Some thoughts in response to reading both the article and some of the comments…
First, the opening images and dialogue about ads is entertaining. However, I think it is also a distraction from the overall point of the article. Marketing is not unique to apps. As the screenshots show, the web is what has enabled the marketing. If we can assume that marketers will both adapt to the dominant ecosystem and ruthlessly pursue our attention, then it becomes irrelevant as a point of comparison.
Second, it is clear that mobile apps are quite different from web apps. There are good reasons to go native on mobile given current technology constraints. Yes, we humans will misunderstand and abuse those reasons as we have in the past with websites, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t great reasons for both web and mobile specific features/experiences. As a specific example, see Benedict Evans’ four points about why smartphone apps are unique in the context of ‘Whatsapp and $19bn’
- Smartphone apps can access your address book, bypassing the need to rebuild your social graph on a new service
- They can access your photo library, where uploading photos to different websites is a pain
- They can use push notifications instead of relying on emails and on people bothering to check multiple websites
- Crucially, they all get an icon on the home screen.
Third, just as use of the web quickly moved to a single input field (search bar same as url bar) … desktop and mobile phones have done the same. No need to organize your apps … on iOS it’s swipe down (search) and type a few characters. And remember, that’s when we want to open something manually. With appropriate use of notifications its … see, tap, boom. This is a far superior experience to what a web browser currently enables on a mobile device.
Last .. some questions this discussion has me thinking about. Why do we need to pit mobile apps against the web? At the end of the day, if they are both appropriate ecosystems for delivering user-valued products then why can’t they co-exist? How would showing both suggested apps and web destinations (in addition to installed apps) via smartphone search change accessibility/discoverability concerns? If that ubiquitously happened across device platforms … would web tech become preferred approach for app development?