Previously I'd say no for the kind of thing you're talking about, but the implementation that does what you want, Progressive Web Apps, is being killed off.
Is doing it as a PWA that essential? I don't know much about it other than it seems to be a bare-minimum standard of sticking in a manifest file and a few shreds of standardisation. I've thought a little bit more about this since posting and I really can't see anything that I can't do with just a website and a login. A native app seems complete overkill and unnecessarily giving a cut to Apple / Google. In fact, if the "app" is basically just a front end to my web service and users pay by a subscription what cut do they get? If as is likely the service were available in a non-app form website as well and it's a subscription, I wouldn't want to charge people different rates depending on whether they logged in via the app or via the website. But presumably Apple and Google close the loophole of a separate payment subscription model for apps in their store. Or not?
Someone asked Null about that. His response was that basically chance of Apple allowing a KF app was zero so no.
The problem, if you want to develop something that is going to capture people, is that it isn't just a 'what's the best tech' question. It all depends on how you see your product working for users, how you will get adoption, how you will make the initial basic workflows as appealing as possible, and how you intend to generate revenue (if at all).
Revenue is pure paid subscription, not ad funded. At least no plans for the latter.
The reality is that unless you are creating a product for Apple or (if they even exist) Android nerds who read the Human Interface Guidelines and care about them, unless it obviously looks like dogshit, it probably doesn't matter to any user if your UI looks 'native' whether it's in a browser, or loaded as a PWA, or loaded in some kind of hokey framework for making web apps into real APKs or whatever, or whether it's native and coded in Java or ObjC/Swift. But it does matter if it's easy to find and easy to 'install' and easy to not be logged out of and once you've passed all those barriers, whether it's easy and satisfying to use for the purposes people who've found it want to use it for and whether they recommend it to people like them. It matters if- if you have competition- if there's a good reason for people to try and enjoy your product over theirs.
I think there would be a good reason. It's not a market with no competition but it's not something where this is direct overlap like for like (that I have found). But I hear what you're saying. It really is a big factor in people finding my product, huh?
If you have a very specific need that you're addressing and the sort of people who want to address it have similar technical competency to you, you could very easily create a very good solution without thinking about all that gay UI/UX and product stuff. Especially if they're not the kind of people who care about using 'apps' as opposed to bookmarks.
But if you need your product to show up in the Apple app store for it to see mass adoption, then you need to drag your dick through whatever you need to drag it through to put it in there.
Yes. Mass adoption. It'll be hard enough to get off the ground without any additional constraints on adoption. I don't think many people got rich by targeting only the technically highly competent. I guess I just don't think of book-marking a page as requiring that. I barely use apps on my phone. It's mainly browser.
Assuming you are trying to sell something as opposed to just doing a labor of love, and if there's likely to a bigger gap between how you and likely endusers would perceive the product, it would be worth looking around for resources on product management to see how you can take on that role and bridge that perception gap and make sure your development efforts are focused in the right direction (I quite like the Product Talk blog, but there are probably good short courses/books that I'm not thinking of right now). The goal is to center yourself on what the market is that you want to go after and how you absolutely rope them the fuck in and keep them in your product rape cage, while also keeping a focus on how you can expand the audience later on without inadvertently fucking your initial market enough to make them run from you like you're the Toy Box Killer.
But... I don't want to build a rape cage.
I want to make people happy.
I'll look into what you suggest, thanks. Also, congratulations on a user name that almost nobody can @ you with.
massively, unless your service is niche and aimed at competent people.
Well this sucks, basically. There's very little technical reason I need to build this as an app. In fact, I'm not sure there's any. But if the bar for "competent people" is now so low that bookmarking a webpage counts, I have a problem. How did we end up with people being so consumerist and led that if something isn't in an app store it's almost invisible to people. I'm starting to realise for some people they don't even use "the Web", per se. It's all just consoomed via apps. At this rate, the Web of tomorrow is going to end up like the Usenet of today - there, still exists, but largely obscure and ignored by the masses.
If it's for mass use an "app" that's essentially just a hyperlink will boost adoption, if its not on the app store or the top link on google it doesn't exist to 99% of people.
I see. If that's viable that might be my shoe in the door. So long as Google and Apple don't take a cut just for me sticking a hyperlink in their store.
