11 years ago to the day, I was at a tech conference. It was 3 year after the iPhone had launched its app SDK. Those of us who had been in the mobile game a while had already spent years developing apps for Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows CE, and at least a dozen other OSes which I’ve since scrubbed from my memory.
But apps were the hip “new” thing, apparently. And there were a lot of people who were passionately invested in the idea the Steve Jobs™️ would save us all.
And, some of us, thought this was bunkum. With this memorable comparison being made:
.@adactio “writing an app is like coding for LaserDisc”@Aral: “that’s not fair!”@adactio: “give it time”
*audience applauds*#update2011— Terence Eden (@edent) September 5, 2011
11 years later, and I think Jeremy Keith (@adactio) was right.
For those of you too young to remember, a LaserDisc was like a CD ROM about the size of a vinyl record1.
The LaserDisc was, I think it is fair to say, not a commercial success. In the 1980s, the BBC built an amazing Doomsday2 Project on LaserDisc. It had a prototype version of Street View. But a few years later, there was no hardware capable of playing the discs.
The same is true of most modern smartphones. If you wrote an app for an early version of iOS or Android, it simply won’t run on modern hardware or software. APIs have changed, SDKs weren’t designed with forward compatibility, and app store requirements have evolved.
The web has none of that. The earliest websites are viewable on modern browsers3. Sure, sometimes they might render in unexpected ways. And you might hope the servers they run on have been updated with security patches. But a website from the 1990s still works three decades later.
An app released a single decade ago is unlikely to run.
Even if the OS had a compatibility mode, it still requires the developer to stay up to date with all the various changes to app store policies. App stores are a gatekeeper.
.@adactio gets it spot on at #update2011 - app stores are for people who want to turn back the clock to a permission base publication model.
— Terence Eden (@edent) September 5, 2011
The web doesn’t have gatekeepers4. If you pay for your domain and hosting, your site will be viewable.
Of course, there are still some things which the web can’t do. And there are some things where users prefer an in-app experience rather than tabbing through a browser.
And, of course, conferences are for big discussions rather than subtle nuance!
Native vs Web debates are good for a laff (a la #update2011), but the real question is when should I use which?
— Algorithms R Us (@mahemoff) September 5, 2011
I don’t have time for militant web devs anymore that I have time for militant native devs. The right tool for the job at hand. #update2011
— 🌈 Michael (he/him) (@maybe_social) September 5, 2011
It’s worth having a look through all the Tweets from the day. I’m sure some people have long since deleted their messages or accounts. But there’s still a treasure-trove of wisdom from when we were all much younger and much more self-confident.
I particularly like this snarky video from Relly Annett-Baker:
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/If-books-were-created-like-most-websites.mp4
Ironically, many of the web links are now dead. But they’ve mostly been captured by the Internet Archive to be enjoyed for many years to come.
I wonder whether apps will become part of a digital dark ages which are lost to the future?