HACKER Q&A
📣 moomoo11

Why do people say that mobile apps are dying?


Granted, I hear this mostly by people in "web3" but is this true? What is your experience, because I think that we're still just getting started with what's possible in the mobile apps space.


  👤 tryptophan Accepted Answer ✓
I think its more that mobile app economics are dead due to the google/apple app store duopoly. Their fat cuts of all sales make a lot of businesses quite hard to pull off. Plus, you need to be in constant fear of getting randomly banned for one reason or another (or no reason at all really).

It just isn't an attractive place for developers. Companies (especially large ones that dominate the top50 charts) see their mobile apps as costs so they don't really care about making money there.


👤 smt88
Cost of user acquisition for native apps is enormous. Most people install very few apps per month, and the vast majority uninstall them afterward.

"Utility apps" (messengers, banking apps, etc.) do OK if the user must use them. All other types of apps are competing against the few big social apps and games that are more than adequate for most users.


👤 pedalpete
Mobile apps are "dead" in the same way web apps are.

The average mobile app gets opened 1 time. People have enough apps on there phone, they don't go browsing in the app store for the new new thing anymore.

It doesn't mean that people won't use apps, but the selling feature of your product being an app has no meaning any longer.

For almost all companies, it's table stakes, if you expect people to use your app on the go.

When Uber came out, being able to leverage the tech in a mobile app is what made the app possible. So that was a huge selling point of the company.

There is almost no new capabilities in phones today that allow new experiences.

So, yes, people will still develop apps. Apps themselves are not dead. The web is not dead. Web3 will be a thing, and will change some of how these things operate, but for it to truly work, I think the average person won't understand the difference between their web3 apps and their mobile/web apps.


👤 zamadatix
Depends what is meant by "dead". Mobile apps aren't going to stop being made and existing good apps aren't going to suddenly stop being useful. That said if you look at the numbers I think we're starting to get to the other side of the S curve of app revenue and download rates. At the same time there is more competition than ever due to barrier to entry being basically nothing these days.

To some the lack of "forever going to be going to the moon" may seem like dead, to others it may seem very much alive and healthy without that.


👤 muzani
App development here peaked some 4-8 years ago, dipped for a bit when RN came out, and it's entering a new generation.

I think it goes about in waves where people make mobile sites and think that's enough, then realize that the direct hardware and lifecycle access is actually pretty important after spending a few months wrestling with certain edge cases. And then go overboard with it.

The cycles might happen in different periods of time in different ecosystems, but they also seem to be anchored around technology.


👤 GianFabien
I think that the mobile app market is saturated. There seems to be multiple choices for no matter what you are looking for. The banking, ride sharing, home sharing, meal delivery, etc areas are in the grip of the corresponding providers. There are thousands of games available. In this environment it is extremely hard to define a market that has sufficient potential to make the development and support costs provide a suitable ROI.

👤 xet7

👤 ksaj
New app technologies might be dying a bit, but new apps themselves sure are not. Every restaurant you can think of has their own app these days. And "Try our new App and get !" is definitely not a rare thing to see in the junk mail flyers.

👤 fuckcensorship
It’s less about Web3 and more about web apps being a superior solution to mobile apps in most cases.

👤 seydor
Because everything will shift to the web , for the Nth time

👤 Madmallard
At least in the mobile game space they're all review botted reskins of thinly veiled gambling machines with basically zero artistic passion behind them

I haven't used a "new" mobile app in quite a long time must be something to that as well


👤 swah
Some trend that they make much bigger than it actually is...