Thread by @intelligibabble

So the way I see it, there are three aspects to this problem.



1) Investment

2) Technology

3) Culture

Gonna need more than 280 characters for this one…

A thread:

https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1071469254837334016

1). Investment:
Companies are pushing everyone towards their native apps. The web is littered with “open this in my app” banners that destroy whatever semblance of a good experience could have been on the web site anyway, making the average mobile-web experience *terrible*.

It’s an implied statement of “we don’t believe the web is good enough for mobile, so we don’t even try”. This behavior perpetuates the culture and is a self-fulfilling prophecy: If we put banner ads to leave the web all over, then it *is* worse than a native mobile experience.

It’s not just app install ads though. Most web sites have way more annoying ads than their native app equivalents. Why?!

And because everyone is stuck on the “responsive design” train, we just “squish” all those ads down into the small viewport of a mobile device so that the mobile web experience is *even worse* than the desktop web experience.

There’s some nuance around how we got into this state… there’s real business advantages to having someone installing an app (semi-permeant) rather than browsing a web site (ephemeral).

But now the expectations of the web are so poor that if someone really tries to invest in a Good Mobile Web App, they will be let down because users aren’t giving them a chance anymore. They want a native app, and the numbers are showing it.

2). Technology:
It’s amazing that anyone really builds anything at all on top of DOM / JS. It wasn’t built for applications, but that’s really what people are wanting to build these days.

You can say (and many do) “but this web site should just be a document. It doesn’t need so much JS!”. I’m sorry but so can most native mobile apps. But that doesn’t stop people from making them feel 10x better than their web equivalents by making them more then Just A Document.

Service worker and related standards make some real progress here, but it’s not enough, and companies don’t seem to be investing in it.

I wish more focus from a web standards perspective was spent thinking about how to turn it into a *good* app platform instead of letting it continue to accidentally be a crappy one.

Where are our virtualized list views built into the platform? Where are our robust stack-based animation-based navigation APIs? Where are decent gesture-handling APIs?

Finally, the fact that the web has to download, parse, execute the code for an entire app on every page reload is a huge limiting factor. We haven’t really done much to mitigate this.

I still think we should have signed JS script tags and content-addressable modules in such a way that browsers aggressively cache the generated byte code from scripts in such a way that it would actually make sense for large apps to not bundle their whole app into a single file.

This is a hard problem, but I’m not aware of much being done to fight this limitation on the web at all. Hopefully WASM won’t make the same mistakes.

3). Culture:
This is the biggest one IMO. Real talk time. There is a significant culture difference between web developers and native mobile app developers. Put plainly, the minimum “bar” for UX is much, much higher for native apps.

Most “beautiful” web sites have some UX problems on mobile (ones we have the tech to fix) that simply wouldn’t fly for a middle-of-the-road native app. The expectations are set differently. This is a systemic issue and I’m not trying to point any fingers. It’s just different.

It almost feels to me like a type of Stockholm syndrome. We seem to not realize just how much worse the mobile web experience is than the current status quo on Native.

I’m not sure what the fix here is, but having a few notable exceptions in the wild, especially from some vocal engineers that talk about the importance of it would be a great start.

And that concludes my rant. I hope it didn't sound overly negative. I deeply care about the web platform, and consider myself a web developer at my core. I love the community and hope (and believe) some of these things can be turned around.