Well I don't really understand why everyone jumped on the 'app bandwagon' and spent millions if not billions of dollars developing said apps.
If I could have a regular mobile reading experience using my browser, pray tell why I would want to switch to your awesome app (TM) ? I detest "download our app" popups with a passion. The worst part is that most of these 'apps' just have the same experience packaged into them but are located under yet another icon on my iPhone/iPad. It just doesn't make any sense.
The only other place that I read besides the browser is Pocket.
With responsive design and HTML5 (Geolocation, Canvas, etc.) there really isn't that much more that an app can do - that a browser cannot.
Also, asking to me repeatedly download your app (tripadvisor, you're guilty!) is probably going to alienate me even more from it.
A good example of an app doing less than the website: Until recently I couldn't use the hotels.com app to score/redeem welcome rewards. Yet, when I would go to the site I would either be:
My suspicion is that apps provide for an enhanced-user experience ... for the app vendor. That is, they enhance the user-data available for demographic and marketing targeting.
I'd also like to second the point regard the advertising of apps. Advertising your own app to me in a pop-up is pretty much the death-knell for my usage of any site.
File upload is only now coming to iOS6, and wasn't in Android for a long time. It used to be in Windows Mobile, and was apparently pulled last year, IIRC.
Offline access - being able to function properly when no network is around is important for a lot of functionality required by applications. Some of this could be done with browser-side caching, but probably at a performance cost (at the very minimum).
When you load up Gmail on a mobile device it does some pretty aggressive browser side caching. Works really well! But file upload is definitely an important reason to have apps. However, the article is talking about reading the news and those don't have much to do with file upload..
When the original iPhone launched, the mobile browser wasn't anything like as good as it is now, and it regularly blanked pages when you switched to other apps. Even just offline support was a huge thing to have, and you could only get it in an app.
If I could have a regular mobile reading experience using my browser, pray tell why I would want to switch to your awesome app (TM) ? I detest "download our app" popups with a passion. The worst part is that most of these 'apps' just have the same experience packaged into them but are located under yet another icon on my iPhone/iPad. It just doesn't make any sense.
The only other place that I read besides the browser is Pocket.
With responsive design and HTML5 (Geolocation, Canvas, etc.) there really isn't that much more that an app can do - that a browser cannot.
Also, asking to me repeatedly download your app (tripadvisor, you're guilty!) is probably going to alienate me even more from it.
A good example of an app doing less than the website: Until recently I couldn't use the hotels.com app to score/redeem welcome rewards. Yet, when I would go to the site I would either be:
a) Limited to the mobile site
b) Treated to a heinous app download popup.
Way to go!