Comments on: Native applications are doomed

By: Tomas Simpelo

Tomas Simpelo — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 15:05:05 +0000

I’ve bookmarked your web blog.

By: Steren

Steren — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:28:30 +0000

Hi,
Today it’s almost impossible to have the same code run on all desktop and mobile OS. My stance is that web browsers are technically less diversificated than OS. Of course, websites may not look exactly the same on every browsers. (I talk about modern browsers)

I’m also looking forward to test ChromeOS.

By: Steren

Steren — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:15:53 +0000

Hi, thanks for your comment.

I’m aware of this problem since I come from the countryside and really didn’t enjoyed a reliable internet connection before.

I tried to mention that web applications can run offline or on slow/unstable connections with the power of local data stores and client-side running code.
For your example, I bet that if you were using Gears (which is an implementation of the HTML5 “offline mode” specification) your Gmail would be faster. A part of your online data is downloaded and edited locally, then synchronized when possible with the cloud.

We could also imagine an application build around (new) web standards that runs without any Internet connection (an word processor for example).

By: Hugh

Hugh — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:26:26 +0000

“It’s coming faster that I would have imagined.”

Well… While I agree that for many applications online software will become more and more mainstream, it will take quite some time before everything is transfered to the web.

Why ? Well I see several reasons :

1 – data transfert speed. Today even having to transfer a few dozens of megabytes over the internet is a pain. The speed might be 100 times higher than ten years ago, but we would need another tenfoldsincrease to make this even remotly similar to working locally (maybe in 10 years ?) . Consider HD video editing : unthinkable.

2 – connection : quality and network size. I live in the center of one of the largest french towns (and France is supposed to have a reasonable internet network), and sometime Internet just get’s really sluggish. It simply isn’t as reliable as a local computer. I recently reinstalled thunderbird because gmail somtime get’s unusable. That’s me in a large city. My parents live in a little towns that got ADSL 5 years ago, and they were recently able to upgrade from a 512k connection to 2M, which is still ten times less than I can get. If local application are to be dropped, then 100% of the population needs access to a high speed network.

Things will improve, of course, but when I see how much time it took for the smaller towns to have (fairly) high speed ADSL, and all the problems I have with simple web applications like youtube or gmail, I really think the time when native applications will disappear is not that close.

By: Guillaume

Guillaume — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:26:14 +0000

Great post Steren!
I guess the diversification of OS isn’t as bad as the diversification of web browsers (espacially with Internet “Pain in the Ass” Explorer).
But google is pushing really hard towards this direction. I can’t wait to see Chrome OS to see how far web apps can go.

By: Steven Copley

Steven Copley — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:22:13 +0000

I heard of a company proudly stating that they had their DOS application recently rewritten in Windows.

After reading this article they would realise their Windows application is already falling behind the times.

By: Jon Phillips

Jon Phillips — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 07:05:32 +0000

Exactly!