We are at a crossroads. A battle is going on around us: mobile web troops are fighting the native apps army. The apps are well equipped with hardware resources and native interfaces. The mobile web is throwing in responsive design to the defenses.
Who is winning? Are we going to manage our lives from the web browser or will there be an app for everything, literally?
As a web developer, I grew up with HTML, web standards and open source. For many years, my goal with any project had been to provide the best experience for the user no matter the device, browser, or connection speed. The web should adapt itself to the users’ capabilities and help them execute their tasks. I was thrilled when adaptive, and later responsive web gained popularity – my dreams were coming true. And I was annoyed with all these mobile app developers who didn’t understand how hard it was for us web veterans to get to where we are today, where you can write code once and all browsers will understand it.
Are we going back to having to create a separate app for every OS? Multiply the development time, create a maintenance nightmare?
But then I stopped and forced myself to look beyond my hurt feelings. The users really loved those apps. They were slightly faster and slightly more responsive. All the buttons and other UI elements were familiar to them – moreover, they liked them since they obviously liked the look and feel of their mobile OS, or they wouldn’t have picked it in the first place.
There was one major problem with the apps, though. You literally need an app for every little task that you want to do and for every device that you own. I switched my RSS reader recently, and I had to install their app on all of my devices. And I was lucky that they had an app for all of my devices. What if they didn’t? Would I need to type the URL to that app on the tiny screen on my phone? What if I don’t remember the URL? What if I don’t remember my login credentials? What if I do, but that particular website is not mobile-friendly? This is getting frustrating.
Once again, lets stop and look beyond all of this. Apps and websites. None of them will win, because they both have major flaws. Responsive design is not the answer. Anyone who has built a responsive website knows how hard it is to create one solution that will work on all browsers, screen sizes, resolutions, connection speeds etc. And the device explosion that we’ve seen is not going to stop.
Back in the old days, we only had to care about a computer with a monitor. Yes, we had a couple of incompatible browsers to worry about, and those screen resolutions could go from 800 to whole 1024 pixels. Now, we have screens going from 320 to over 4000 pixels. How are you supposed to design an interface that can handle that well?
But those are screens – flat surfaces that the user can pick up and look at. What if you are wearing the screen? Glasses, a watch, contact lenses? What if there is no screen? You may communicate by talking to the system. An implant in your brain will project all the visuals for you – your brain is the only device you will need. Ok, that’s not going to happen for a while (or is it?), but still, you get the point.
Speaking of pointing, we have many ways to provide user input compared to the traditional mouse. Fingers, our whole body (Kinect), voice.
The task of designing and building one interface that will handle all of these scenarios is impossible. The task of designing, building and maintaining a separate app for each of these scenarios is equally impossible.
So what are we left to do? With all these different ways of user interaction, there is no doubt that we need to address each of the scenarios individually. There is no way that we can have one interface that can work well on both Google glass and a huge 4K TV screen.
We need to fine-tune the experience for each of the devices, to be able to fully use the device’s strengths. For glasses, it’s really important to provide timely information without being in the way. A huge TV screen has lots of screen real estate but cannot be taken on a road trip, so the spacial position of the device is not that important.
We need to address all of these situations individually, with lots of dedicated development.
But we can’t do that over and over for every single little app.
Instead, each device can have “super apps” that will handle multiple tasks. They will be hand-crafted for their device and take advantage of all the device’s capabilities. They will be able to do lots of things by default, but also adapt to the user’s needs and learn new tasks.
The user will be able to build their own apps customized to their needs, and change their visual appearance. Super apps will communicate with the rest of the world to perform these tasks.
I will be able to read emails, subscribe to my RSS feeds, watch videos and connect with my friends from the same super app.
No more signing up for the never-ending flow of social networks and entering all your information and finding all of your friends, again and again.
My super app will talk to your super app. My video player will show me videos from YouTube and Netflix. My mom won’t have to install Skype to video chat with me. I won’t have to enter my credit card information over and over, and trust with this sensitive information to every little website out there. I won’t even need to sign up for Google Wallet to send lunch money to my kids’ school.
We already see many of these things happening, and it’s just the beginning.
We live in very exciting times. The web is dead (in its current form), long live the web!