Dave Winer on Apps and the Web

Dave Winer:

I’m talking about the newspaper or magazine that, when you click on a link to go to one of their articles, puts up an interstitial telling you that you could read the article in their app instead. Initially, I installed one or two of these. The other day I installed a big comprehensive one from Google. Flipboard is the original one of these reading environments that is not the web. The NY Times has a slow buggy huge app for reading their news.

I think Winer’s piece yesterday was almost completely misunderstood. There are people taking extreme positions on this: those who believe native apps will replace the web, and on the other side, those who think we’ll eventually use nothing but browser-based web apps. Winer isn’t arguing that.

Some things work best on the web. Some things work best in native apps. And as Brent Simmons writes, they’re getting intermingled in interesting ways. I love native apps, but almost everything I read other than books, I read on the web. I make my living writing for the web. But a lot of what I read on the web I read in web views inside native apps like Tweetbot.

Maybe someday there will be a Daring Fireball app, but I still haven’t thought of a reason to make one that would be better than just reading DF on the web.

★ Wednesday, 14 December 2011