Webiness

John Gruber quite rightly skewers a paywall-proteced “sky is falling” piece in the Wall Street Journal called The Web Is Dying; Apps Are Killing It, writing that native apps are part of the web:

They’re just superior clients to open Internet services.

This is something I wrote about earlier this year:

There’s a whole category of native apps that could just as easily be described as “artisanal web browsers” (and if someone wants to write a browser extension that replaces every mention of “native app” with “artisanal web browser” that would be just peachy).

Instagram’s native app is a web browser.

Facebook’s native app is a web browser.

Twitter’s native app is a web browser.

In that same piece, I try to define exactly what the web is:

Well, the unsexy definition I’ve used in the past is that the web consists of files (e.g. HTML, CSS, JavaScript), accessible at URLs, delivered over HTTP.

John also gives a defintion of what the web is:

There are two big four-letter “H” acronyms that powered the web from the beginning: HTML (client), and HTTP (networking protocol). Native apps are just an alternative to HTML running in a web browser (and many native apps still use HTML web views embedded within the apps themselves to render parts of their interface). Almost all native apps use HTTP/S for networking, though.

Notice the difference? Whereas John talks about two things that define the web (HTTP/S and HTML), I talk about three: HTTP(S), HTML, and URLs:

But to be honest, I don’t think that the Hypertext Transfer Protocol is the important part of the web; it’s the URLs that really matter. It’s the addressability of the files that’s the killer app of the web in my opinion.

URLs are what give the web is its reach, and that’s what’s still missing from native apps.

But John’s fundamental point that native apps and the web are not fundumentally opposed? I completely agree with that. They are complementary. Irakli Nadareishvili wrote about this false dichotomy recently in a post called Responsive Web Design or Native Mobile Apps?:

Native mobile applications are not going anywhere and the future of all websites is to be responsive. These two assertions are not mutually exclusive, they are complementary – don’t create apps when what you actually need is a website; but also don’t pretend webapps can completely replace native applications, because they can’t.

It’s also worth remembering that even if you’re using a native app—like, say, Facebook or Twitter—you’re still going to spend a lot of time following links and reading stuff that’s rendered in the app, but that lives out on the world wide web. And the reason why those apps can access those resources is because those resources have URLs.

URLs are not an implementation detail. The URI is the thing.

The web on mobile (a response) | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

Rich suggests another reason why the UX of websites on mobile is so shit these days:

The path to installing a native app is well trodden. We search the App Store (or ironically follow a link from a website), hit ‘Get’ and the app is downloaded to our phone’s home screen, ready to use any time with a simple tap.

A PWA can also live on your home screen, nicely indistinguishable from a native app. But the journey to getting a PWA – or indeed any web app – onto your home screen remains convoluted to say the least. This is the lack of equivalence I’m driving at. I wonder if the mobile web experience would suck as badly if web apps could be installed just as easily as native apps?

Your App Should Have Been A Website (And Probably Your Game Too) - Rogue Engine

Remember when every company rushed to make an app? Airlines, restaurants, even your local coffee shop. Back then, it made some sense. Browsers weren’t as powerful, and apps had unique features like notifications and offline access. But fast-forward to today, and browsers can do all that. Yet businesses still push native apps as if it’s 2010, and we’re left downloading apps for things that should just work on the web.

This is all factually correct, but alas as Cory Doctorow points out, you can’t install an ad-blocker in a native app. To you and me, that’s a bug. To short-sighted businesses, it’s a feature.

(When I say “ad-blocker”, I mean “tracking-blocker”.)

Pluralistic: Web apps could de-monopolize mobile devices (13 Dec 2022) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

But you can’t have a web app without a web-app-compatible browser, and you can’t get a web-app-compatible browser in Apple’s App Store. The only browsers permitted in the App Store are those based on WebKit, the browser engine behind Safari. This means that every browser on iOS, from Firefox to Edge to Chrome, is just a reskinned version of Safari.

jwz: PSA: Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet

If you’re thinking of signing up to Hive or Post:

If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated browser, or if there is no way to make a new post from a browser, then that program is not a part of the World Wide Web in any meaningful way.

Consign that app to oblivion.

as days pass by — Farmbound, or how I built an app in 2022

Stuart writes up the process up making a mobile game as a web app—not a native app. The Wordle effect reverberates.

It’s a web app. Works for everyone. And I thought it would be useful to explain why it is, why I think that’s the way to do things, and some of the interesting parts of building an app for everyone to play which is delivered over the web rather than via app stores and downloads.