Custom made, cute, but not reusable

In the weeks following Google IO there was a lot of discussion about progressive web apps, Android instant Apps and the value and role of URLs and links in the app world. We had commentary, ponderings, Pathos, explanation of said Pathos after it annoyed people and an excellent round-up on where we stand with web technology for apps.

My favourite is Remy Sharp’s post which he concludes as:

I strongly believe in the concepts behind progressive web apps and even though native hacks (Flash, PhoneGap, etc) will always be ahead, the web, always gets there. Now, today, is an incredibly exciting time to be build on the web.

PWAs beat anything we tried so far

As a card-carrying lover of the web, I am convinced that PWAs are a necessary step into the right direction. They are a very important change. So far, all our efforts to crack the advertised supremacy of native apps over the web failed. We copied what native apps did. We tried to erode the system from within. We packaged our apps and let them compete in closed environments. The problem is that they couldn’t compete in quality. In some cases this might have been by design of the platform we tried to run them on. A large part of it is that “the app revolution” is powered by the age old idea of planned obsolesence, something that is against anything the web stands for.

I made a lot of points about this in my TEDx talk “The Web is dead” two years ago:

We kept trying to beat native with the promises of the web: its open nature, its easy distribution, and its reach. These are interesting, but also work against the siren song of apps on mobile: that you are in control and that you can sell them to an audience of well-off, always up-to-date users. Whether this is true or not was irrelevant – it sounded great. And that’s what we need to work against. The good news is that we now have a much better chance than before. But more on that later.

Where to publish if you need to show quick results?

Consider yourself someone who is not as excited about the web as we are. Imagine being someone with short-term goals, like impressing a VC. As a publisher you have to make a decision what to support:

• iOS, a platform with incredible tooling, a predictable upgrade strategy and a lot of affluent users happy to spend money on products.
• Android, a platform with good tooling, massive fragmentation, a plethora of different devices on all kind of versions of the OS (including custom ones by hardware companies) and users much less happy to spend money but expecting “free” versions
• The web, a platform with tooling that’s going places, an utterly unpredictable and hard to measure audience that expects everything for free and will block your ads and work around your paywalls.

If all you care about is a predictable audience you can do some budgeting for, this doesn’t look too rosy for Android and abysmal for the web. The carrot of “but you can reach millions of people” doesn’t hold much weight when these are not easy to convert to paying users.

To show growth you need numbers. You don’t do that by being part of a big world of links and resources. You do that by locking people in your app. You do it by adding a webview so links open inside it. This is short-sighted and borderline evil, but it works.

And yes, we are in this space. This is not about what technology to use, this is not about how easy it is to maintain your app. This is not about how affordable developers would be. The people who call the shots in the app market and make the money are not the developers. They are those who run the platforms and invest in the companies creating the apps.

The app honeymoon period is over

The great news is that this house of cards is tumbling. App download numbers are abysmally low and the usage of mobiles is in chat clients, OS services and social networks. The closed nature of marketplaces works heavily against random discovery. There is a thriving market of fake reviews, upvotes, offline advertising and keyword padding that makes the web SEO world of the last decade look much less of the cesspool we remember. End users are getting tired of having to install and uninstall apps and continuously get prompts to upgrade them.

This is a great time to break into this model. That Google finally came up with Instant Apps (after promising atomic updates for years) shows that we reached the breaking point. Something has to change.

Growth is on mobile and connectivity issues are the hurdle

Here’s the issue though: patience is not a virtue of our market. To make PWAs work, bring apps back to the web and have the link as the source of distribution instead of closed marketplaces we need to act now. We need to show that PWAs solve the main issue of the app market: that the next users are not in places with great connectivity, and yet on mobile devices.

And this is where progressive web apps hit the sweet spot. You can have a damn small footprint app shell that gets sweet and easy to upgrade content from the web. You control the offline experience and what happens on flaky connections. PWAs are a “try before you buy”, showing you immediately what you get before you go through the process of adding it to your home screen or download the whole app. Exactly what Instant Apps are promising. Instant Apps have the problem that Android isn’t architected that way and that developers need to change their approach. The web was already built on this idea and the approach is second nature to us.

PWAs need to succeed on mobile first

The idea that a PWA is progressively enhanced and means that it could be a web site that only converts in the right environment is wonderful. We can totally do that. But we shouldn’t pretend that this is the world we need to worry about right now. We can do that once we solved the issue of web users not wanting to pay for anything and show growth numbers on the desktop. For now, PWAs need to be the solution for the next mobile users. And this is where we have an advantage over native apps. Let’s use that one.

Open questions

Of course, there are many issues to consider:

• How do PWAs work with permissions? Can we ask permissions on demand and what happens when users revoke them? Instant apps have that same issue.
• How do I uninstall a PWA? Does removing the icon from my homescreen free all the data? Should PWAs have a memory management control?
• What about URLs? Should they display or not? Should there be a long-tap to share the URL? Personally, I’d find a URL bar above an app confusing. I never “hacked” the URL of an app – but I did use “share this app” buttons. With a PWA, this is sending a URL to friends, and that’s a killer feature.
• How do we deal with the issue of iOS not supporting Service Workers? What about legacy and third party Android devices? Sure, PWAs fall back to normal HTML5 apps, but we’ve seen them not taking off in comparison to native apps.
• What are the “must have” features of native apps that PWAs need to match? Those people want without being a hurdle or impossible to implement?

