Mobile Apps are Dead! Long Live Mobile Apps!

I just enjoyed San Diego Startup Week (#SDSW19). It is a growing community fostering innovation and support for startups. One particularly helpful session was by Rich Rudzinski, CEO of Tragic Media. “How Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) Are Changing Startup MVPs, Infrastructure, and More!”

PWAs have been around for a while but only just recently getting traction. Thanks to the magic of JavaScript, you can build amazing mobile apps. You can turn your website into a mobile friendly site which can readily be converted into a mobile app with an icon that sits on your mobile device’s screen just like a native app. In fact, in most cases, users cannot tell the difference between a native app versus a Progressive Web App (PWA). (Of course, this also works for desktop PCs, so you can click a button on your website and drop an icon on your PC desktop as if it too were a native app.)

Finally! No need to develop and maintain native apps that demand expensive expertise and multiple development languages and ongoing Apple Appstore/Google Play/ Microsoft Store flaming-hoops to approve and deploy! You can just develop once and self-deploy across all platforms!

What’s not to like? One coding language! One website that transforms itself into a mobile app regardless of device OS! Write once, deploy everywhere. Bypass the Appstore. Pay nothing to Apple or Google or Microsoft. PWAs leverage the browser, and presumably much of the ongoing maintenance and support, upgrades, and especially the mobile device interoperability headaches get handled by the browsers.

What could go wrong!? Not so fast. There are a few things you need to know before you pop that champagne.

Remember back when “hybrid HTML5 apps” were The Big Thing? I remember first seeing them in a useful way by print media companies who didn’t need a heavy native app to display newsprint (not to mention the ability to bypass the Apple Tax in the Appstore for a subscription service).

Well, we had mixed experiences with those hybrid apps, mostly because they were too slow compared to native apps, but also because there were some key features missing that only a native app could do for accessing some internal functionality on some mobile devices. This was especially true in my niche of streaming OTT media where DRM and 3rd party software libraries had to work.

Sadly, there are also some limitations that PWAs suffer compared to native apps. But it’s not all bad news. PWAs have matured to the point where you seriously need to look at what they can do. There are a growing number of use cases where a PWA is perfectly suited to your needs. According to Mr. Rudzinski (and I believe him), 80% of today’s native apps could be replaced by a PWA.

So where’s the fine print? What are the caveats? Well… for starters, look here: https://www.whatwebcando.today

That gives you a checklist of features that you CAN and CANNOT do in a PWA. Looks like my streaming media OTT apps will remain native a while longer.  :-(

PWA capability is browser/ device dependent. Google and Microsoft have been pulling the PWA bandwagon for years, and they’ve worked out a lot of bugs and kinks and seem to be well on the road to empowering PWAs to become impressive, snappy app platforms that will expand that 80% rule of thumb over the course of time. But Apple isn’t quite as enthusiastic. In fact, it might be accurate to say that Apple isn’t so much “pulling” the PWA bandwagon, nor even riding on it, as much as they are tagging along behind and dragging their feet.

At this moment, Safari will not allow you to “click a button” and drop a PWA app icon onto your desktop. There’s a way to do it, but Apple ain’t quite ready to make it that easy for you yet.

Apple has always been and will likely continue to be like a Parisian driver. In Paris, there are just two important things you need to remember in order to drive a car:

1)   The car on the right has the “right of way”;

2)   A Parisian driver will always do whatever is most convenient for themselves.

Apple will very likely continue to do what is best for Apple, and that doesn’t include opening up all iOS features and functions to PWAs nor shutting down the Appstore.

There are a few consumer education factors in play as well. For the past 10+ years we’ve trained consumers to look for their apps in the Appstore (or Google Play, etc.) and to NEVER download and execute an app from the internet! There are even warning messages that still appear on some devices to scare the end user from installing “internet” apps.

There’s also the Big Question about “security”. Google has always tended to be a bit like a Boyscout – nice, clean, honest, never evil, always googly. Not only does Google NOT think like a Parisian driver, but Google seems to be a bit na?ve about bad guys. 

