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I don't expect you to cater to a minority market, but whoever writes apps that run significantly better than "generic" ones using html or other frameworks (dear electron-based developers: your apps are garbage) will get my money.

Niches have a lot of money in them, to the point that entire industries blossom just to cater to them. Things like high-end personal audio and performance automobiles are both multi-billion industries.

i doubt it, because you are not going to find my app. you are going to want the same apps that everyone else uses, and the fact that there are a few apps out there that actually run well on your phone is not going to make a serious dent in my profits.

i have yet to hear about any apps that became popular because they performed better than others. in the whole market, that's just a blip.

things like high-end personal audio and performance automobiles are a high-end market market. you are asking me to create a high-performance app for a low-end market. the dynamics here are entirely different. and the profit margin is too.

well preforming apps for underpowered phones is a minority market.

i wouldn't even know how to promote my app to you.

my app is significantly faster than the competitors, and it even runs well on your cheap semi-smart phone

but does it have feature X?

sorry no, because that would make it slow

how much does it cost?

$20

uh, why did you think i bought a cheap phone?

apps for this market will not be sold on performance, but on solving problems that are specific to this particular group of people.

Your argument was that you'd always want to develop universal apps in order to cater to everyone, not niches. Now you're talking about catering to low end garbage phones specifically. I don't doubt that catering to as large as possible an audience works for the low end of the market spectrum but I was arguing against the concept of ignoring niches, particularly high-end ones.

I want fast and feature X and I've no problem with $20 if it's better than the free one.

We were talking about different markets :)

huh, i think we are missing each other somewhere. i am talking about not catering to low end phones. i thought you were talking about better performing apps for low end phones. this whole article is about low end phones. why else would you need high performing apps? (i mean i can imagine why you would, but that is an entirely different topics, so please forgive me that i would miss that.)

in summary my argument is that:

- writing native apps to gain a bit of performance for a minority of users is not worth the added cost of development

- performance is not a selection criteria for most users

- low end phone users are unlikely to spend money on expensive apps

- catering to low end phones only makes sense for apps that are useful to that market. those apps have to be cheap, and that's yet another reason not to make them native.

and i was responding to a comment how it doesn't make sense to use web technology on low end phones.

my counter argument: it does not (no longer) make sense to write native apps. period.

you then responded that you would pay for better performing apps, but that puts you into a different niche demographic than the entire topic of the article.

now one point of the article is that the demographics will change and that there is going to be a huge market of users with low-end phones.

however that still doesn't make performance a selection criteria for people buying apps unless the phones are not able to run any of the popular apps which appears to be the case because kaiOS didn't even support native apps last i checked. in other words, apps on those phones are competing in an entirely different league, and the existing android market does not apply.

then again we have an entirely different dynamic of competing in a new market where there are no existing contenders, and the main question is, is the market big enough yet to make it worth it.

and since those phones run kaiOS native apps are off the table anyways

> even on the desktop

I'd dare say it's already happened on the desktop. I do IT for an elementary school, and pretty much none of the employees use any app other than their web browser. Right now the computer I'm sitting in front of is running Outlook, our ticketing system, WhatsApp, Discord, and Spotify all within Firefox which is the only native app I have open, and likely the only app I'll open all day.

certainly some are more ahead than others, but it proves the trend. if only the webbrowser had a better way to manage the apps. a desktop of sorts.

i do realize that we are reinventing everything here. and as some said elsewhere, html is not the best of tools to create user interfaces. not by a long shot[1]. but the dream of a single unified architecture that we can all develop towards may at last become a reality.

[1] actually, thanks to things like canvas or webassembly we are not necessarily stuck with html. we'll be able to create gui toolkits in javascript (hey, js-framework developers, here is your next target: the js-gui-toolkit of the week ;-) or maybe even port existing toolkits to webassembly and then our gnome or windows apps will simply run inside the browser instead.

the day of the linux desktop (for those that are still waiting for it) will be the day of the browser desktop

>but the question is why do you expect me to cater to a minority market

Where do you get the idea that anyone expects you to do anything? Since when are hackers opposed to more options, especially those outside the walled gardens of modern smartphones? If it's worth it, do it. If it isn't, don't. If the system sucks, it'll fail. But why rail against the idea?