Re: The state of standalone apps on iOS

Hi All,  
The whole installable web app thing has been blowing up on twitter [1] [2] [3], so I made a few fixes and put it out for people on the web to comment.

The updated version is here:
https://github.com/w3c-webmob/installable-webapps/blob/gh-pages/ios_standalone/README.md

I added a "Recommendations to implementers/W3C" section. Would be great if, based on the data, people could add some additional recommendations I might have not though of. 

Kind regards,
Marcos 
-- 
Marcos Caceres
[1] https://twitter.com/marcosc/status/436522185641824256
[2] https://twitter.com/ppk/status/436841242128031744
[3] http://paul.kinlan.me/Add-to-homescreen-not-the-answer/


On Thursday, February 20, 2014 at 10:31 PM, Marcos Caceres wrote:

> Hi All, 
> I've prepared a detailed study of installable web apps on iOS. You can find the complete document here:
> 
> https://github.com/w3c-webmob/installable-webapps/blob/io_standalone/ios_standalone/the_myth_of_single_page_apps.md
> 
> Would appreciate any feedback/review prior to wider circulation. 
> 
> Below are the key findings from the study: 
> 
> ##Key findings
> The number of sites claiming to run as standalone is small but significant; of the 78,155 sites we used as data, they represent 1.4% of the dataset (i.e., 1097 claim to be "apple-mobile-web-app-capable").
> 
> Despite their claims to the contrary, what we found was that the majority of web apps do not run as standalone (90%, or 324 out of 360). Only a tiny fraction (10%, or 36 out of 360) are able to run as standalone - and 28% of those had significant limitations (described below). There is, in fact, a greater percentage (12%) of desktop sites masquerading as installable web apps than there are actual standalone applications.
> 
> Of those 36 apps that were true standalone web apps (i.e., has an icon, is usable on mobile, can be navigated), 10 (28%) of those had issues where they either left the user stranded without being able to "go back" - or worst, suddenly navigated to the desktop version of the site. In other cases, the application mostly worked - but then it was not possible to perform some critical task in the application (e.g., a purchase). In such cases, the application returned the user back into Safari. Others, like nest.com (http://nest.com), make a best effort at working at standalone, but throw the user back to the default web browser at random points.
> 
> On the up-side, the majority of web apps (76%) where designed to work on a mobile phone, even if only 13% of those could actually be navigated.
> 
> Icon usage, overall, was also fairly healthy - 56% of the web apps we tested included an icon. However, we discovered that at least some web apps included dummy icons from pre-purchased templates - meaning more than one web app included an icon that had nothing to do with the application itself and had the same icon as another site.
> 
> Oddly, many web apps (5%, or 19) incorrectly claim that they can run as standalone - but contain a markup error in their HTML that prevents the application from actually doing so! Ironically, of those, 12 out of 19 (63%) even go as far as to include an icon.
> 
> For more details, see the "other observations" section, as well as the "all the questions" section. 
> 
> -- 
> Marcos Caceres

Received on Friday, 21 February 2014 17:51:17 UTC