Month: December 2017

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Trends: Mobile Web vs Mobile App

From the August 2017 comScore study slides:

  • users spend 87% of their time in apps, 13% in mobile web, however… (slide 5)
  • across age segments, users’ top 10 apps account for 96-97% of their app time (slide 9) – i.e. Facebook, YouTube, Google Search, etc.
  • mobile web gets 2.2x more unique users per month than apps (slide 6)

From this data, it seems that the casual customer would be more likely to visit a mobile website than download and install an app.

A quote from a recent Morgan Stanley analysis:

‘As a crude generalization, the browser is for more casual audiences and apps are for more frequent and loyal customers.’

 
So both mobile web and mobile apps have their place.

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React.js

React.js is a JavaScript library created and maintained by Facebook for building user interfaces.  React maintains a virtual “DOM” in memory and makes updates to the real DOM only as needed.

React Native applies the same principles to cross-platform UI development for iOS and Android.

React.js components are typically written in JSX, a JavaScript extension syntax that allows inlining HTML with code, among other features.  JSX is optional and not required to use React.

Thoughts?  I really like how UI elements and state are componentized and non-global.  I don’t like how there are now two DOMs – the real one and the React-managed one.

The React tutorial is a Tic Tac Toe game; here’s my completed version.

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JavaScript Array.map() and arrow functions

In newer versions of JavaScript (ECMAScript 5 +) we have the wonderful Array.map() method, and in even newer versions (ECMAScript 6+ aka ECMAScript 2015) we have the new arrow function expressions.

This allows for concise and powerful code like the following:

// an Array of integers
var array1 = [1, 4, 9, 16];

// create a new Array from the original Array using a function
const map1 = array1.map(x => x * 2);

// display; expected output: Array [2, 8, 18, 32]
console.log(map1);