These are exciting times and I am looking forward to PWAs being the wedge in the cracks that are showing in closed environments. The web can win this, but we won’t get far if we demand features that only make sense on desktop and are in use by us – the experts. End users deserve to have an amazing, form-factor specific experience. Let’s build those. And for the love of our users, let’s build apps that let them do things and not only consume them. This is what apps are for.

Disclaimer: The following are my personal views and experiences at this year’s Google IO. They are not representative of my employer. Should you want to quote me, please do so as Chris Heilmann, developer.

TL;DR: Is Google IO worth the $900? Yes, if you’re up for networking, getting information from experts and enjoy social gatherings. No, if you expect to be able to see talks. You’re better off watching them from home. The live streaming and recordings are excellent.

Google IO this year left me confused and disappointed. I found a massive gap between the official messaging and the tech on display. I’m underwhelmed with the keynote and the media outreach. The much more interesting work in the breakout sessions, talks and demos excited me. It seems to me that what Google wants to promote and the media to pick up is different to what its engineers showed. That’s OK, but it feels like sales stepping on a developer conference turf.

I enjoyed the messaging of the developer outreach and product owner team in the talks and demos. At times I was wondering if I was at a Google or a Mozilla event. The web and its technologies were front and centre. And there was a total lack of “our product $X leads the way” vibes.

Kudos to everyone involved. The messaging about progressive Web Apps, AMP and even the new Android Instant Apps was honest. It points to a drive in Google to return to the web for good.

The vibe of the event changed a lot since moving out of Moscone Center in San Francisco. Running it on Google’s homestead in Mountain View made the whole show feel more like a music festival than a tech event. It must have been fun for the presenters to stand on the same stage they went to see bands at.

Having smaller tents for the different product and technology groups was great. It invited much more communication than booths. I saw a lot of neat demos. Having experts at hand to talk with about technologies I wanted to learn about was great.

Organisation

Here are the good and bad things about the organisation:

• Good: traffic control wasn’t as much of a nightmare I expected. I got there two hours in advance as I anticipated traffic jams, but it wasn’t bad at all. Shuttles and bike sheds helped getting people there.
• Good: there was no queue at badge pickup. Why I had to have my picture taken and a – somehow sticky – plastic badge printed was a bit beyond me, though. It seems wasteful.
• Good: the food and beverages were plentiful and applicable. With a group this big it is hard to deliver safe to eat and enjoyable food. The sandwiches, apples and crisps did the trick. The food at the social events was comfort food/fast food, but let’s face it – you’re not at a food fair. I loved that all the packaging was paper and cardboard and there was not too much excess waste in the form of plastics. We also got a reusable water bottle you could re-fill at water dispensers like you have in offices. Given the weather, this was much needed. Coffee and tea was also available throughout the day. We were well fed and watered. I’m no Vegan, and I heard a few complaints about a lack of options, but that may have been personal experiences.
• Good: the toilets were amazing. Clean, with running water and plenty of paper, mirrors, free sunscreen and no queues. Not what I expected from a music festival surrounding.
• Great: as it was scorching hot on the first day the welcome pack you got with your badge had a bandana to cover your head, two sachets of sun screen, a reusable water bottle and sunglasses. As a ginger: THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU. The helpers even gave me a full tube of sunscreen on re-entry the second day, taking pity on my red skin.
• Bad: the one thing that was exactly the same as in Moscone was the abysmal crowd control. Except for the huge stage tent number two (called HYDRA - I am on to you, people) all others were far too small. It was not uncommon to stand for an hour in a queue for the talk you wanted to see just to be refused entry as it was full up. Queuing up in the scorching sun isn’t fun for anyone and impossible for me. Hence I missed all but two talks I wanted to see.
• Good: if you were lucky enough to see a talk, the AV quality was great. The screens were big and readable, all the talks were live transcribed and the presenters audible.

The bad parts

Apart from the terrible crowd control, two things let me down the most. The keynote and a total lack of hardware giveaway – something that might actually be related.

Don’t get me wrong, I found the showering of attendees with hardware excessive at the first few IOs. But announcing something like a massive move into VR with Daydream and Tango without giving developers something to test it on is assuming a lot. Nine hundred dollars plus flying to the US and spending a lot of money on accommodation is a lot for many attendees. Getting something amazing to bring back would be a nice “Hey, thanks”.

There was no announcement at the keynote about anything physical except for some vague “this will be soon available” products. This might be the reason.

My personal translation of the keynote is the following:

We are Google, we lead in machine learning, cloud technology and data insights. Here are a few products that may soon come out that play catch-up with our competition. We advocate diversity and try to make people understand that the world is bigger than the Silicon Valley. That’s why we solve issues that aren’t a problem but annoyances for the rich. All the things we’re showing here are solving issues of people who live in huge houses, have awesome cars and suffer from the terrible ordeal of having to answer text messages using their own writing skills. Wouldn’t it be better if a computer did that for you? Why go and wake up your children with a kiss using the time you won by becoming more effective with our products when you can tell Google to do that for you? Without the kiss that is – for now.

