Pickr – A web based app to randomly pick things
A few weeks ago I decided to try and make a web app for iPhone. The idea was simple; to create an app to randomly pick items from a list. I will admit my reason for choosing this is not arbitrary, rather, born out of frustration of using the Tea Round app for drinking games.
Tea round is far too constrained in terms of the inputs (no spaces are allowed) and adding new names / clearing names takes far too long. Not to mention that if you run two ‘spins’ one after another, everyone is still included in the ‘spin’. Mine would be different. So I started to build a skeleton app using javascript and I had it working in an hour or two.
The styling replicates the look and feel of a native iOS app and can also run perfectly well on desktop or tablets.
The end result is an app that looks like a native app; is cached on your device so you don’t need an internet connection – like a native app; and has the same interactions & speed that you would expect from a native app.
So how long before the native app is dead?
Well the only thing stopping it is access to functions within the device itself. Things like the camera (although there are workarounds – see PicUp) or GPS, gyroscope / accelerometer. All you need is a secure API to access that information with the user’s consent (imagine a popup screen similar to the ones you get with Facebook authorisation for apps) and you can say bye bye to a lot of native apps. So how long until this happens? Well, probably a long time.
The app business is worth £billions now so allowing anyone to create their own and not have it pass through an app store (so the creator gets all the money) is unlikely. Also you will lose the curation of apps so there won’t be any guidelines to adhere to in order to be published. So you could get any old Tom, Dick or Harry publishing a crappy app… like the internet then.
Really though, everything is eventually going to be web based. So it’s just a matter of time.
Check it out
Have a look at the app on your phone or tablet (or even in your browser) and use it.