Are Web Apps the answer to App Store problems?

Transcription

 What’s up everybody. Welcome to another episode of the UIBuzz podcast. I’m your host, Peter Witham. You can find myself in this podcast at Peter Witham dot com. And this episode, I want to talk about web apps. And WebEx as a solution to what’s becoming more of a problem again, and that is the ever-changing rules and restrictions. And other problems that come with that of using app stores and putting your amps in there, or trying to get them in there and be compliant. Now of course, if you work in the apple platforms, You will be familiar.

I hope with the EU. Yes, I am still changes that are coming into play and all the complications. That potentially. Create for you. If you’re not, I’ve got an episode of the compulsive podcast. That’ll help you there. I’ll put a link in the show notes. But it got me thinking this week about. Opening up all the options again.

I’m a mobile developer, that’s my profession. But I’m realizing that I am left with basically no choice, except to start evaluating again, the viability of creating web apps. And using those for these platforms for my users. Now, I don’t mean, in the day job, which. I’m where I’m responsible to a company that I work for. But my apps and especially my personal apps as well. The problems with that stores. I’m only going to get more complicated and I’m not saying we should abandon them and I’m not saying the app stores are wrong.

All I’m saying is, if you are native to a platform and you put an app in an app store, You’ll be holding to that app store to have your work in the world and potentially generate revenue. And users for you. And maybe you’ll find with that, but what if one day it bites you and you got an app that you just cannot get through app store review. Or it ends up costing you a fortune. Things like that.

We have to start thinking about these things again, because it’s coming around. Now, again, these recent changes, I’m not going to go into the details here. But they’re not likely to affect everybody, but they may one day, if if your dream of being successful happens and you get a viral app, you got a problem on your hands, right? Whether you charge for it or give it away for free is what I’m getting at here.

Now. WebApps has always been an alternative solution for this. It is in fact for those of you who don’t know how everything started out. All right. For example, when the original iPhone came out, people would build web apps and you would access them in the browser because there was no such thing as an app store that you could put your apps in. So it’s going full circle here in many ways. But I think it’s was. Discussing this and thinking about it as an alternative option. Because you’d like to say, you may have to go that way now for me, the advantage is here. Complete. Cross-platform compatibility right.

At that point, it doesn’t matter to me what device you’re using. Desktop laptop, phone, whatever, but it doesn’t matter. The app is there on the web and universally, reachable, hopefully and usable. And I’ve only got to write the code once, and again, this is not a thing about cross-platform technologies as such. As much as it is cross-platform solution. Right.

An app. But it’s not that simple because. Even if you do that. And you’re very good at doing that. And there are some fantastic. Whereby apps and services out there. I use a lot of them. In fact, I would say I’m using more of those now. Than I am perhaps native install labs in many ways, because it’s just working out for me that way.

And I don’t have to install anything. I can get to it on my Linux box, my windows box, my iPad, my Mac, you name it, my phone and it just works great for me and probably for many others as a user. But the problem is you don’t have. The power of that icon on a home screen of a device and therein lies the problem because for users, that’s what you’ve got to have.

That’s what you need. They are used to this simple world. Of one click install, one click to open your app. And there it is always on the home screen. And the problem with that is it’s not that simple with web apps, right? There’s been many attempts at different solutions and I’ve yet to find one that just seems like end-users of any skill level or technical understanding could use it.

And that’s a problem. If we can solve that problem, then we’re a long way on to making web apps. Very usable on home screens and probably more installs. Now, I’m greatly simplifying the problem there, so don’t flame me, but I think if you have a done this, you’ll understand what I’m talking about.

It’s just not a simple process to get users to do it. Now. That is hopefully something that will get better is what I’m hoping for here, because I think the WebEx. I’m going to play a massive part in this going forward. I’m noticing for example.

The apple vision pro a lot of people are saying that the Bowman. They’re just, using the word browser and access and things in there. Wall apps get themselves up to speed, but also the web browser is being the most popular app right now. On that device. And it makes me wonder about other headsets that I’ve not paid attention to, and whether that’s the same deal. Now, this all comes down to. An attractive platform to build your apps on, forget the technology.

It’s just a good platform. Now talking about the technologies. I’m a little out of touch on this, so you’ll have to forgive me. I’m, I’ve not kept up on this as much as I should have maybe because I’ve, I live every day in native platform world. And, means that my skills are not as good as they used to be.

My knowledge is not as varied as it used to be, but I want to get back into this. And when I was doing it before, and even today I’m using react native for some things, but it was react. And I don’t know that’s the story today. You all know that I absolutely love using Astro for my Compile Swift website and it’s working great.

And I absolutely love that, but I haven’t know that it’s any good as a web app. So, if any of you have any ideas out there or suggestions as to what I should look at, As a way to build web apps these days. Going forward. Reach out to me, Peter Witham dot com forward slash contact or at UI bars on ax.

And let me know, because I’d like to look more into these platforms and bring my skills back up to speed. And I would love some community help there to help me do that because. I want to get back into this and understand it as an alternative option. Should I need it? And she’s so that I can also give better advice to folks if they come to me and ask me.

That’s where it’s at in this episode. Let me know what you think are your thoughts on this. I’d love for you to come on the show and talk about it. If you are interested. You’re more than welcome to again, go to PeterWitham.com/contact. Link in the show notes. And come on and talk about this.

I think this is something we have to. Bring to folks’ attention who may not have entertained this option before. And I think it’s, like I say, it’s going to become more relevant going forward as these app stores. Get more and more complicated when it comes to rules and how much you have to pay and sharing the earnings and everything else.

So that’s it folks. That’s what I got for you in this one. Let me know what you think with that. I will speak to you in the next episode.