As a solo developer, it's hard for me to gauge exactly where we are on the 'app' technology trajectory. My enthusiasm for any native mobile endeavour is pretty much shot by now. So, so much work for such little payoff.
Most folks I know will use the 'Big Four' apps for social - Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and to a lesser extent Twitter. Anything else gets googled. So what opportunity is left? I have no idea - maybe a big one. I can't tell at this point. I don't use apps. The thing is, I wonder if this pessimism existed towards the web in its early days, which obviously turned out to be a huge opportunity for those that didn't dismiss it when things were rough (Browser wars, IE, Web 1.0).
The web had much more organic growth than apps. Apps have pretty much been rammed down our throats by personal-information-seeking marketroids. Initially, the web didn't promise to be a solution to anything, just a large bazaar of occasionally useful and/or interesting information.
Things were not that bad back then. The worst thing of the early web was that any practical web browser had to process broken HTML the same way that Netscape Navigator 3 did.
Microsoft had the resources to reverse engineer that behavior, and then they designed CSS in such a way that it could not be implemented on the Netscape rendering engine without wrecking it.
Mozilla finally caught up, then eventually the undocumented behavior got documented in HTML 5 and it is all roses now.
Most folks I know will use the 'Big Four' apps for social - Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and to a lesser extent Twitter. Anything else gets googled. So what opportunity is left? I have no idea - maybe a big one. I can't tell at this point. I don't use apps. The thing is, I wonder if this pessimism existed towards the web in its early days, which obviously turned out to be a huge opportunity for those that didn't dismiss it when things were rough (Browser wars, IE, Web 1.0).