interesting, it is not so much speed as lack of debuggers and diagnostic tools that lead them to abandon HTML. I guess that in the end supporting two mature platforms (iOS and Android) cost them less time than one not-so-mature platform (mobile web)
oh yes, no doubt about that :). They might be better so serve content to you by knowing more about you. Lots of (young)users will not care. Still it would be good to educate us more about how they use our data. Maybe it requires some body like the EU to step in and require more transparency, like they did with Google: http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/04/04/six-eu-countries-targ...
Interesting. So it is not an OS or UI layer baked into the OS, it is an app with deep integration. In theory you can do it on any Android phone. Starting out with only 5 phones though, so it requires probably a lot of testing and high end specs. They do a lot of things on Android now that you cant on iOS (background processing, replacing Lock and Home screen) that will make Android look better. A lot of interaction that is brand new, and will take time to get to like. In my view, it does turn your phone into a Facebook phone and that might be too much FB for some
Well yes, but for startups that doesn't work. Every day you need to look at the results of your product, talk with your team and adjust course. Having remote workers really kills your ability to do that.
because it is cheating to the judges, competitors and to possible people that join up with my team and would put in hours for free. I am already out there with my company. The number of successful startups that come out of a hackathon is actually quite low I'd say.
What I don't get so much is the push to take the result of a hackathon and turn it into a company. Several occasions I have seen investors promise to invest in winners, but most of the time it is just a group of people together for the weekend with already their startup or a dayjob. Lauch, Angelhack have this actually built in. Result: more focus on business and already existing teams (companies?) that come in together to use the event as a launching platform. Which is not the goal for me for a hackathon: trying out technologies, meeting new people, have fun. I already have my startup, don't need another.
I once had a user complaining on twitter "HelloInbox sucks" (that was my company in those days). I responded "Sorry to hear that, what is the problem?". Guy asks for email address. Sends a 2 pager, starting that he really liked HelloInbox but had a list of addition featured he wanted. So awesome!
Yep, running a web site in an hybrid iOS app will slow down your app, as the Nitro Javascript engine is not available. That has been the case for a while, because of security reasons, and won't go away any time soon
yep, Objective-C sucks. But Javascript, is that such a straightforward language? You might think that because you are familiair with it, but I remember learning it after Java and that was not a good experience.
in due time, not really. However, as mobile is a very much evolving platform, for the next few years native code will have earlier access to new features before html through additional api's has.
Soon app innovation will stifle because only a very few companies are making money. Indie/mid size developers will stop working on innovative apps and start working for bigger risk aversing boring companies.
Biggest reason imho is that these top 25 are one big self fulfilling prophecy: A top 25 position guaranties big download numbers. And to get there you need either a collection of apps already out there for cross promotion or buy lots of ads and installs.
Switching to a metric that indicates quality much like engagement measured by # sessions or # minutes use/month will make quality apps stand out much more.
yeah. I was one of the persons that rested (no real sleep) for 4 hours instead of going home. I still think it is crazy, but seeing half the people do it makes it competitive and therefore you want to stay up too. Apart from students I don't know any professional group that is crazy enough to do that, you?
I don't think it is a problem that is harder on mobile than web, it is just that up till now for mobile we have only focused on downloads: downloads is the main metric for iTunes Store and Google Play to rank apps and to get into a top 25.
I totally agree that this is a stupid metric and we should move to monthly active users, both for general measurement of success as well as ranking in app stores. Getting a lot of one time visitors on your web site is not hard, monthly recurring visitors is. No different on mobile, let's start dealing with the challenge of engagement on mobile as well.
Yep, I know that is one of their worries. Parallel store, bypassing Apple's payment system and creating a bad user experience. However, the number of users that jailbreak their iPhone and use Cydia is small, and the new iPhone users are more and more regular people and will not jailbreak their phone. In essence, Apple has all the control it needs to prevent this and shouldn't worry about it
Two questions:
1. Why is the app called Recommend it and not Refer.ly?
2. You seem to focus on different use cases than with the web site, for power users that share more instead of all users. What was the rationale behind that? Ebay or Amazon apps do both.