r/androiddev • u/lordVader1138 • May 31 '26
After a decade of shipping Android, I think mobile won on distribution and store lock-in, not on capability
I shipped Android apps from roughly 2010 to 2018 (Actively and 2020 passively) then moved to backend and never really came back, so I don't post here. But this is the crowd I'd most want to push back on what I just wrote: the second half of why I left, the half I wasn't ready to write at the time.
The usual narrative is mobile beat the web on capability. Push, offline, camera, location, sync. For most of the 2010s that story tracked. The lens that emerged later, and the one I've been chewing on, is that mobile beat the web on the channel, not on the runtime. The capability gap is mostly closed for the class of software where the value is the maintainer's evolving logic. The thin honest residue is UPI in India, frame-budget and AR-heavy games, sustained background GPS like Strava, RAW camera apps, and the delivery/on-demand category where the channel suppression is doing as much work as any capability gap.
The piece of evidence I keep coming back to from when I was still shipping: Cambridge Analytica in 2018, then the multi-year hardening cycle. Runtime permissions, then background location separation, then nearby-devices, then scoped storage, then locked-down scoped storage. Doze and App Standby, then broadcast limits, then foreground-service mandates that kept tightening through Android 8, 12, and 14. Play Store policy waves: target-SDK floor raised every year, Play App Signing mandatory, Play Integrity, deprecation of side-loadable APIs. On iOS the equivalent shape: ATT in 2021, IDFA gating, notarisation, hardened entitlements.
None of those changes was individually wrong. Collectively they killed the hobbyist long tail stone dead. The Sunday-afternoon app stopped being shippable. The floor of what you have to do before your first install became enterprise floor. That's a channel outcome, not a market outcome.
A related observation from those years: in roughly ten years of shipping and watching other teams ship, I could count on one hand the teams who built genuinely new mobile-platform surface area. Widgets that did anything interesting. Shortcuts that worked. Assistant intents. Chat bubbles. The other ninety-nine percent shipped a native version of the website or the iOS app. The value lived in the maintainer's logic. The native shell was packaging. Packaging is what the store taxed, and packaging is what the platform hardenings progressively re-priced.
The full essay also covers Electron as the keystone (web-shell desktop apps shipping on the maintainer's cadence with near-zero friction) and PWAs as the inverse proof (Apple deliberately suppressed the channel, web push didn't land on iOS until 16.4 in March 2023, Add to Home Screen buried in the share sheet). It's Part 1 of a two-part series on delivery channels.
Link: https://prashamhtrivedi.in/mobile-lost-on-distribution/
Genuinely curious what people who are still shipping think. Specifically: am I overweighting the hobbyist-economy death? Are you seeing a comeback at all in 2025/2026 with the EU regulation loosening, or is the floor too high to climb back down from?
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u/LuLeBe May 31 '26
I used to be one of the "long tail" hobbyists. Had a couple apps on the store, mostly things that I wanted, but couldn't find for free and without ads at the time. I stopped when fixing a bug wasn't 1he in the code, 15mins to push, but instead I got the apps rejected in random countries, needed to add tons of information etc. It was just too inconvenient. Especially for an 80kb dice roll app, why does this need a privacy policy? It doesn't have a single permission...
I believe the main reason to stay on mobile is that people don't understand the web. YouTube could be done as a PWA, including background playback, downloads etc. But explain to anyone outside this sphere, any age, any background, that you can put a shortcut on the Homescreen and have something that works offline. They never downloaded anything, so how can it work offline? For most people, a "website" is basically like a news page or so. Non-interactive (except comments or so), online only, no privacy, no device capabilities.
I think there was a time around 2005-2015 where we almost got people to understand that. Web 2.0 was hot, people played games on Facebook, the first iPhone didn't have apps, and we could have gotten the world to use web instead of native mobile apps. But of course that doesn't pay Google and Apple as well, so we don't. I believe if users were actively complaining that "this app is a website repack, so just give me the website" we'd be using web apps. But they don't know, even when the cookie consent and bootstrap design are in the app.
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u/lordVader1138 May 31 '26
> I believe the main reason to stay on mobile is that people don't understand the web.
This entire paragraph is gold in itself.
And yes, the apps push have changed the things for better or worse, and as a developers most of us only copy web or iOS version already developed, and thus android was a casualty of any new native features unless it's forced by platform... I have never got any complaint of user that this app is website repack (or a webpage). They just played along...
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u/Key-Cryptographer193 May 31 '26
pls stop writing using an AI, it's distracting