient.
Unless mobile vendors put up artificial barriers on functionality of web apps (Apple).
At a certain hardware level, UX is not perceptibly different between native and Web based, yet development much easier with cross platform target
> The fact that browser apps replaced desktop apps eventually kind of proves that the same on mobile is inevitable once computing power and efficiency is sufficient.
IMHO, replacing something != proving something. We may have replaced desktop apps with browser-based apps somewhere, but that does not prove anything. I'm looking at a lot of professional software, that just won't perform as a browser app (or work at all) in the near future. And then I look at a lot of crap browser-based software (like MS Teams) that makes me wonder whether this was actually an advancement, because it absolutely does not feel like it. It's UX is just miserable and so slow.
It's proven in the sense that there is freedom to choose to write a native desktop client, and yet nobody does it anymore, regardless of how widely adopted or important their app is to the business.
It's enough proof for me, at least.
Native apps continue to exist for areas where browser APIs aren't sufficient yet, that's true. But those will get replaced once a sufficient API supports it
I partly agree, but I disagree at the point that there may be no correlation between the amount of non-native apps and the overall "happiness" of users.
Just because business see that it's cheaper does not make it the better option.
Also from a user perspective there are many benefits with a software that exists on many platforms. It's often better with a slightly less good/snappy app that runs on all platforms than a perfect app than runs only on one platform. It's a feature.
It could also be said that it's a feature that the app does not 100% follow the native UI as the experience will be the same irrespective of which OS you are on.
Is it a feature, that MS Teams (as a default setting) does not use native notifications on OS X? As a user, I have to disable two notifications now, because one does ignore the system setting. I don't know how to sell that "feature"... Imagine having many apps with each having it's own notification setting, layout and appereance.. That's hardly an improvement to the status quo.
That is only a feature for app developers and (especially) the marketing departments of companies who do so, not platform users. I use non-platform native UI as a leading indicator of contempt for users.
>It's proven in the sense that there is freedom to choose to write a native desktop client, and yet nobody does it anymore
There’s factors occluding this though I think-the JS/web stack has had millions of dollars of investment thrown at it by parties with a vested interest in seeing it succeed, so a lot of UX issues and friction points have been smoothed over as much as possible.
The wider native UI ecosystem hasn’t had the same investment, so I’m not surprised it’s superficially “easier” for devs to thrash out a UI with web tooling. Doesn’t mean the resulting application is actually any better though.
I mean, you could simply say you don't care about your users, it's not that hard.
Web apps are dreadful, regularly lock up, and are an active step back in computing. But hey, if your startup can spew out a shitty app much faster, good for you.
> And then I look at a lot of crap browser-based software (like MS Teams)
I actually prefer to run MS Teams in a browser tab instead of installing it to my computer. Same with Slack or Zoom. I'm not losing much since their core functionality relies on an internet connection. Full-blooded browsers are also more likely to stay up to date than the bundled Chromium build, and I can enjoy the peace of mind from a modern browser sandbox.
This is a classic 'My job is X, so I presume people doing Y also have the same experience"
Software developers and PM's can generally get by with a browser, but woah boy good luck getting the finance world off of desktop Excel/Bloomberg (as the most prominent example of an immovable force against browser apps).
> The fact that browser apps replaced desktop apps eventually kind of proves that the same on mobile is inevitable once computing power and efficiency is sufficient
Let me know when the power is there for the desktops. My MacBook M1 Pro chokes a lot due to running Teams, Slack, VS Code all wanting to be desktop webapps and are highly inefficient.
I have to use a proper desktop to get everything running smoothly together.
There's a reason software trends towards higher level, less performant abstractions over time. The takes about chrome being a memory hog or electron being inherently slow are very tired at this point
And garbage collected languages are slower than managed ones. Should we avoid garbage collected languages for all software then?
It's just demonstrates a very poor grasp of what actually matters in the world. And the performance gap is greatly exaggerated.
Most people would agree VS Code is very snappy, and it's written in JS and browser based. There's no inherent reason they have to be slow. And we don't double the RAM in computers every few years to leave it unused
The problem is that Electron apps are slower today than native apps were 10 years ago, despite computers getting faster and available RAM on my machine quadrupling.
I understand why developers like Electron, but like everything it's a tradeoff.
Exactly. This is a developer culture problem as much as it is a technology problem. Developers care less about runtime performance than other development factors, so they choose technologies that sacrifice runtime performance for developer speed and comfort. Is the root cause even deeper? Why are we so focused on developer productivity? Do individual developers really not care about performance, or is it that their companies are insisting that they poop out whatever crap they can in as little time as possible?
> > Electron apps are slower today than native apps were 10 years ago, despite computers getting faster and available RAM on my machine quadrupling.
Desktop software today seems to be slower than desktop software even 20 years ago, when RAM and hard disks not only had less capacity, but were also slower just as CPUs were slower. As an industry, we have sacrificed so much at the holy altar of Developer Productivity.
> it that their companies are insisting that they poop out whatever crap they can in as little time as possible?
Very much this but management are not requesting Electron. They see that JavaScript developers are cheap and plentiful, and JavaScript devs want to use JavaScript, even if it isn't a desktop language.
If you don't think having to run _an entire chromium stack_ just to display something, actively bypassing all of the OS's rendering facilities to draw some stuff on a canvas, I have a bridge to sell you.
> And garbage collected languages are slower than managed ones.
What..? Many common managed platforms are also garbage collected - .NET and Java, for example.
If I assume you misspoke with “managed” it still is untrue that garbage collection means “slower” because “slower” says nothing about whether you are measuring throughout or latency.
I only know internet commentators to talk about how VS Code is fast enough. In meat space, no one has ever said that VS Code is performant, just that it is free and X company has standardised on it.
> And we don't double the RAM in computers every few years to leave it unused
On a point of clarity.
Who is we?
I don't want my browser taking up 14gigs of my 16gigs just to watch a cat meme...thanks.
I would like my experience to be improved and elevated while using less resources. Efficiency.
> It's just demonstrates a very poor grasp of what actually matters in the world.
I find this particular statement...lacks any modicum of humility. One might say it ventures into dangerously callous.
Put simply, outside first world economies, most of humanity does not earn enough money to buy a new macbook pro/ Dell XPS every 2 years nor have access to fast internet...relying on crappy broadband instead.
Even those people deserve efficient software that does its utmost to not hog the little resources so they can get things done yes?
The biggest problem with VS Code is that it doesn't actually do anything, all functionality is performed via plugins which have dramatically different performance.
So most of the time people are not discussing the same application experience. VS Code with nothing installed isn't that bad, once you start actually using it for code then performance drops off a cliff.
> The fact that browser apps replaced desktop apps eventually kind of proves that the same on mobile is inevitable
I'm not sure whether it's that black and white. If you've worked on both platforms you know how much of a different beast mobile is, it's a lot less forgiving in a lot of aspects. The use cases and interaction model is very different.
Unless mobile vendors put up artificial barriers on functionality of web apps (Apple).
At a certain hardware level, UX is not perceptibly different between native and Web based, yet development much easier with cross platform target