Is the web dying? The state of affairs in 2016

[prof_hobart]

For me, mobile web and native app are largely solving two different use cases.

If it's one of the handful of places that I use regularly, and want frequent quick access to, it's probably going to be an app. I use apps for my main news sites, for my bus timetable, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon etc.

If it's an occasional visit it's going to be the web. I'm not going to be downloading dedicated apps just to browse a forum that I've been to a couple of times ever, if I'm just trying to check prices across a whole bunch of shops or if I'm trying to get the opening time of a restaurant.

There are a few that fall into the middle ground of visiting every now and then. But for the vast majority of the time there's a pretty clear web/app split, at least for me.

[berns]

That's why progressive web apps are so interesting. It's only after you visit a site a couple of times that the banner to add to home screen appears. And you don't have to download a whole app, just the app shell. If you visit a site sporadically, you are not bothered by the constant updates that you suffer with native apps.

[simbalion]

The #1 reason that mobile apps are better than web apps for specific tasks like you describe is that mobile browsers are mostly junk and the phones are not powerful enough to run them. Cellular connections also provide an unreliable and inconsistent experience on the mobile browser.

As the technology improves this will change. The exact same relationship existed on desktop computers at one time.

[kevin_thibedeau]

The internet is dying. It is becoming ever harder to do anything outside of port 80.

[dingaling]

I have literally just encountered this using free hospital WiFi. Ports 80 and 443 open but ssh, SMTP and IMAP are all silently dropped.

Workaround is to tunnel those over 80 which in turn reinforces the dominance of web ports.

[chasing]

"Is the web dying?"

First chart:

"Desktop" (which I assume means "desktop browsers"): Up 15%, 2013-2015.

"Mobile Browser": Up 53%, 2013-2015.

So: No?

[artifaxx]

Perception is interesting, in this case some people perceive technology relativistically. If the technology isn't growing faster than its competition then it is dying. The author is a web developer after all.

[johansch]

Mobile apps: +90%

[dasil003]

I don't see much competition between apps and the web, they have very different use cases and evolution characteristics. The web will never be able to compete with an app SDK for performance, OS integration, and ease of development. But on the other hand, no app SDK will ever be able to target all platforms the way the web can as a defacto standard which all vendors must implement to be considered a general purpose computing device.

I see the web as a sort of unstoppable blob of a standard which moves forward slowly, but is constantly growing in use cases. No vendor or even a consortium has the power to supplant it. The only thing that would kill the web is something which makes it irrelevant, but apps will not be that thing, it will be some other force or trend which we aren't really seeing yet.

[bobajeff]

I think it can get close to competing with a native SDK in performance. With WebGL2, SIMD.js, JavaScript shared memory threads and WebAssembly it could get close enough that few will care about the difference.

I think ease of development really depends on the developer and tools.

I can't speak for OS integration as it has never interested me to a great extent as a user. I'm sure some users care but I don't.

[IshKebab]

Mobile websites were never very good. Websites either don't have one, or they have a cut down one that doesn't let you see the full site (e.g. the HSBC mobile site only lets you check balances - wtf?). Combine that with huge cookie warnings and ads that take up most of the screen and you end up with a pretty bad experience.

[phee]

Add slow loading... not really bad by itself but terrible when the partially loaded pages constantly move and rearrange as new elements are ready.

[PaulHoule]

I hear this message a lot from the press but I don't believe it.

Have you actually used a mobile app? I agree mobile apps let you use the gyroscope and things like that, but for reading content, at least on a tablet, the ordering is

real web site >> mobile web site >> app

For instance I went to the imgur site, it told me to download the app, then i could not find the content I was looking at on the site.

[christogreeff]

Consuming content from the same site, on different devices is flawed. When I know a site, and go to mobile site the experience differs so much sometimes, that it might as well be a different site. In my perception, the reason is that someone else decides what is important to me, on the smaller format.

[ProxCoques]

I don't know if it's just me having a bad day, but I can hardly concentrate on what this guy is saying due to his over-use of commas.

Anyone else, find these commas, distracting and, weird?

[kazinator]

Those are run-on sentences of the "comma splice" variety. This could be a non-native English writer, coming from a language in whose written conventions (orthography), independent clauses can be correctly joined by a comma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_splice

[hartator]

I've gave up for different reason, I felt everything was copy/pasted in a hurry.

[christogreeff]

Is it just me who finds the big blocks of links, throughout the article, quite distracting?

[nailer]

Not just you. Most articles would just have a link that refers to 'Apple's announcement of the iPad Pro' rather than an excerpt and a thumbnail of an iPad pro. Medium normally has a pleasant reading experience, this wasn't.

[runewell]

It depends what you consider "the web" to be at this point. If you consider domain names, web server software, and data formats / protocols created for the web to be part of "the web" then I would argue that nearly all of the mobile apps use "the web" in some capacity. If you're referring to only browser-accessible web properties then I would say it's increasing at an incredible pace, just not as incredible a pace as mobile. Mobile is king right now but it's hard to predict the future, perhaps Augmented Reality takes over, or perhaps mobile is the first to enter emerging markets but as the cost and size of computers decrease we may see an eventual surge in desktop machines with web browser access. I look at the web as the "safe zone" or default last-resort method of accessing the Internet. I don't think it will go away anytime soon until we have a superior alternative that provides the convenience, efficiency, and level of open access to information that we see today.

[pjdorrell]

One group of people will always want to access the open web on a large screen via a web browser running on a general purpose computer: software developers.

If the web "dies", then the non-web will also die, or at least it won't be very healthy, because the developers won't have the infrastructure they need to efficiently develop the required non-web software.

[simbalion]

Apps are a fad. Mobile devices are heavy and people will get sick of their novelty, as people do with all new toys after awhile. Many of us probably understand this as we were using mobile devices long before the iphone existed.

In contrast, "the web" or something like it, will exist forever.

[kazinator]

> these days native apps seem to consistently provide better experiences than their web counterparts, with better performance, smoother animations, and fully integrated with the device OS.

These days? When have native apps not had these properties?

[sotojuan]

Mobile web can be just as good as apps for a lot of (not all) use cases but only if people put enough effort into them like say, Google does with their PWA initiative. Anything less than that and apps win.

[rimantas]

Mobile web can be as good (or better) in just one case—reading the content.

[anotheryou]

Worth mentioning is, that so far we remain free to build alternative niches (even though they will have a hard time to become mainstream). Net neutrality remains especially important for that.

[nailer]

As of a month ago, we (as in the web) have finally got window.payment on the way (or whatever Apple and Google's different payment APIs are actually implemented as). I'm happy.

[greenspot]

It's not dying but it's a saturated market where almost every problem has been solved in the past 20 years.

[franze]

No.

[T-A]

TLDR: Total time spent on desktop web was up 16% from June 2013 to June 2015; on mobile web it was up 53%. So, no.

[sktrdie]

Native apps and Web apps are essentially the same thing. They're both running inside a sandbox environment (be it the OS or the browser). The real difference is that the Web sandbox is more constrained. Other than that (and yes I'm looking at you people who think URIs are the coming of jesus), there's really no difference between the two.

Inevitably the platform which has less constraints will win.

[philippnagel]

There is another difference. Imagine a world where websites have to be approved by the browser vendor in order to be loadable. That's a constraint of native apps.

[PaulHoule]

One person's "constraint" is another person's freedom. That is, having to make a separate app for Android and for iOS, not to mind having to deal with whatever BS the app store puts you with, etc...