As I put it during the event:

I actually feel poor looking at the #io16 keynote. We have lots of global problems technology can help with. This is pure consumerism.

I stand by this. Hardly anything in the keynote excited me as a developer. Or even as a well-off professional who lives in a city where public transport is a given. The announcement of Instant Apps, the Firebase bits and the new features of Android Studio are exciting. But it all got lost in an avalanche of “Look what’s coming soon!” product announcements without the developer angle. We want to look under the hood. We want to add to the experience and we want to understand how things work. This is how developer events work. Google Home has some awesome features. Where are the APIs for that?

As far as I understand it, there was a glitch in the presentation. But the part where a developer in Turkey used his skills to help the Syrian refugee crisis was borderline insulting. There was no information what the app did, who benefited from it and what it ran on. No information how the data got in and how the data was going to the people who help the refugees. The same goes for using machine learning to help with the issue of blindness. Both were teasers without any meat and felt like “Well, we’re also doing good, so here you go”.

Let me make this clear: I am not criticising the work of any Google engineer, product owner or other worker here. All these things are well done and I am excited about the prospects. I find it disappointing that the keynote was a sales pitch. It did not pay respect to this work and failed to show the workings rather than the final product. IO is advertised as a developer conference, not a end user oriented sales show. It felt disconnected.

Things that made me happy

• The social events were great – the concert in the amphitheatre was for those who wanted to go. Outside was a lot of space to have a chat if you’re not the dancing type. The breakout events on the second day were plentiful, all different and arty. The cynic in my sniggered at Burning Man performers (the anthithesis to commercialism by design) doing their thing at a commercial IT event, but it gave the whole event a good vibe.
• Video recording and live streaming – I watched quite a few of the talks I missed the last two days in the gym and I am grateful that Google offers these on YouTube immediately, well described and easy to find in playlists. Using the app after the event makes it easy to see the talks you missed.
• Boots on the ground – everyone I wanted to meet from Google was there and had time to chat. My questions got honest and sensible answers and there was no hand-waving or over-promising.
• A good focus on health and safety – first aid tents, sunscreen and wet towels for people to cool down, creature comforts for an outside environment. The organisers did a good job making sure people are safe. Huge printouts of the Code of Conduct also made no qualm about it that antisocial or aggressive behaviour was not tolerated.

Conclusion

I will go again to Google IO, to talk, to meet, to see product demos and to have people at hand that can give me insight further than the official documentation. I am likely to not get up early next time to see the keynote though and I would love to see a better handle on the crowd control. It is frustrating to queue and not being able to see talks at the conference of a company who prides itself at organising huge datasets and having self-driving cars.
Here are a few things that could make this better:

• Having screening tents with the video and the transcription screens outside the main tents. These don’t even need sound (which is the main outside issue)
• Use the web site instead of two apps. Advocating progressive web apps and then telling me in the official conference mail to download the Android app was not a good move. Especially as the PWA outperformed the native app at every turn – including usability (the thing native should be much better). It was also not helpful that the app showed the name of the stage but not the number of the tent.
• Having more places to charge phones would have been good, or giving out power packs. As we were outside all the time and moving I didn’t use my computer at all and did everything on the phone.

I look forward to interacting and working with the tech Google. I am confused about the Google that tries to be in the hands of end users without me being able to crack the product open and learn from how it is done.

Yesterday morning I dragged myself to present at NodeConf London in the Barbican to present. Dragged not because I didn’t want to, but because I had 3 hours sleep coming back from Beyond Tellerand the day before.

I didn’t quite have time to prepare my talk, and I ended up finishing my slides 5 minutes before it. That’s why I was, to use a simple term, shit scared of my talk. I’m not that involved in the goings on in Node, and the impostor in me assumed the whole audience to be all experts and me making an utter berk of myself. However, this being a good starting point I just went with it and used the opportunity to speak to an audience that much in the know about something I want Node to be.

I see the Node environment and ecosystem as an excellent opportunity to test out new JavaScript features and ideas without the issue of browser interoperability and incompatibility.

The thing I never was at ease about it though is that *everything is based on on one JS engine&. This is not how you define and test out a standard. You need to have several runtimes to execute your code. Much like a browser monoculture was a terrible thing and gave us thousands of now unmaintainable and hard to use web sites, not opening ourselves to various engines can lead to terrible scripts and apps based on Node.

The talk video is already live and you can also see all the other talks in this playlist:

The slides are on Slideshare:

A screencast recording of the talk is on YouTube.

Resources I mentioned:

• ES6 compatibility table
• Babel JS transpiler
• The cost of transpiling
• Time Travel Debugging in ChakraCore
• ChakraCore added to Node mainline
• ChakraCore on GitHub

I was very happy to get amazing feedback from everyone I met, and that people thoroughly enjoyed my presentation. Goes to show that the voice in your head telling you that you’re not good enough often is just being a a dick.