In a saturated app ecosystem, mobile app developers face challenges of discovery, user adoption, and monetization
Mobile App Developers are Suffering … Said my friend as he described why his company stopped building native apps. It's easier to build a business on the web. How could that be?
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2015 piece captures the moment the 'build a native app' default started cracking: weeks before it ran, publisher The Atavist had already abandoned its native apps for the web, citing poor discovery, slow app-store approval, and a smaller readership than its mobile site.
A decade of coverage since has turned that anecdote into a pattern — Apple's long refusal to allow alternative browser engines kept web apps technically hobbled on iOS (WebKit delays and the engine ban), while new consumer entrants like BeReal still struggle to win users' limited attention without a platform shift to ride.
First-order effects
- Developers weighing native vs. web face a quantified verdict by now: RevenueCat's dataset of 75K+ apps and $10B+ in revenue found most apps never reach even $1K/month within two years, making discovery and monetization failures the norm rather than the exception.
- Publishers like The Atavist that exited native apps redirect their engineering toward the web, where they control distribution instead of competing inside store rankings.
Second-order effects
- Apple's grip on distribution pushes developers into defensive structures — after App Tracking Transparency, publishers such as Zynga acquired or built first-party ad tech to keep monetization outside Apple's reach.
- Because Apple simultaneously constrains the web alternative through WebKit stagnation, developers are squeezed from both sides, feeding public friction over how much value the platform attributes to the apps themselves (as Marco.org charged in response to Apple).
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the app economy consolidates around incumbents with installed bases and marketing budgets, while breakout hits require external catalysts — BeReal's experience suggests no amount of product quality substitutes for a platform shift.
- Structurally, this points toward platform-infrastructure dependency becoming the defining developer risk: whoever controls discovery, payments, and tracking sets the economics, and developers' best defense is owning channels (web, first-party ad stacks) the gatekeeper cannot touch.
The trend: Mobile development is shifting from a build-an-app default to a distribution-first calculus, where developers weigh native reach against gatekeeper-controlled discovery, monetization, and a deliberately constrained web alternative.