The funniest thing is that this trickles down to small SAAS companies, all of whom think they need two native apps. Talking to them about it is illuminating. Their app doesn't need to:
- use bluetooth, accelerometer data, or anything else not exposed to a browser
- spy on their user closely to generate valuable data (your app is the product, not the user)
- be discovered in the apple or google app stores. Relatively expensive, niche, high touch, business to business apps are not impulse buys for bored managing directors.
And their dev team is usually already over burdened just dealing with the web stuff.
But still they pour money into the two native apps bucket. Before they're even profitable...
I wonder how much this "IT LOOKS BETTER IN THE APP" propaganda is affecting their business sense. Twitter and Facebooks business model is a bit different from B2B SAAS SME.
When you need to do anything actually useful in these apps they typically send you to a browser anyway. Or worse, you have to do so yourself because you discover something isn't fully implemented in the app part way through using it.
Recently a coworker was struggling to change some personal details online and got stuck in a loop of no access due to multi-factor authentication. The phone helpdesk kept directing them back to the site to get stuck again. The solution? In this case the app's lack of support was a blessing. Personal details could be easily changed there because the app hadn't implemented multi-factor authentication.
As someone who works with mobile apps that use Bluetooth, I would be very happy to just write one app in the browser if that was available. However we are not there yet, so two native apps it is.
As a mobile dev, it's sometimes frustrating finding interesting work and BLE seems to be one area where businesses are willing to do something useful outside of duplicating simple REST calls and occasional multimedia uploads so the app can be at parity with the limitations of a website. Most product people are limited in their thinking of what's even possible because of their narrow usage of the capabilities.
Our phones are packed with sensors, and are more powerful than the computers that landed us on the moon. Apps can be so much more than dumb pipes for simple data upload and download from a server.
- use bluetooth, accelerometer data, or anything else not exposed to a browser
- spy on their user closely to generate valuable data (your app is the product, not the user)
- be discovered in the apple or google app stores. Relatively expensive, niche, high touch, business to business apps are not impulse buys for bored managing directors.
And their dev team is usually already over burdened just dealing with the web stuff.
But still they pour money into the two native apps bucket. Before they're even profitable...
I wonder how much this "IT LOOKS BETTER IN THE APP" propaganda is affecting their business sense. Twitter and Facebooks business model is a bit different from B2B SAAS SME.