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?
-
-
Replying to @wycats
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.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @JordanHawker
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.
2 replies 1 retweet 6 likes -
Replying to @wycats @JordanHawker
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.
1 reply 1 retweet 1 like -
Replying to @wycats @JordanHawker
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).
1 reply 1 retweet 0 likes -
Replying to @wycats @JordanHawker
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.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @wycats @JordanHawker
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.
1 reply 5 retweets 6 likes -
Calling Facebook a native app is quite a stretch.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Um what.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
It has custom drawing for nearly everything, and the newsfeed is a webview.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
Not quite, but anyway, the way people decide to build native apps is not really relevant. And Google's Go apps show that the same is true about other implementation strategies.
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.