Mile
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Paul Kinlan's post, Add-to-homescreen Is Not What the Web Needs, is only the most recent in a long-running debate surrounding "apps" on mobile, but it is thought-provoking. Kinlan, who cheerleads for the Web Intents integration system in Chrome, naturally thinks that having an "add-to-homescreen" option misses the point:

I want to see something much more fundamental. The web offers something far richer: it encourages lightweight usage with no required installation and interaction with on-demand permissions. I never want to see an install button or the requirement to understand all the potential permissions requried before trying the app. The system should understand that I am using an app and how frequently that I use it and it should then automatically integrate with the launch points in the OS.

Kinlan has a great point, in that reducing the web to "just another app" is kind of a shame. The kinds of deeper integration he wants would probably be prone to abuse, but they're not at all impossible. Mozilla wants to do something similar with Firefox OS, although it probably gets lost in the vague muddle of its current state. Worse, Firefox OS illustrates the fundamental problem with web "apps" on mobile, and it's probably going to take a lot more than a clever bookmark to solve the problem. That's because the real problem with the web on mobile is URLs, and nobody wants to admit that.

As a web developer, I love URLs. They're the command line of the web: a powerful tool for organizing information and streaming it from place to place. Unfortunately, they're also like the command line in other ways: they're arbitrary, much-abused, and ultimately difficult to type on mobile. More importantly, nobody who isn't a developer really understands them.

There is a now-infamous example of the fact that people don't understand URLs, which you may remember as the infamous Facebook login of 2010. That was the point at which the web community realized that for a lot of users, logging into Facebook went a lot like this:

1. Search Google for "facebook login"
2. Click the first link
3. Look for the password box

As a process, this was fine until ReadWriteWeb actually published a story about Facebook's unified login that rose to the top spot in the Google search listings, at which point hundreds of people began commenting on the article thinking that it was a new Facebook design. As long as they got to Facebook in the end, to these people, one skinny textbox was basically as good as another. I've actually seen people do this in my classes, and just about ground my teeth to nubs watching it happen.

In other words, the problem is discovery. An app store gives you a way to flip through the listings, see what's popular, and try it out. You don't need to search, and you certainly don't need to remember a cryptic address (all these clever .io and .ly addresses are, I'm pretty sure, much harder to remember than plain old .com). For most of the apps people use, they probably don't even scroll very far: the important stuff, like Facebook and Candy Crush, is almost certainly at the top of the store anyway. Creating add-to-homescreen mechanisms is addressing the wrong problem. It's not useless, but the real problem is not that people don't know how to make bookmarks, it's that they can't find your web app in the first place.

The current Firefox OS launcher isn't perfect, but it at least shows someone thinking about the problem. When you start the device, it initially shows a search box titled "I'm thinking of...". Tap into the box and even before you start typing it'll instantly start showing a set of curated sites sorted into categories like "social" and "games." If you want isn't there, you can continue to search the web as a whole. Sites launched from this view start in "app mode" with no URL bar, even though they're still just web sites and nothing's technically been installed. Press the bookmark button, and it's added to your homescreen. It's exactly as seamless as we've always claimed the web could be.

On top of this, sadly, Mozilla adds the Marketplace app, which can install "packaged" apps similar to Chrome OS. It's an attempt to solve the discoverability problem, but it lacks the elegant fluidity of the curated results from the launcher search (not to mention that it's kind of confusing). I'm not wild about curation at the best of times — app stores are a personal pet peeve — but it serves a purpose. We need both: an open web, because that's the spirit of things, and a market destination, because it solves the URL discovery process.

What we're left with is a tragedy of the commons. Mozilla's marketplace can't serve the purpose of the open web, because it's a curated and little-loved space that's only for Firefox OS users. Google is preoccupied with its own Chrome web store, even though it's certainly in a position to organically track the usage of web apps via user searches. Apple couldn't care less. In the meantime, web app discovery gets left with the scraps: URLs and search. There's basically no way, other than word of mouth, that your app will be discovered by normal people unless it comes from an app store. And that, not add-to-homescreen flaws, is why we can't have nice things on the web.