I love comic book Superheroes. But that’s why the bad guys always seem to have a plausible chance at winning, because their devious little minds are crafty and tricky and always looking for an annoying way to overcome the Superhero’s superpower to gain the upper hand, even if just for a moment. That’s why it’s so fun to keep watching Google fight the bad guys in the bar, while Apple just lounges in the corner coolly smoking a cigarette and sipping their espresso, unfazed by the commotion.

Without a mobile app “store” to scan and verify every app (not that it is foolproof), how do we trust PWAs? Rogue operators could hack a website and insert malware into the PWA, and the website owner would be none the wiser. Undoubtedly, any rise in PWAs will open new opportunities for cybersecurity companies to offer scans, certs, and validation seals to keep us safer. Maybe there’s even a blockchain security twist waiting to ensure PWAs haven’t been tampered with?

I have to muddy this article with a slightly related issue that some of my friends and colleagues might otherwise hit me over the head with. There isn’t a week that goes by when I don’t banter with colleagues who keep telling me that “the future is here already” and that native mobile apps will “soon” be obsolete. They keep telling me that this will especially be true as soon as #5G is fully deployed. Low latency! Infinite capacity! Unimaginable data speeds! Edge computing! Mobile apps will just become lipstick for edge/cloud driven compute power! It’ll be just like the good old days when our VT100 terminal was just a pretty face into the mainframe doing all the heavy lifting. 

So PWAs are moving us towards the good old days of dumb terminals? That has huge implications for future mobile devices. No need for faster mobile CPUs or massive onboard memory, which reduces the power, which shrinks the battery size, which extends the usage. I remember those old PHS handyphones in Japan with standby battery life of 30 days! If a smartwatch or smartphone had a battery life like that I’d be the first to buy it.

Nobody can accurately predict what’s going to happen if and when 5G gets fully deployed and realizes all its promises. I don’t want to be a whiner but I was privy to a small-cell field trial in Tokyo trying to alleviate the problem of in-building 4G coverage in a town where Godzilla regularly gets lost and hidden in a sea of skyscrapers. That field trial produced mixed results. Works great if you can just deploy a tiny box in every room and tune directional antennas to cover nooks and crannies on every floor, but who has time and effort for that? 5G isn’t going to get any better, and at some of the new frequencies, it will only get worse. 

I keep waiting for somebody to invent 5G base stations that replace commercial building windows – where the window is a solar panel that you can still see through like sunglasses and the window frame is the antenna and base station, and you just swap out some skyscraper windows to get coverage. They’d have to be “fully wireless”, with wireless backhaul too.

If you’re waiting for Elon Musk to deploy his ubiquitous fleet of low-earth-orbit satellites that will empower the backbone of 5G no matter if you’re sitting in an office on Wall Street or on a desert island in the Pacific, ya gotta wait a while longer. But I’m still skeptical about LOEs replacing fiber.

To quote Bob Dylan, “the times they are a changin’”. In my career, I witnessed embedded assembly code and clean, tight algorithm skills and compiler optimizations give way to sloppy, inefficient object-oriented code because CPUs and memory got faster and cheaper. If PWAs increase in capability, then native apps will die off. There will be impacts on mobile app development tools and developer skillsets and especially shared revenue for the owners of some app stores, while new opportunities for cybersecurity and PWA trust will rise. And if 5G delivers on its hype, then someday we might even see PWAs shrink into dumb shells that leverage edge compute power. That would be a seismic, climactic shift in many ecosystems. The times they are a changin’.

#richrudzinski

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/why-your-startup-should-consider-building-progressive-rich-rudzinski/

https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/rich-rudzinski-4672446/

https://tragic.media

#STARTUPSD

https://startupsd.org/about-us/

San Diego Startup Incubators

https://www.ucsdbasement.com

https://ziplaunchpad.sdsu.edu/about

https://sandiego.edu/SDAC

https://sandiego.edu/sbdc

https://cybertechnetwork.org

https://evonexus.org

https://heralabs.com

https://incubator.thinktanksd.org

https://nex3.com

https://thesandbox.ai

https://procopio.com/launchpad

https://qualcommventures.com

#ios #android #mobile #5G #4G #pwa #apple #google #microsoft #blockchain