Thie assertion is extremely funny to me. Historically we come from an "app culture". Back in the day, around 2000 or so, if you wanted some functionality, you ran an application. You ran software in your computer.
Then on the early 2000s people started migrating their software web" , inventing "SaaS" (software as a service" .
I remember my young self being strongly opposed to that, because I saw little sense in constraining what you could do with a scripting language, when you could easily get the "networking" capabilities adding tcp/ip to your software .
But the web and Javascript won, mostly due to control (there was advertising in software since the 90s, for example Opera or GetRight had ad banners) .
The feature and mobile phones came and people started to migrate to "apps" again. So we came full circle.
Native apps would be the better platform in my eyes if the Operating Systems would be better in terms of letting a user manage what a native app have access to and can do.
But currently they are preferred by companies despite more dev effort because they can get more user data without the user having easy ways to prevent that. And of course showing ads without the user being easily able to block them
In the 2010s the model inverted: now you need to keep an entire browser open to use google chat, and people try to get you to install an app to read a web page.
In corporate IT, for instance, you have to roll out new versions of software all the time. There are better solutions for managing desktop fleets than there were back then, but with a web app you just update the server and... you're done!
Possibly not even that: just a dumb terminal sending keystrokes & displaying text returned by the server.
Setups like this have been around almost as long as computers exist.
I recall that these replaced library catalogs in the form of drawers full of cards. Each card representing a book located elsewhere in the library (or available upon request from a central location). Man I'm old...
Apple did that because they want their sweet 30% from in-app purchases, which they couldn't enforce in PWAs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_app
[2] https://infrequently.org/2015/06/progressive-apps-escaping-t...
[3] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fg%2F11bzxympx6...
https://web.archive.org/web/20071012231544/http://www.apple....
https://web.archive.org/web/20071012025941/http://www.apple....
The only reasons I'll use an app over a website is if I have no choice in the matter, or if the app provides an easier UI/UX than the website.
I am not sure about the history, but a lot of it now is about tracking, and perceived security. Its far harder for users to manage things like location tracking in apps than in browsers.
i don't want to pay for servers just to have an app.
and updating apps is slow, for flutter you need to pay for shorebird.
In react native land, not sure but there are paid stuff like expo? you can self host but usually you end up payign for some OTA provider?
IMO the reason we got to this place is twofold:
- apps give companies a spot on your Home Screen and allow you to develop a habit of opening it. I suspect Apple are very aware of this, which is why they continue to make it very difficult to install a web app to your home screen.
- notifications. Which, again, draw a returning audience
- well-designed apps retain enough state to be useful offline or in places with spotty coverage; PWAs can kinda be made to work like this but IIRC iOS will happily evict them under disk pressure;
- notifications. I've read that Apple have implemented them for home screen installed web apps but for reasons unknown I have not seen this in action even once.
Web traffic is so diluted and low signal.
Apps like YouTube are an exception, but there are other ways around that on Android.