The web is doomed. Native will rule. I’m not alone.
A great piece by Joe Hewitt, who writes far better than I. This is pure killer:
The arrogance of Web evangelists is staggering. They take for granted that the Web will always be popular regardless of whether it is technologically competitive with other platforms. They place ideology above relevance. Haven’t they noticed that the world of software is ablaze with new ideas and a growing number of those ideas are flat out impossible to build on the Web? I can easily see a world in which Web usage falls to insignificant levels compared to Android, iOS, and Windows, and becomes a footnote in history. That thing we used to use in the early days of the Internet.
As those of you who read my previous post on the possibility native could eclipse web on the desktop will know, I could not agree more. It’s not something I want, but I believe it may be inevitable. Even if Joe’s mooted guardians/CEOs of “the web” materialised, there’s no guarantee they would produce something compelling enough for the average user to use in preference to native apps.
Joe’s piece is bang on, in that the web geeks of the world are in complete denial of this and the dead weight of design-by-committee that will forever drag the core web technologies down.
Also ties into a tweet that I saw today:
@hnshah: “As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.” Jef Raskin
There are a couple of ways to interpret this, but mine is “customers don’t give a shit how you implemented this or what your constraints are”.
What they see, feel and experience in front of them is what they care about.
Web devs who deny this is the case are just sticking with what they know, and companies sticking to web development are doing this purely for cost reasons that make not one jot of difference to the customer. Seriously, who wants to learn Objective-C, code Android, or Windows or OS X when they can already do HTML + JS? You can see the logic – it’s “cross platform”. It is however self-interest, and this does not drive the software market. The customer does, and the customer is rarely happy in the long term with lowest-common-denominator UX and functionality.
The web offers no gain for the customer whatsoever vs native. The converse is true for native vs web.
Yes I make a living from making web app stuff. For now at least.
Native will beat web apps on desktop too
It’s OK, I have two sets of flameproof clothing on.
Further to my contribution to the everlasting mobile web apps vs native debate I was discussing these issues again with good friend Richard (who is truly called a platform ninja), and again cropped up the “why is a tablet different from a desktop then? why is native better for tablets and not desktop?” question.
The web does not a mobile app make.
This is a rant about the Web vs. Native debate in mobile.
I’m very squarely on the “Native is best” side. Obviously if you don’t have the funds/expertise to make a native app then you’ll choose web – but I would wager this is only viable if you don’t actually want to make money out of the app. Unless you have some amazingly compelling content (like pictures of naked people) that can not be got at by native means.
Interviewed on DZone
I was interviewed last week by Andres Almiray for DZone.com on matters Grails, Groovy and Weceem.
The interview can be found here.
Why leaving the house sucks
This is a perhaps atypical post for me… Long ish but hopefully interesting.
I often feel like I’m in the wrong job. I love the real world, being outside, being with my family. Staying indoors all the time in front of a computer is a bind, thought it obviously conveys benefits to my family so one can’t complain. I am also incredibly privileged to spend most of my time applying my sometimes hard to constrain creative urges, rather than plodding along doing dull grey work.
Working outside of the corporate office is something that all companies should strive to support. It is challenging, buy we should be driving forward developments to make it less so for more people. There was a recent article about this and increased productivity I read, and it holds true.
