Terrifying how quickly Trigger.io moves. This is already awesome, but I could see an A/B testing layout on top of this that alone could be an amazing startup.
I expect that we'll see a lot of consolidation in the mobile tooling market as companies with well-designed base infrastructure are able to quickly dominate new niches and feature sets. If Trigger continues executing this well, I'll be happy to see the market consolidate around them.
The important point isn't so much how fast Trigger is moving, but how fast they let developers move. The html/css/js -> mobile app shift is letting build build things really fast. This A/B testing stuff is helping those developers that have built fast iterate quickly. It's pretty incredible what a team can do in a weekend these days.
Excuse my ignorance, but if you're serving up app content through a webview pointing to your own server space, could you not just edit the html5 yourself and have the same effect as this service? is the benefit more to do with tight integration of the native iOS UI components..?
Hybrid apps serve the website locally, from the device, because if you didn't there would be a lot more data being sent over the wire, and your app would perform significantly worse. The only thing (well designed) hybrid apps generally use the internet for is querying apis, just like normal mobile apps do.
More the reason web will win over "mobile." "Mobile" to me is not a platform - it is a medium of consumption. The web is and always will be the platform in my mind.
This is great. If people can iterate on mobile like they can on the web, theres no telling how fast things can move.
This is already pretty common in the AppStore. I remember AstroApe talking about it at a meetup over a year ago. Since you can't push a new version without a review process, they often have server side settings for any new feature or game setting. So, for example, if they push a game release and see it is too hard for players, they can dial down the difficulty without having to wait a week for the review process.
Very timely! I found the article you reference http://andrewchen.co/2012/08/15/mobile-app-startups-are-fail... very interesting yesterday - being able to push major changes to application UI at "web speed" is a better way to launch and iterate. Downloading your new toolkit now...
A/B testing on Mobile apps is something I have been thinking about for a long time. However contrary to popular belief it is possible to push out changes to native Android apps. I have developed such a technology. I am taking it in another direction (app discoverability) but if someone is interested in using the tech for A/B testing please drop me a line (kenneth at appprevue.com)
To see the technology in action go to www.AppPrevue.com. There is a link to a technology demo in the Play store. It is a bit crude but it does show it is possible to run a native Android app without installing it. The same technology could be adapted to push out new versions of an app to do A/B testing.
I remember talking to them very very recently and asking for this EXACT feature. If I'm using webviews and JavaScript I want to change things on the fly. One more reason to use trigger for my projects !
I expect that we'll see a lot of consolidation in the mobile tooling market as companies with well-designed base infrastructure are able to quickly dominate new niches and feature sets. If Trigger continues executing this well, I'll be happy to see the market consolidate around them.