Hey @tomdale @wycats: Can you point me to some sources of data re: native apps vs mobile web apps for deep, meaningful applications (as opposed to simple transactional flows)? I know you talk about this stuff a lot and I'd like to show my team why we should value mobile web.
The first question is: If someone agrees that the mobile form factor can provide engaging/meaningful experiences (which they do if they are making an app), why do they think mobile web is a bad fit for that?
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Because they think that no company has ever seen a mobile web app outperform a native app. They believe they have data that proves this and no data that says the opposite.
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The main mistake in that analysis (which isn't true on its merits) is that leaving the website to download a native app and then open the native app is a huge time sink, and has to be accounted for when thinking about performance.
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Google had so much trouble making its native apps perform well on low-end Android that they created a new ("Go") version of Android and rewrote their main apps as "Go" versions to make them work on lower-end devices. People are overoptimistic about native and then some.
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I was once helping a homeless man in a cafe set up a new phone (his old phone had cracked). He desperately wanted to get Facebook set up to reconnect with his relationships. I opened the Play Store, waited >30s, and then downloaded Facebook (waited minutes).
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I then tapped the Facebook icon (the guy was very enthusiastic and excited to get back on Facebook) and then waited five minutes. Facebook was still booting. It took so long that I eventually had to leave to catch a ride to work that day.
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We got Facebook booting, but this was a phone purchased in the United States and used by a person living in San Francisco. Web sites that we tried were slow but not that slow. People have a pretty misleading sense of native apps being self-evidently better.
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Calling Facebook a native app is quite a stretch.
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