I'm thinking mobile apps are a thing of the past. But writing a book is a hell of a job. I did it once, it was hard, as hell and the everybody pirated it.
> I'm thinking mobile apps are a thing of the past.
Do you think this is the future or actually happening right now? Because as an iOS developer I've seen zero reduction in work since close to a decade. What I have not seen, is people favoring web apps.
I mean I could be totally wrong but, it is my perspective at least.
I’ll share my perspective from working in big tech. Mobile apps aren’t the sexy tech they once were (like in 2012). We do have mobile apps critical to the customer experience. Even the same app may have some components or features built natively, using some framework (React Native), or html rendering. And these apps are supported by dozens or more teams across organizations.
Delivering this at scale is hard. And big tech likes to launch things quickly, and so you might see something that’s an obvious thing to fix… but it turns out that changing that one thing will break several other things. There’s no single holistic architecture even within one distribution of the app.
It doesn’t really matter if they’re a thing of the past. Mobile apps aren’t as novel anywhere - your customers expect a mobile app. That actually raises the stakes because making the wrong architectural decisions is going to be very costly in the future as your business has to scale or might even straight up prevent your business from becoming successful in the first place.
> I'm thinking mobile apps are a thing of the past.
They _should_ be mostly. Apart from push notifications and 3D rendered games and cutting edge apps using phone tech that isn't available in html - very few apps in use today couldn't be published as a PWA.
"App Store discoverability" its totally a thing people want though. You can't publish/find PWAs in Apple's App Store.
>But writing a book is a hell of a job. I did it once, it was hard, as hell and the everybody pirated it.
You probably know this, but don't get _too_ disheartened by that. Very few of the sort of people who happily pirate books would have paid for them anyway. Same as how the movie/music industries claims of billions of dollars lost to piracy are just self serving hyperbole bullshit.
I find at least as big a driver from our clients is that until webapps case be searched/discovered/"installed" from the AppStore, businesses still want mobile apps.
I've also heard war stories of people who built PWAs for Android and published them in Play Store, then wrapped them with Cordova to make a "native" iOS app, only to have it rejected from App Store because the reviewer found the PWA/website and used the "apps must be 'beyond a repackaged website'". :sigh:
