[HN Gopher] Do not download the app, use the website
___________________________________________________________________
Do not download the app, use the website
Author : foxfired
Score : 1226 points
Date : 2025-07-25 22:07 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (idiallo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (idiallo.com)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I don't even get "The Unseen Cost of Convenience" as frequently
| the app is not "convenient", it's just worse -- especially on
| tablet platforms where a desktop site is just fine, and a desktop
| site at AAA accessibility is perfect.
| moron4hire wrote:
| > Some apps can even record audio
|
| I have started to think this is the real reason why so many apps
| have a messaging and voice chat features, not so they can orifice
| this services to you, but so you'll grant the access so they can
| spy on you and sell it to advertisers.
|
| I randomly decided to try my hand at pottery using clay I've dug
| up from my yard. Talked about this in person with a few people,
| but hadn't posted anywhere online about it. Suddenly, Amazon is
| suggesting pottery equipment and supplies to me.
| simondotau wrote:
| One of those people might have googled about pottery, or did a
| casual Amazon search for indicative pricing, on their phone
| while on your Wi-Fi connection.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Sure, that's possible.
|
| But nobody in that ecosystem deserves the benefit of the
| doubt.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| But knowing the truth gives _you_ power.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| "so they can orifice this services"
|
| haha, that was a funny autocorrect (or diction) error, or maybe
| an even funnier Freudian slip!
| simondotau wrote:
| For what it's worth, iPhone shows a visible notification
| whenever the microphone is actively used. While you're within
| an app, this will show as a small orange dot.
|
| If an app attempts to use the microphone in the background,
| it'll appear similarly to a phone call, but orange or red in
| colour.
| velocity3230 wrote:
| The same is true for Android.
| i80and wrote:
| I 100% agree with this, but a significant way that mobile
| websites often decay the experience compared to the app is with
| very short-lived login sessions.
|
| Even when the experience is otherwise basically identical, I've
| found that login sessions in a browser are sometimes measured in
| days, where in the app sessions never expire.
|
| Which feels like app install metric juicing to me.
| phillipseamore wrote:
| Note that Safari will remove storage for a site if it hasn't
| been accessed in 7 days.
| retropragma wrote:
| That doesn't sound right. Have you seen documentation on
| this?
| hackingonempty wrote:
| Do you have an iPhone? Safari for iOS deletes all cookies older
| than a week unless you add the site to your home screen.
| radicality wrote:
| Whoa, is that right, I somehow never knew this. Why does it
| do that, does it still make sense if 3rd party cookies are
| disabled? And is there a way to disable it apart from the add
| to home screen?
| Aachen wrote:
| Dutch: https://appdwang.nl
|
| German: https://appzwang.de
|
| I don't know if they're affiliated but I recently came across one
| after already knowing of the other. The name means something like
| "app compulsion" in both languages, as in being forced to use
| apps. Very much in line with the submitted article above
|
| Is there such a resource for English already? A place or movement
| we can link to
| rambambram wrote:
| Appdwang seems to be inspired by the German initiative, I found
| after clicking around there.
|
| It's a good initiative, and I hope (non-tech) people realize
| more about this.
| markbao wrote:
| Don't agree, but to each their own. The native app experience for
| every app noted in the article is better and smoother than the
| mobile web version, in my opinion. Lots of people hate Electron
| apps, which suggests to me that my preference for native apps
| isn't unique.
|
| Web apps can ask for your location or microphone the same way
| native apps can. Just reject it, there's nothing that says you
| have to accept on either platform, so to say that's a negative
| for native apps is odd.
|
| The biggest downside of native apps is you can't customize them
| with extensions or user styles like you can with websites.
| thwarted wrote:
| Mobile apps are so limited compared to an actual web browser's
| interface. The reddit mobile app only lets you view one
| topic/conversation at a time. Same with the IMDB app; it's
| impossible to do any research, like comparing actors or movies,
| using the IMDB mobile app because the flows are all captive and
| there's very limited ways to navigate between the resources.
| With a browser, I can open up multiple sets of content at once.
| So many mobile apps are just fixed views and offer no
| compelling interface for anything but the extremely limited way
| they want (force) you to use their app. The fact that a browser
| allows multiple tabs and can do bookmarking makes up for (works
| around) the relatively lack luster interfaces both website and
| mobile apps have.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| Mobile IMDB is not the best example -- simply navigating
| backwards causes a page reload, or at least a long stall and
| jitter as the page scrolls you around. I'd prefer an app
| experience (however I just use the Letterboxd app instead.)
|
| Tabs are a big win for mobile web, I agree. I just don't
| think it outweighs the annoyance of navigating the app in
| more traditional ways.
| VoidWarranty wrote:
| The reason I believe the web experience is inferior is because
| companies put more resources into apps at the expense of the
| web.
|
| Apps break often. They need a lot of support. Everything must
| be constantly updated. You never know when Samsung or Apple
| will push an update that breaks things because of some esoteric
| policy shift or setting change.
|
| But the web? If you do it right, maintenence is much easier. If
| things do break: users can try different browsers or devices to
| get around instead of being bricked.
|
| I can't be the only one who _never _ updates software on my
| phone until I absolutely have to. Everything is so brittle. I'm
| sick of being gaslit that apps make that better. Despite it's
| own horrible implementations, the web is far more stable.
| bitpush wrote:
| > The reason I believe the web experience is inferior is
| because companies put more resources into apps at the expense
| of the web.
|
| The main reason is just a single company - Apple. They have
| been hell bent on nerfing Safari so that they can continue
| their rent seeking behavior on App Store.
|
| If Spotify has a functional mobile website, they cant take
| 30% cut from their app. The way Apple does is 2 fold. 1)
| deliberating not investing $$ into Safari 2) claiming that
| you'll get malware from internet.
|
| Both are hypocritical.
| mvanbaak wrote:
| Google play store is no better
| h4ck_th3_pl4n3t wrote:
| In this discussion, both can be bad faith actors.
|
| It's not a defensive argument about "but he did it too"!
|
| That's not how you get to a better solution to the
| problem at hand.
|
| On iOS there is no effective way to install sideloaded
| apps, therefore this rent seeking behavior is even more
| hostile to the user.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Yes that's why there are so many great PWAs on Android and
| companies don't make apps for Android and instead tell
| their users to use the web app...
|
| And Spotify hasn't had in app purchasing of subscriptions
| on iOS for over a decade. Apple has never once said you
| would get malware by using Safari.
| bitpush wrote:
| Spotify was an example, but since you were harping on it.
| Why is it that on desktop everyone uses spotify.com to
| listen to music, purchase subscription but when it comes
| to iPhone, we have to install an app from the App Store.
|
| Who do you think is stopping from that happening?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Well seeing that you could play music in the background
| from Safari since 2007, Spotify is the one forcing you to
| use an app
|
| Apple makes no money from the Spotify app being on the
| iPhone and hadn't for over a decade.
| h4ck_th3_pl4n3t wrote:
| This is an untrue statement.
|
| Music was played by the iTunes process on mobile until
| 2016, and only a single audio stream at a time. How dare
| you wanted a fade in/out with less than 3 seconds
| latency!
|
| And even then Apple was reluctant to implement a correct
| Promise based Audio API in WebKit, which in turn was
| incompatible with all other Web Browsers (up until today,
| btw) and also had very different audio formats supported
| that were only compatible with iOS due to proprietary
| patents.
|
| Saying WebKit played music in 2007 is literally a worse
| experience than a Flash web player doing that.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| It is very true, you think the only way thst music came
| from your phone before 2016 was iTunes? It was a hack
| that streaming services - mostly radio streaming
| services- used before iOS 4 when apps could play music in
| the background used because Safari was the only thing
| that could run in the background.
|
| The question was why did Spotify have to use an app
| instead of using the web.
|
| But then again, are you really saying that Android users
| don't use the app?
| ralfd wrote:
| > Why is it that on desktop everyone uses spotify.com to
| listen to music
|
| But ... I don't?
|
| I download and install Spotify.app on my computer (at
| least my gf does on hers, I use Apple Music). Maybe I am
| the weird one? No I am not, I skimmed the Spotify
| subreddit and most use the app on PC/Mac: It has keyboard
| shortcuts, people find it nicer being its own program
| instead some browser tab, it is more lightweight, it
| provides offline play and crossfading and has (freemium
| and paid) higher bitrate than web. It is you who are
| missing out.
| yownie wrote:
| >I can't be the only one who _never _ updates software on my
| phone until I absolutely have to.
|
| right there with you brother
| idlemonk wrote:
| I do the same thing and i wonder why
| pixl97 wrote:
| >But the web? If you do it right, maintenence is much easier
|
| Eh, I'll argue this isn't as true as you think. Browsers are
| constantly updated these days and have their own fun things
| that break or mess with experiences.
|
| But that's not the biggest issue with browsers, at least on
| the PC, it's that the average user seems completely incapable
| of keeping mal/adware off their device. For those users the
| app world is an escape from the hell they were in.
|
| For me as a power user apps suck. But they became popular
| quickly for a reason.
| SapporoChris wrote:
| https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/malware-adware/more-
| than...
|
| That link was posted two days ago, but it's not unusual
| news. Phone apps are not an escape from mal/adware.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| As a mobile dev who's done a little web work, my experience
| has been the opposite. If you're writing your apps with
| native OS SDKs and mostly stock widgets (don't go reinventing
| wheels for the sake of branding), maintenance generally isn't
| too bad.
|
| Web app projects on the other hand always feel some degree of
| held together by bubblegum and duct tape. Do so much as
| breathe wrong and they fall apart (which is part of why the
| industry has become docker-centric). None of the old web
| projects I have laying around are trivial to get into good
| enough shape to develop on again, whereas I can pick up and
| old iOS app that hasn't been touched in a decade and getting
| it running in an afternoon.
|
| I will say however that there's a class of poorly built cross
| platform mobile app that I've come to abhor, because as you
| say they're brittle and break easily on top of generally
| being unpleasant to use.
| noodletheworld wrote:
| I feel like many web developers want this to be true, but it
| is _categorically false_.
|
| When you target a higher level abstraction, be it web, or
| flutter or whatever, you are explicitly choosing not to
| follow the platform native UX.
|
| It's more convenient to developers not to have to worry about
| that.
|
| That's it.
|
| Web is easy. It's free.
|
| That doesn't mean it's _better_ , or that it's even
| _possible_ for it to be as good as a native experience.
|
| You _can_ make a web app that is good; but it is the
| unavoidable and undeniable reality that web applications have
| a glass ceiling.
|
| It is. Not. Possible. to write a web app that is as good as
| the equivalent native application can be. Certainly not a
| _cross browser_ one.
|
| There are reasons, you can blame Apple and safari or whatever
| you want, but that's where it's at, today.
|
| > The reason I believe the web experience is inferior is
| because companies put more resources into apps at the expense
| of the web.
|
| It's not a falsifiable argument.
|
| "That is not as good because I believe less effort was put
| into it".
|
| Ok.
|
| I believe that for the equivalent effort you could create a
| better web app than a native app. I think you could measure
| that, and it would be pretty clear.
|
| However, I believe many large native applications could not
| be implemented using the web platform. I think react native
| and the disaster that is is a reasonably solid proof that
| this is true.
|
| They're worse because web is worse, not because they didn't
| bother to put effort in; because it wasn't _possible_ to do
| it using the web platform.
|
| Native is always better if you out the effort in. It has
| capabilities that web doesn't.
|
| It is impossible for it not to be better.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I agree with you: I always use native apps where they exist, on
| mobile or desktop and only use web apps if I'm forced too.
| montroser wrote:
| The author is not contesting that the app experience is better.
| Yeah, the web experience is worse -- because the product people
| are treating the entire web presence as a _marketing surface_
| for the app. So, the web version is basically an ad for the
| app. This is true of Reddit, Yelp, and others. How could it not
| be worse?
|
| It's too bad because it's not like the web is incapable of
| providing a beautiful ux for those products. But then so why do
| you think these companies employ massive teams of devs, for
| Android, and then again for iOS, reimplementing their
| functionality on every platform? All that to provide you with
| that sweet extra smooth native "feel", 2% nicer than the web
| could do? No, it's not for you...
| dylan604 wrote:
| > No, it's not for you...
|
| This is key. Companies pushing apps is not for your benefit.
| It's so they can further monetize you right under your nose
| and with your full permission by accepting their EULA. This
| is just a furtherance of the if you don't pay for the product
| you are the product.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Companies still have to provide value for them to attract
| users. It's cynical to only look at the value the company
| gets and ignoring the value users and advertisers get.
| immibis wrote:
| Companies have to provide the perception of providing
| value.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I argue that this decade shows you do not have to provide
| value. You capture the market yester-decade and then you
| can hold the users hostage as you do any and everything
| to appeal to shareholders and advertisers.
|
| This is indeed a short term strategy, but tech companies
| right now are thinking very short term.
| notyourwork wrote:
| Agreed, this is post-capture monetization.
| charcircuit wrote:
| How do you hold users hostage without providing them
| value?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Nostalgia, network effects, and boiling thr frog. Then
| you build on that with business incentives; you may not
| like Facebook, but you need to advertise there because
| that's where everyone is.
|
| Basically, you rely on goodwill from yester-year and
| slowly ad in intrusive stuff that users adjust to. Thars
| enshittification in its raw essence. Admittedly, this
| mostly works because the general user is not "active" and
| will not take the time to migrate unless something
| absolutely scandalous happens. For them, it's easier
| putting up with ads than trying to log into an ad free
| substitute.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Nostalgia changes how people perceive value. Network
| effects is about how exponential value can be gained from
| linear user growth. Boiling the frog us about slowly
| doing things to avoid changing how people perceive value.
| None of these are a sign a product has no value.
|
| No one would advertise with Facebook if there was no
| value from purchasing ad space. The billions of dollars
| people spend is evidence there is value there for
| advertisers.
|
| >will not take the time to migrate
|
| Sure, people don't actively seek to maximize the value
| they receive, but that doesn't mean what they are
| currently getting value from doesn't have value.
| thfuran wrote:
| > None of these are a sign a product has no value.
|
| You described the majority of those as being about the
| perception of value rather than value.
|
| >No one would advertise with Facebook if there was no
| value from purchasing ad space. The billions of dollars
| people spend is evidence there is value there for
| advertisers
|
| No one is disputing that the advertisers are getting
| value. The pursuit of advertiser value at the expense of
| users is the complaint.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >You described the majority of those as being about the
| perception of value rather than value.
|
| Which is why they weren't useful to bring up.
| thfuran wrote:
| No, the difference between value and perceived value was
| pretty much their point.
| charcircuit wrote:
| I see perceived values as more of a multiplier. If an app
| had 0 value, 0 times anything is still 0. You can't take
| hostages over something with no value. If people didn't
| value their life it wouldn't work, similarly if people
| saw 0 value in an app they wouldn't use it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Network effects is about how exponential value can be
| gained from linear user growth
|
| network effects is the momentum that keeps everyone from
| stopping the use of the service/product. it takes too
| much energy to stop, so people just keep using. it also
| helps there's nothing to replace. any fledgling service
| that might offer an alternative just gets bought up by
| the service.
| econ wrote:
| It is both mysterious and comical how we manage to
| enshitify every corner of our existence. I can't think of
| anything unrubbed with the magic poop wand.
| econ wrote:
| Must be hard to understand or something?
|
| The scope of the problem is much larger. If there is no
| "let's not use the app" movement and if there was it
| wouldn't be big enough to pick up on the radar.
|
| We have bigger things to worry about as the shit is
| oozing out of everything.
| arthurbrown wrote:
| Monopoly, network effect
| charcircuit wrote:
| Like the other posters you are giving reasons why people
| will not switch to alternatives, but you are failing to
| argue why people are stuck using an app that provides no
| value.
| dylan604 wrote:
| for one, it's a nice little icon on the desktop of their
| device. you click it, and it launches the very thing you
| are looking to do. a browser means you have to click to
| open the browser. then you have to type the specific URL
| which is already something way more demanding than
| clicking the single icon even if they _do_ remember the
| URL.
|
| for another, devs are definitely making the web
| experience subpar which has been mentioned elsewhere in
| this thread. most websites are just adverts for their
| apps if they function at all any more. loading a website
| on mobile is even worse than desktop as they pester you
| with "it's better in the app" pop ups.
|
| people find browsing an app store much easier than
| browsing the web. in fact, do people browse the web at
| all any more. search is shit now, so discovery by search
| is not what it used to be. click through from search is
| also plummeting as "search assistant" type responses
| means no reason to click through to sites.
|
| how many more reasons do you need?
| charcircuit wrote:
| >how many more reasons do you need?
|
| One. Because I don't believe one exists. The reasons you
| gave of it looking nice and accomplishing something the
| user wants to do provide value to the user.
| II2II wrote:
| Take Reddit, which is one of the few sites mentioned here
| that I use. At least initially, the value provided is
| getting rid of the constant prompts to load the site in
| the Reddit app. Even though I use old.reddit.com, which
| doesn't have those prompts, there are times when it
| redirects me to the new website automatically. Does it
| offer value beyond getting rid of those messages?
| Perhaps, but I doubt that it is the type of value that I
| would be looking for.
| charcircuit wrote:
| How about the value of being able to talk to people who
| share the same hobby you do. Or the value of being able
| to see a community made wiki about some topic you are
| trying to learn about. Even being able to see cat
| pictures is valuable to people.
| thfuran wrote:
| You can do that on the website.
| charcircuit wrote:
| I never claimed it doesn't.
| thfuran wrote:
| Then what was your claim?
| charcircuit wrote:
| That the mobile app is providing value to people. So
| companies paying to make the app are also providing value
| to people.
| c-hendricks wrote:
| None of that is unique to the app though, and existed
| before the app.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Nothing existed before a user was born. It is impossible
| for someone that has always had something to imagine in a
| real manner what not having it would be like. Hell, if
| there's an AWS outage for a couple of hours, those that
| have always had it freak out like the world is ending.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| We should be able to get that value in a fair way without
| giving up massive amounts of information in sketchy ways.
| II2II wrote:
| I tend to use Reddit on mobile as a read-only medium, but
| I don't see why one couldn't contribute to
| conversations/wikis with a mobile browser. One can
| certainly do so through their website with a desktop
| browser. _If_ there is a barrier, it would be artificial.
|
| It's also worth noting that I have nothing against apps.
| I use them to read RSS feeds, download podcasts, etc..
| Yet those are independent of any particular service and
| there is enough choice between apps that I can use one
| that respects my privacy. I am not being limited in any
| way. If anything, it is more empowering since the
| developers of a dedicated RSS feed reader is more likely
| to design an app that is directed towards the needs of
| its users. In contrast, the Reddit app is directed
| towards the needs of Reddit.
| thfuran wrote:
| We have moved beyond that. Even if you pay, you're usually
| still the product.
| dylan604 wrote:
| moving beyond is usually what happens when something is
| furtheranced
| bornfreddy wrote:
| It is - from the company point of view.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Isn't that precisely the point with this thread? It's all
| from the company's perspective. They've just gaslit the
| users into thinking it is from the user's perspective.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| > It's too bad because it's not like the web is incapable of
| providing a beautiful ux for those products.
|
| I've never seen a web app I was happy with being a web app. I
| understand that a lot of people prefer web-based tools but a
| lot of us cannot stand them and try to get our work out of
| the browser as much as possible because we dislike the UX of
| the browser platform.
| aiisjustanif wrote:
| How about Google Flights as an example?
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I've never really used Google flights: I tend to buy
| delta tickets either on my desktop via the website or via
| the Delta mobile app.
|
| I prefer the Apple Weather app on desktop and mobile to
| weather websites, though; and, I prefer the Google Map
| mobile app to mobile website.
| DirkH wrote:
| G maps is surprisingly doable. Been using it as a web app
| for years now whenever my main map app CityMapper fails.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| The web is definitely incapable of hacking the speed of
| light, though. And if you want truly instantaneous search - I
| mean deterministic, keystroke by keystroke - you have to put
| your data as close to the customer as possible, ideally right
| on the same device, ideally right in the same process.
|
| Is this necessary for most commercial projects? Of course
| not. But many of the programs I consider the nicest to work
| with today are that way precisely because someone fought back
| against the call of the network.
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| I wonder if that explains why focus and scroll (via arrow
| keys and page up/down) is broken on so many websites.
| yownie wrote:
| it doesn't seem like you even read the relatively short post
| since:
|
| "The native app experience for every app noted in the article"
| doesn't make any sense, the article lists none.
|
| "Lots of people hate Electron apps, which suggests to me that
| my preference for native apps isn't unique."
|
| again......what does this have to do with the article at all?
| Aren't you merely reinforcing the articles point?
|
| " Just reject it, there's nothing that says you have to accept
| on either platform, so to say that's a negative for native apps
| is odd."
|
| Except that most app's would stop working if anyone confined
| them to the minimum amount of data required, case in point any
| scooter app that won't let you rent unless you have google
| location services turned on vs just regular GPS.
|
| OPs point is that app are a walled garden of functionality that
| lock users in because of expedience for living life.
| jjulius wrote:
| >"The native app experience for every app noted in the
| article" doesn't make any sense, the article lists none.
|
| At the risk of nitpicking, the second paragraph mentions
| Reddit, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
| opan wrote:
| >The native app experience for every app noted in the article
| is better and smoother than the mobile web version, in my
| opinion. Lots of people hate Electron apps, which suggests to
| me that my preference for native apps isn't unique.
|
| I want native programs on my PC, and fewer apps on my phone.
|
| I get all my apps from F-Droid. If I need to use Steam chat or
| view the menu at Taco Bell, mobile website it is. I am not
| gonna put their proprietary software on my phone. This also
| brings up another interesting difference. There is no desktop
| program for Taco Bell, that would be super weird. I think other
| comments already addressed that, but a lot of mobile apps are
| basically just the website.
|
| A game like Luanti or some sort of Tetris is something I'd want
| native in both places (desktop and mobile). Games in browsers
| are a mess.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| If this was actually done, let's say as a government-imposed
| requirement, we may actually see some innovation in browser
| usage and the release of new UI frameworks.
| amarshall wrote:
| Many of the "native" apps on mobile app stores are React
| Native, though.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| Why quotes? React native is native
| wiseowise wrote:
| React Native uses native ui.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| For me, the last straw with the Amazon app was when it started
| injecting ads into the Android text selection UI
| Intermernet wrote:
| That sounds like a potential attack vector. Similar to
| copy/pasting commands from web pages. I'm surprised it's
| allowed, but I suppose it's also very tricky to fix.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| That's partially by design. Apple makes it a pain to make
| proper PWA's, and companies with websites make extremely
| intrusive elements to ruin the mobile website in order drive to
| the app. Which is easier to monetize and harder to adblock, I
| imagine. Some places outright disable the mobile view for the
| app.
|
| More simply, I don't need an app for every website I visit. a
| bookmark is much more lightweight than downloading yet another
| app to clutter my drawer.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| I'm not apple lover, but safari support for PWAs is pretty
| good. What do you think is missing?
| judah wrote:
| I work on PWABuilder, Microsoft's open source dev tool that
| packages PWAs for app stores.
|
| I can say with certainty Apple has been hostile to PWAs.
|
| Unlike Google Play and Microsoft Store, iOS App Store
| doesn't allow publishing PWAs. (You instead have to build a
| native web view app to load your PWA.) And many of the PWA
| features just don't work on mobile Safari.
| tootie wrote:
| Honestly haven't noticed this. What I have noticed is that few
| if any apps implement a "find text on this page" which I use
| constantly in browser.
| aflag wrote:
| Isn't the mobile app of Reddit just using electron as well?
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| With exception to Reddit, I generally prefer apps to sites
| because mobile process management is considerably nicer than
| browser tab management.
|
| App processes are sorted in order of most recent use, keeping
| the most relevant ones at hand, and those that aren't used for
| a while just silently go away without much fuss.
|
| In comparison browser tabs aren't organized unless the user
| does that themselves, and so with each web app tab management
| overhead increases. Some browsers have an idle tab auto-close
| feature, but that closes the wrong tab (usually a page with
| info pertinent to something I'm working on) quite often.
| "Installing" PWAs can be an ok-ish workaround, but the problem
| there is that a lot of sites don't have the little bit of
| manifest magic that makes saving to home screen "install" a PWA
| instead of just opening a browser tab.
| radley wrote:
| > The native app experience for every app noted in the article
| is better and smoother than the mobile web version
|
| I've found it to be the opposite. Perhaps if you're heavily
| involved on Reddit, LinkedIn, etc., then it's more convenient.
| But I only go to those sites via a search link. Why would I
| want to spend time and effort installing the app, just to see
| the same content I just landed on?
|
| It's a huge red flag when websites push their app so
| intrusively. It means the app has little value and will be just
| as bad or worse when you use it.
| Zak wrote:
| People who know what Electron is and profess hatred for it are
| usually mostly annoyed by the fact that it bundles all of
| Chrome, giving the app an absurd memory and storage footprint
| relative to its functionality. People don't complain the same
| way when apps are made with Tauri.
| meehai wrote:
| Tbh, the web won the application platform mostly because it's a
| standard. Everybody knows html, css and a little JS.
|
| On the other hand, for mobile apps, there is still a device-
| specific mentality.
|
| Imagine web apps being built with a different flavor for all
| the major browsers...
|
| I hope that the same level of standardization comes to mobile
| apps too with the option to use more device-specific features
| on top of the generic UI.
| BrtByte wrote:
| But I think a lot of the frustration comes from how
| aggressively companies push the app, even when the web version
| is perfectly serviceable for casual use
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Don't forget the ability to send push notifications. I think
| that's one of the main reasons -- it turns your whole
| relationship with a product on its head: you lose control over
| when you're engaging, instead they can literally push their
| services and ads on you.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| I have never liked notifications on iOS so I can't say for sure
| but I do know that on Android it's been possible to disable
| certain types of notifications or demote the urgency for at
| least 5 years now.
|
| Whether or not most people are aware of this ability is another
| question, I guess.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Can do same on iOS. I get very few notifications - lots of
| apps want me to authorize them but I only do so for the ones
| that actually need to do it (PagerDuty, instant messaging,
| pushover). Also if any app abuses the privilege it loses it
| immediately (looking at you Twitter, eBay and Amazon).
| AaronAPU wrote:
| I get almost zero notifications on iOS, you can just disable
| them. There are a couple exceptions but they are high-signal
| and business purpose.
| addaon wrote:
| > I get almost zero notifications on iOS, you can just
| disable them. There are a couple exceptions but they are
| high-signal and business purpose.
|
| The one that gets me is Uber. For several minutes a month
| while traveling, I really want their notifications. But
| once a day when I don't, they use it to send advertisements
| for services I can't even use (no Uber or Uber Eats service
| where I live). I used to turn off notifications the first
| ad I got after getting home (usually within a day), but
| then realized it's easier just to delete the app each time.
| And if Lyft hasn't advertised at me by the next time I'm
| traveling, and they're still installed, well, they're the
| ones getting my dollars, since who has time to download an
| app each use?
| dontlaugh wrote:
| You can disable the notifications and enable the live
| view. It'll notify about the current ride.
|
| At least for now there are no ads there.
| addaon wrote:
| Huh, I sort of assumed that they used the same permission
| ("pop crap up on my lock screen"). Didn't occur to me
| they were different. Thanks.
| teagoat wrote:
| You can get push notifications to your phone from a website
| through the browser, even when that website isn't still open.
|
| But presumably developers have more control over app
| notification look & feel vs browser notifications?
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Browser push isn't enabled by default which ime is a huge
| difference.
| frollogaston wrote:
| On iPhone at least, neither is app push
| frollogaston wrote:
| That's relatively recent. For years, iPhone PWAs didn't
| support push, and there are still other big reasons they're
| not really a thing. Like try making Firebase auth work in a
| PWA.
| fugalfervor wrote:
| On Android/Graphene, I recommend permanently turning on do not
| disturb and adding apps to the allowlist. Opt in to
| notifications, rather than opting out.
| velocity3230 wrote:
| Or just disable notifications for the various apps you don't
| want to hear from.
| deepsun wrote:
| > If you've ever opened Reddit, LinkedIn, Pinterest
|
| And Facebook. I swear they intentionally make the website as bad
| as possible for mobile browsers. Explicitly disabled sending
| messages a few years ago. Do they really think someone who
| resisted their push to apps for 10+ years would submit one day?
| djoldman wrote:
| just for those who don't know:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/
| Tmpod wrote:
| Unfortunately, i.reddit.com is no longer available :(
|
| Fortunately, Redlib exists: https://github.com/redlib-
| org/redlib
| huqedato wrote:
| Well good advice... in theory.
|
| Most of websites I use regularly are simply not "optimized" for
| mobile: broken features, display errors, inadequate UI, just
| unusable on the phone. And it's intentional: they're sabotaging
| the mobile experience just to push you into downloading their
| app.
|
| I have no option than using their f..g app.
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| Yelp is one of the worst. So much so that I will do everything
| in my power to never download their app out of spite.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Why would you even use Yelp the website?
| djoldman wrote:
| I use yelp exclusively for photos of the menu, food, and
| display cases (with prices).
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| What's the alternative? I don't use Google products and
| Apple maps shows Yelp reviews.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Why would you use their app if they are bostile towards you.
| That doesn't make any sense.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Because they're my bank, or some service essential to my life
| with no good alternative. Google maps, for instance.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I too use my bank app which they require to as mfa but
| google maps is totally usable from the website, that is at
| least one less.
| fsflover wrote:
| Another argument is apps force you to use the Apple/Google
| duopoly on mobile, whereas websites can be opened on desktop and
| on GNU/Linux phones.
| creatonez wrote:
| The Discord web app is nearly identical to the desktop app. The
| main things you are missing are global push-to-talk and rich
| presence (i.e. dicord spies on your process list and tells other
| people what games you are playing). I'm always surprised more
| people don't use it.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Is that how it works? Don't you need to call into it with the
| Social SDK?
| Tmpod wrote:
| Nope. Games can do that to provide richer information, but
| Discord Desktop does scan your process list and even let's
| you chose which software to show or add a custom new one from
| the process list.
| Uvix wrote:
| I also lose the ability to keep my place in my browser when I
| switch to it.
|
| (Yes, in theory, I could open another browser window for it
| instead of another tab. In practice, Chromium will pick the
| wrong window to remember the tabs from when it's restarted, so
| I try to stick to one window.)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It remembers all the tabs: it just doesn't open them all.
| Ctrl+Shift+T should bring the rest back.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > Ctrl+Shift+T should bring the rest back.
|
| This is the shortcut for "undo close tab" on most non-macOS
| web browsers. Command-Shift-T for macOS, W instead of T for
| undo close window.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| New Microsoft Edge has a weird key combination mapping; I
| assumed that was a Chromium thing.
| Uvix wrote:
| Hmm. They don't show as "recently closed tabs" in the
| history, but I haven't tried the key combination. I'll have
| to give that a try if it happens again.
| vunderba wrote:
| Another advantage to using the Discord website is that it's
| easier to style/modify using extensions such as tampermonkey.
| Tmpod wrote:
| I agree, I always use Discord web over the Electron app. Beyond
| what you said, using it in the browser also has better
| backward/forward behaviour and it's easier to handle media and
| links. Also, being inspectable is quite nice.
| bramhaag wrote:
| I use the web app on my phone as well, and it's... usable. The
| mobile app is quite slow, probably because React Native apps
| are far from being native, so in that regard the experience is
| the same. Being able to block all enshittified features is
| quite nice.
| bitwize wrote:
| But the experience is better on the app!
|
| [ DOWNLOAD APP NOW ]
|
| [continue with chrome like a scrub]
| Xunjin wrote:
| Continue with firefox like an old (wise) person.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| I dream of developing mobile sites that can play audio with the
| screen off and use the same media controls as apps (think: music
| player apps while driving). A lot of the things that make mobile
| sites second class is the lack of screen-off functionality.
| ryao wrote:
| I have done this to videos on my iPhone using extensions called
| baking soda and vinegar. I then put the video into Picture in
| Picture mode, turn off the phone, turn it on, press the play
| button and turn it off again, with the audio still playing. It
| is not as convenient as the YouTube application, but I cannot
| copy and paste text from paused videos in the YouTube
| application or in YouTube comments either.
| foxfired wrote:
| You sure can: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/API/MediaSessio...
| garciansmith wrote:
| The Video Background Play Fix extension for Firefox on Android
| comes close.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Ironfox/Firefox keeps playing audio when the screen is off and
| can pause/play from the lock screen and notification pulldown
| screen. I wrote a simple music player around the html audio
| tag.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| iOS Safari does this, at least on bandcamp and SoundCloud.
| wonger_ wrote:
| You should! The browser APIs are straightforward:
| navigator.mediaSession.metadata = new MediaMetadata({
| title: song.name, album: song.category,
| artwork: [{src: song.imagePath, type: 'image/jpg'}] })
| navigator.mediaSession.setActionHandler('play', player.play)
| navigator.mediaSession.setActionHandler('pause', player.pause)
| navigator.mediaSession.setActionHandler('nexttrack',
| player.nextTrack)
| navigator.mediaSession.setActionHandler('previoustrack',
| player.prevTrack) // song and player are instances of
| state
|
| Then you get those native media controls. Even stuff like "hey
| google, play/pause/skip"
| sltkr wrote:
| Does it work on iOS too?
| wonger_ wrote:
| MDN says yes as of iOS 15. Don't have an iPhone to double
| check atm.
| masterj wrote:
| Yes: https://caniuse.com/mdn-api_navigator_mediasession
|
| Try using Spotify's mobile web app for an example. Works
| great.
| Aachen wrote:
| I wish Android would let apps run with the screen off. The text
| to speech api kills itself after a few minutes, halfway through
| the blog post I'm having it read to me... It works if I keep
| the screen on but then I can't put it in my pocket and it
| drains the battery way faster
|
| Browser or native doesn't matter, both have this issue. Heck,
| this is Google's own software that gets killed: the utility
| that submits the string to it is still there when I unlock the
| screen. It's probably just me but I really miss the Android 4
| which I had customised to death so it would only run the things
| I wanted (no bloat): the battery still lasts _weeks_ (the
| device is >10 years old!) if you don't ask it to do anything
| because nothing runs in the background. However, when _I
| choose_ to run an app and don 't turn it off before locking the
| screen, it'd just keep running
|
| But yea, that wouldn't work for the general public
| koolala wrote:
| I hate how Android ALWAYS asks to use the App. There is no "I
| prefer websites" button.
| Aachen wrote:
| That's not Android, that's whatever software you're using. I
| think I've noticed this in previous versions of Firefox mobile
| before, but not as much recently. And essentially never in
| Lightning browser. Where are you seeing this?
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I installed the GitHub app and immediately all the links on
| Google search to GitHub projects turned to "open in app".
| Absolutely toxic degradation of experience, taking meaningful
| data about where I was going to navigate and turning into
| useless dumb ignorant OS level garbage.
|
| I uninstalled the app, almost immediately. Because it poisoned
| my web experience, destroyed my ability to see where I was
| navigating on the web.
|
| But still Chrome shows GitHub links as "open I'm app". Even
| though the app is uninstalled, even though Chrome will open
| them, even though all I want and all that would be meaningful
| would be to show me a URL.
|
| It's beyond my imagining how toxically bad apps are. How the OS
| would prefer to poison us with a zero dimensional facimile of
| useful information, to shunt us away from useful experiences to
| route us into the awful bad no good low information indistinct
| app world. Apps suck so bad. The OS does nothing to make apps
| any good. There's no principles, no backbone, no nothing
| outside the web: just co-opting and exploiting users, offering
| low power low information experiences to people who know no
| power, have no agency, on and on.
| wordofx wrote:
| Unless your FB/Google etc. no this isn't why companies want a
| mobile app. They want the infinitely better experience and
| functionality it brings to their users to keep them as customers.
|
| lol downvoted but undisputed.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| What are good examples of apps that have managed to monetize the
| precise location of millions of users in a way that isn't obvious
| (e.g. location-based advertising, or location-based filtering of
| social media content)?
|
| Collecting that data sounds creepy and nefarious, but if i think
| about what Experian and everyone else already knows about me, I
| don't know what information my phone's location would actually
| add that has enough value to build a massive telemetry engine.
|
| But perhaps I am insufficiently paranoid.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| 'Value' and 'how much and who would pay for the information'
| are two different questions. It's clear the answer to the
| latter is 'alot'.
| transcriptase wrote:
| When "location" includes Bluetooth and wifi info, companies
| with a reason to invest can track your movement around a store
| to ~1m accuracy with BLE beacons etc. They know what you looked
| at in an aisle, for how long, and unless you paid in cash what
| you ended up buying via loyalty programs or credit card info.
| They also know, for each product you looked at and bought, or
| looked at and didn't buy, what advertisements you were exposed
| to.
|
| On an individual level who gives a shit, but with large enough
| datasets you can essentially A/B test your way to
| psychologically manipulating people into more sales.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Right, that's how I view it.
|
| Access my data = high creepiness, low value
|
| Aggregate all the data = lower creepiness, high commercial
| value
|
| The big fat caveat to the first is if I'm a target of a
| nation state, or the police attempt to use circumstantial
| location data to pin something on me. Which is very real, and
| more so now than ever.
| lionelholt wrote:
| I thought the main reason is because it's a lot more difficult
| blocking advertisements in an app.
| velocity3230 wrote:
| I VPN home where I run Piholes and block all outbound DNS, DoT
| and port 443 to known DoH hosts.
|
| Works like a charm.
| josephcsible wrote:
| I wish Apple and Google would make rules to the effect of "if
| your app's entire functionality could be done in a regular
| website or PWA, then you can't put a native app on our stores".
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| then they can't charge their app tax!
| nomel wrote:
| > if your app's entire functionality could be done in a regular
| website or PWA, then you can't put a native app on our stores
|
| A very silly threshold, since this would knock out probably 95%
| of the app store, including games, since "websites" are
| extremely capable these days, with full 3d graphics, etc. Then,
| each time safari added a new modern browser feature, more would
| get knocked out.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Why is that a bad thing? Wouldn't we be better off with all
| of them being PWA's?
| Zak wrote:
| It's not a bad thing _for users_. It would reduce the
| ability of Apple and Google to extract revenue from their
| stores though, so they 're motivated to do the opposite.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| For more complex apps, efficiency could be a considerable
| issue. As capable as the web has become, it's not very
| battery friendly for more advanced use cases.
| Zak wrote:
| Sure, native apps can be good for users in some cases,
| but this post isn't about those.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| How many apps that could be websites have in app
| purchases of digital goods?
| karanbhangui wrote:
| Gotta love the HN bubble. Users want apps, not PWAs.
| frollogaston wrote:
| If Apple wanted to make PWAs look like apps, users
| wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Except that's
| not what Apple wants at all.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| If apps were interchangeable with PWAs we'd just call
| PWAs apps. What would be the difference, besides
| distribution?
| frollogaston wrote:
| That would be good too, "progressive web app" is a silly
| name
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I don't think that'd be possible without a considerably
| different web engine than currently exists. Even on
| desktop with Chrome which is the best case scenario
| currently, web apps are visibly different from their
| native counterparts due to differences in things like
| click handling, latency, etc.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Most apps nowadays are already websites inside a thin
| wrapper, and that part is just so it can go on the App
| Store and have certain OS integrations, not for the UI.
| Like yeah React Native implements a button with UIButton,
| but Safari also implements a button with native code.
|
| Good example is Discord. Complex app, only really
| difference for native is something about push-to-talk.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Not quite, at least on iOS. React Native is the dominant
| non-native framework there. I run into web shells on
| occasion but they're unusual relative to desktop.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Oh, I meant React Native, not an actual full-page
| UIWebView rendering the entire app (though there is that
| too). Yeah RN is a totally different renderer, but if
| something works in RN then I expect the same to work in
| web. Discord did both.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| RN isn't quite a web shell, it's more of a hybrid, though
| I have seen RN apps use webviews to inject web app bits
| here and there.
| Zak wrote:
| I don't think the average non-technical person would know
| one from the other aside from the installation process.
| This situation didn't come about because users demanded
| native apps, but because companies profit more from them.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| I think that's a _little_ overstated. Part of a game 's
| functionality is performance and native controls. A website
| can _technically_ do those things, but the JS and WGL
| requirements will _significantly_ hamper performance, and
| getting a browser to hand over native, first-class control of
| the device to the website is largely impossible and usually
| ends up an awkward mess.
|
| And that little asterisk would end up getting abused by
| pretty much everyone. After all, we wouldn't be able to add
| the same functionality to the website because the developers
| we employ for this are only proficient in `<native language
| here>`.
|
| By-intent, it would definitely be a big chunk of the apps out
| there, but I would argue that's a good thing. I don't want an
| App for every brand I interact with, especially since I know
| what they're doing (harvesting my data to sell to brokers to
| make a fraction of a penny more per transaction).
| kingo55 wrote:
| Given how much it seems Apple detests PWAs, I don't ever see
| this happening. One can dream.
| barbazoo wrote:
| What you probably envision but didn't say is that this would be
| in a world where a website could be a first class citizen and
| behave more like an app. Mobile browsers don't have e to be so
| shitty.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Apple almost sort of do. If you have a website and put an app
| on the App Store, it must have functionality that beyond what
| the website already offers.
| fsflover wrote:
| It's sort of the opposite: Developer have to shrink the
| websites' functionality to obey this rule.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Usually they don't, though. They add one iOS feature
| instead.
| fsflover wrote:
| Which could work fine in PWA.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I just despise the constant popups "The experience is better on
| the app, click here to download!"
|
| I read news sites I pay for by scrolling through the home page
| and opening stories I want to read in new tabs, and then slowly
| reading and closing them throughout the day. Your app can't do
| that. Your app doesn't support tabs. It also doesn't support
| basic things like letting me zoom in on an image. And sometimes
| it crashes when I try to load comments.
|
| I'm a paid subscriber, and I _still_ get _constant_ nagging
| _every single day_ to use the app instead that is worse in every
| way.
|
| And I don't even know why. They're just news sites. They don't
| ask for any permissions to slurp up my data. I honestly don't
| have the slightest idea why they keep pushing the app.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| I've added pages to my ios home screen which almost appears as a
| native app with some success. The thing is when the app doesn't
| implicitly show a back button either via bread crumbs, a 'cancel'
| button or similar, navigation becomes more tricky. It beats
| installing random things on my phone though.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| I understand but it's not always with bad intentions.
|
| In the Netherlands we have a system called DigiD to login into to
| most government websites like your taxes and city, etc.
|
| When I contracted for the city of Amsterdam I learned they've
| been pushing hard for the DigiD app to two factor authenticate
| instead of text message, because of contracts Digid charges a lot
| per text message validation and none for app.
| bramhaag wrote:
| In this case there is also a perceivable benefit for the user.
| SMS 2FA is vulnerable to sim swapping, this is not possible
| when TOTPs are delivered in-app. The app is also FOSS [1], so
| even if you're paranoid you can still inspect what data is
| sent.
|
| There are also just some things you cannot realistically do in
| the browser (or over SMS) without having to ship specialised
| hardware to 18 million people, like reading the NFC chip of
| your passport. This is needed for DigiD Substantieel and Hoog,
| which are mandated by the eIDAS regulations.
|
| [1] https://github.com/MinBZK/woo-besluit-broncode-digid-app/
| esseph wrote:
| TOTP is able to be intercepted on the device.
| bramhaag wrote:
| Yes, and that's also true for SMS messages and your
| passwords. That is why having MFA is important.
| esseph wrote:
| You can't intercept a passkey in the same way.
|
| It is also far less likely to be phished, and there is
| nothing transmitted.
|
| TOTP is the modern WPA2 of security - it's just not good
| enough when better alternatives exist.
| lieuwex wrote:
| What kind of risk profile does one have when it is likely
| that both the password is known and malware has been
| installed on the phone, but also just access to an
| ephemeral login session by the attacker (which could be
| obtained even when using a secure enclave by waiting for
| the user to authenticate by themselves) would not be
| enough?
| esseph wrote:
| > password is known
|
| What password?
| SahAssar wrote:
| The DigiID app could interact with websites, that's how it
| works for many other digital IDs in europe.
|
| For example with bankID (sweden, and I think the norway version
| does the same) when you need to authenticate you either scan a
| QR code with the bankID app or select "on the same device" and
| then the website will interact with the bankID API to auth.
|
| Either way you don't need your own app to get proper auth
| working with this sort of government login.
|
| (With bankID the app devs still pay a per-auth price, but that
| is not due to any technical reason, just because its made by a
| profit-driven semi-monopoly)
| lieuwex wrote:
| This is the exact same as DigiD, except that there is no cost
| per-auth, only per-sms. The parent comment is saying that
| Amsterdam wanted the users to install the DigiD app instead
| of relying on SMS authentication.
| nehal3m wrote:
| True, but it does force citizens into a contract with either
| Apple or Google. I don't think that is a good idea both from
| the perspective of individual freedom and national sovereignty.
| Beijinger wrote:
| Nothing beats a hardware token.
|
| I would also use Yubikey for banking, but I am scared as f.
| what happens if I lose it while traveling abroad.
| esseph wrote:
| Carry two, leave another in a safe somewhere in your home
| country?
|
| Otherwise, yeah... Passkey it is
| devman0 wrote:
| The principle issue with hardware keys as implemented
| today via FIDO2 or U2F is that you can't enroll them
| without having them in your physical possession, which
| means if you have a backup key stored offsite, you have
| to fetch it anytime you sign up for a new service.
| Wilder7977 wrote:
| A good strategy for this is to enroll it at day 0 for the
| most sensitive systems (e.g., password manager, email
| accounts). This way you are able to use it as a backup in
| the sense of giving the option to reset or access (e.g.,
| via backup codes) all the services, without being
| necessarily enrolled in all of them.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| I think it should be standard to allow registering multiple
| tokens, which would be equivalent to a backup for your
| purposes.
| Beijinger wrote:
| You can copy this if you buy two. You would have to store
| one somewhere, where it can be fedexed to you.
| mystifyingpoi wrote:
| No need to fedex, just have a trusted person read you the
| code back over the phone.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I don't want a hardware token generator since it is
| guaranteed that I will lose it.
| Wilder7977 wrote:
| I wish that was an option, in most cases the phone becomes
| the hardware token, and that can be lost too. Or broken, or
| out of power or without internet connection.
|
| I even have a personal anecdote. My wife "lost" her phone
| in Iceland. I make her login to find-my-phone with her
| google account, and 2fa was needed. Thankfully she had her
| Yubikey in her keychain (plus, we enrolled each other's
| key), so she was able to login. Push notification or
| TOTP/SMS were all not an option.
| msgodel wrote:
| This could have just been TOTP.
| frollogaston wrote:
| TOTP standard made sense, but mainstream implementation was
| user-hostile at the start with stuff like Google
| Authenticator not letting you copy keys, then afterwards
| still making it unclear under what circumstances they're
| backed up. Nowadays it's user-unfriendly at best.
|
| I like how we went full-circle to Passkeys which are
| basically a "remember me FOREVER" button, implemented kinda
| like SSH keys. Should call it that too, and also ditch the
| like 4 prompts it gives you first.
| msgodel wrote:
| >"remember me FOREVER" button, implemented kinda like SSH
| keys.
|
| Here's a better idea: just use openssh or at least
| openssh's key formats since none of the big companies can
| manage anything better.
| frollogaston wrote:
| That would've been nice, cause instead Passkeys are kinda
| locked into whatever walled garden you chose.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| At that scale, the amount of support getting a city of people
| to understand that is overwhelming.
| reflexe wrote:
| I think that while data is a major point here, in my opinion,
| these are the reasons apps are preferred by developers:
|
| 1. Persistence: while websites are very easy to close, deleting
| an app is much more difficult and usually requires pressing on
| some "red buttons" and scary dialogs. It also makes sure the user
| now has a button for your app on their Home Screen which makes it
| a lot more accessible.
|
| 2. Notifications: while they exist for websites too, they are
| much less popular and turned off by default. Notifications are
| maybe the best way to get the user to use your app.
|
| And while I hate the dark patterns some companies use (Meta,
| AliExpress, etc), I do understand why installing the app worth so
| much to them.
| msgodel wrote:
| I actually do not want your garbage persisting on my machine
| and if you want to notify me you can ask for my email and
| maintain the required infrastructure to send me notification
| emails.
| transcriptase wrote:
| And why does a developer care about those things if not for the
| fact it means they can collect data even when the user isn't
| actively using the service?
| cheema33 wrote:
| > And why does a developer care about those things...
|
| I have several apps on my phone where I am interested in
| receiving notifications.
|
| 1. Airline app. While traveling I need to know about gate
| changes, flight time changes, etc. etc. 2. Credit card app. I
| have turned on notifications for all changes above $10. 3.
| Bank app. I have turned on notifications for all transfers.
| 4. Moen water meter app. If there is a water leak at my
| house, I need to know. 5. Server monitor app. If my website
| goes down, I need to know right away. 6. Google smoke
| detector. If there is smoke in my house, I need to know right
| away. 7. Tesla app. If I didn't close the door properly and
| walked away, the app lets me know. 8. Security camera app. If
| there is unexpected movement at my home or office, I get an
| alert. 9. WhatsApp and other messaging apps. When someone
| sends me a message, I get an alert.
|
| And those are only the things that immediately come to mind.
| If you were a developer of some of these apps, would you be
| able to provide these same functions in a user friendly way
| with a web app? Genuinely curious.
| kocial wrote:
| There is only 1 reason for encouraging customers or users to use
| the app, and that is RRR (Retention, Retargeting & Re-
| engagement), which is very high in mobile.
| gxs wrote:
| You forgot data collection
|
| I think if people realized how much data they can get from your
| iPhone with simple permissions like WiFi they'd think twice
| about giving so many apps access
| frizlab wrote:
| This is getting less and less true though. Also WiFi
| permission is not a thing on iOS.
| crimsontech wrote:
| These apps were recently found to be collectind a huge
| amount of personal browsing data from the device,
| regardless of whether private browser mode was used or
| permission settings.
|
| https://localmess.github.io/
|
| This technique was discovered, makes me wonder how many
| undiscovered techniques are still in use.
| frizlab wrote:
| This is on android. iOS has usually less privacy issues.
| gxs wrote:
| I understand but less true doesn't mean not true
|
| Also my bad, been a while since I installed an app believe
| it or not - also possible I saw this in android, but the
| general point stands
| frizlab wrote:
| Yeah permissions are relatively straightforward on iOS,
| and tracking w/o user consent is very much involved
| nowadays, whether in an app or on the web, and probably
| _more_ difficult in an app.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| RRR is also a fun film.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| as an individual more on the unconventional side I've gotten so
| dissatisfied with this that I have a donki nanote next just for
| viewing websites on-the-go. I really wish that people made a
| mobile device that could do the job of a phone and laptop. We
| have the technology.
| rambambram wrote:
| How is the Nanote Next? I've been eyeing these kind of small
| laptops for years, but never got to buying one. Is it only
| available in Japan?
| WorldPeas wrote:
| nope, it can be had via ebay for around 200 dollars, for
| which you get a metal chassis, 360 hinge, nice enough
| keyboard and track-nib, 8gb ddr4 and 64gb all to say that
| it's the basic system requirements to be a proper video-
| terminal into a mac desktop. The nanote itself has had some
| driver issues with its touchscreen (that I do not use, so
| didn't care to install) and screen rotation. I would say it's
| a shame we don't just have clamp on keyboards for our phones
| that are good enough to type on/tracknib and fit in our
| pockets, but that's perhaps for someone else to fix
| WorldPeas wrote:
| https://darekasan-
| net.hatenablog.com/entry/2021/04/23/145516
| inopinatus wrote:
| Not mentioned in this article, but an installed app also makes it
| much easier for the vendor to maintain shadow profiles to
| identify unique users with multiple logins.
| frizlab wrote:
| I do the exact opposite. I'll use the app even if accessing the
| website is more convenient. Usually the app experience is more
| polished, and denying any permission is trivial. Also, I have a
| system-wide app/tracking blocker.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I tried to order McDonalds for pickup today. I got tired of
| twiddling with the website. I tried the app, disabled all the
| permissions.
|
| Instead, McDonalds kept trying to pop up and demand my
| location, even after I put a zipcode and started my order. This
| repeats 3 times throughout my small order. Then I get to
| checkout and somehow I pop right back up to the map screen,
| where I am once again asked for location permissions. this was
| some 2 minutes into choosing a restaurant and picking my order.
|
| I just uninstalled at that point and chose another eatery. Apps
| can get every bit as aggressive with permissions as they can
| with ads if their incentives really align with gaining them.
| That was a bizarre experience, but not the only one where I was
| badgered for permissions that the app really didn't need.
| frizlab wrote:
| I think McDonalds is the worst app there is. Most app works
| relatively okay-ish, often better than the website (trend is
| reversing a bit, but not there yet).
| hamstergene wrote:
| The other side of the coin is that website forces you to trust
| your data to the website and almost always locks you in with them
| (the regulation to provide "export" of data worth nothing if
| competitors are not required to be able to auto-import it). It is
| not as one-sided as this articles presents it.
| habibur wrote:
| > website forces you to trust your data to the website
|
| Applies to apps too. The point was, you trust you whole disk to
| apps, in addition to this.
| hamstergene wrote:
| Apps are sandboxed and don't have full disk access unless you
| want them to.
|
| Article's claim that websites have same capabilities largely
| defeats its own argument that websites have less capacity to
| collect tracking data. Either can be used nefariously if
| isolation is leaky, and both can be secure if done properly.
| But sometimes apps are a better default: I would rather not
| have notes, audio/video recordings, and chats to
| automatically go to out of device unless I consciously opt
| in.
|
| Even when privacy is not a concern, there are still plenty of
| cases when I don't want the website over the app. I don't
| want ebooks reader, music app, bodyweight scale reader,
| vacuum robot and smart home controls, games to be on the web.
|
| Sure there are plenty of apps that shouldn't exist, but just
| as annoying is relentless push for web/cloud tech everywhere
| just so they can lock you in on a subscription, mine your
| data behind the scenes, and risk mass leaking all to hackers.
|
| Always use website is a shortsighted advice that doesn't
| consider the full picture.
| nmstoker wrote:
| I wonder what people do in that one area they are so often
| reticent to discuss: porn.
|
| The (non-scientific) impression I have is that people don't tend
| to use porn apps, they stick with porn websites.
|
| Therefore, do people basically know apps aren't well behaved with
| their data and yet in other scenarios they turn a blind eye?
| sedatk wrote:
| Are there porn apps? I believe App Store restrictions wouldn't
| allow that.
| barbazoo wrote:
| An app can't be hidden easily, in a browser you just go
| incognito. Some people just don't want others to know.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I think people want to hide porn until they don't want to hide
| the porn, and they don't want visible reminders on their phone.
| aflag wrote:
| I think it's more that people don't want others to see a
| pornhub icon when they are slowing holiday photos to friends
| and family. But they don't mind showing a Domino's app
| Beijinger wrote:
| Reddit tries very hard to make you move to their app.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Facebook as well.
|
| They responded to the criticism of people leaving their
| platform because the feed was all garbage and no friend updates
| by making a friends only feed feature you could only enable in
| the app.
| Beijinger wrote:
| If you use Facebook in a browser, install the social fixer
| plug in and put this into the hide options:
|
| follow
|
| Reels
|
| People you may know
|
| join
| alex1138 wrote:
| Reels are ridiculously ham-fisted and there's no
| granularity
|
| Facebook has "content preferences" as an option, but you
| can't put "don't show Reels" in it
|
| Reels are listed 3 at a time so what is "hide this" even
| doing?
|
| It's kind of the same with Youtube Shorts. Show less of?
| Okay, very good, we'll just ignore that setting next time
|
| These companies need some serious goddamn competition,
| there should be real consequences for just ignoring your
| userbase
| frollogaston wrote:
| Idc about privacy, apps are just annoying cause even downloading
| free ones requires auth for some reason (on iPhone), then they
| always want to update, then your OS gets too out of date and they
| stop working.
| worik wrote:
| > Idc about privacy
|
| Until you do. Then it is too late
| frollogaston wrote:
| Yes, except I won't care even when it's too late.
| sadeshmukh wrote:
| Default is to require auth for all installations - you can turn
| it off. For me, I keep apps to a minimum and haven't really run
| into too many app deprecations.
| notnmeyer wrote:
| i use spotlight to switch apps. having everything in a browser
| messes with that.
| paulirish wrote:
| You can install webapps "as an app" which solves that
| problem... its own icon in the dock, cmd-tabable, etc. In
| Chrome this is under the "Cast, save, share" menu.
| ErrorNoBrain wrote:
| I prefer having as few apps as possible
|
| so using the web is my go-to
|
| i dont have reddit, on my phone for example.
|
| Also, all those app icons are just "advertisement" every time you
| look at your phone screen... i dont need that.
|
| if you REQUIRE me to use an app, then i'm only using it if i
| absolutely have to. (there's almost always an alternative)
| xxr wrote:
| >app icons are just "advertisement"
|
| You wouldn't believe the volume of actual advertisements that
| show up as push notifications on my wife's phone
| Mengkudulangsat wrote:
| These are so infuriating they should be illegal.
|
| Especially when they come from apps you can't delete like
| your bannking app.
| frollogaston wrote:
| At least Apple has a rule against push spam, which they toe
| the line on but it's still a lot less bad than it could be.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Hasn't seemed to work...
| xxr wrote:
| Does it work the way CAN-SPAM is supposed to work
| (marketing can be unsubscribed from with rules about what
| constitutes "transactional" messages)?
| frollogaston wrote:
| Kinda
|
| """Push Notifications must not be required for the app to
| function, and should not be used to send sensitive
| personal or confidential information. Push Notifications
| should not be used for promotions or direct marketing
| purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to
| receive them via consent language displayed in your app's
| UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to
| opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these
| services may result in revocation of your privileges."""
| sdf4j wrote:
| not having a way to divide notification channels,
| transactional vs promotional, make it worse than android.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Explicitly promotional push isn't allowed on iPhone to
| begin with. Only exception is if the user enables it via
| some setting inside your app, separate from the regular
| permission dialog, which is really unlikely.
|
| Of course you can just pass off promotional stuff as not
| promotional, but same on Android, and you have to be sly
| about it.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| >Only exception is if the user enables it via some
| setting inside your app
|
| Or if Apple has a movie they really really want to
| promote
| frollogaston wrote:
| Haha true, or better yet a U2 album
| userbinator wrote:
| At least relatively recent versions of Android let you turn
| off notifications per-app:
|
| https://support.google.com/android/answer/9079661?hl=en
| flkiwi wrote:
| Which is nice, but when the offender is, say, a security
| device that sends event notification but ALSO sends
| marketing spam, with no granular control over types of
| notifications, it's not a great situation.
| thomasfortes wrote:
| Android has granular control over notifications, which is
| great because some apps that I need send a lot of
| marketing notifications that I don't care about but I
| cannot get rid of essential notifications.
|
| Not all apps do it and some push all notifications
| through a single channel (and some manufacturers hide the
| granularity options in advanced settings, I'm looking at
| you Samsung) but at least it exists.
| flkiwi wrote:
| iOS is the same, though I've found that the truly
| granular control depends on the vendor exposing the
| control in the app. Scummy companies--most of them--make
| notifications all or nothing.
|
| It's not JUST marketing either. I don't want to be
| interrupted with a reminder to check my lint filter. I do
| that literally every time I change the laundry. But I
| can't disable that pointless alert without disabling ALL
| alerts (and you can rightly question whether any alerts
| from a dryer have value, but that's a different
| discussion).
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Even better, apps have to ask you for permission to even
| show notifications!
|
| Game? Doesn't need notfications, deny, done!
| AaronAPU wrote:
| These things only exist because some people just allow it.
| They allow it and occasionally buy something, enabling the
| entire hellhole we now all live in.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| These things exist because companies and the people working
| there are predatory assholes. Let's not make the victims to
| be the villains and get off your high horse. Most people
| don't even know how.
| nikodunk wrote:
| I also hate obligatory mobile apps, especially when they're
| linked to hardware: At the battery company I work for -
| pilaenergy - we're aware that our hardware may well outlive our
| software, so we're providing a mobile app that's accessible
| over an WiFi access point or over your local WiFi, as well as
| the traditional mobile apps. This way - the software comes
| bundled with the hardware and can't be sunset. Something that
| has long been an issue with IoT products.
| BrtByte wrote:
| Totally with you on this. Every extra app feels like mental
| clutter
| guzik wrote:
| just 1hr ago (1 AM local time) I saw 'your app is live on app
| store' notification on my phone and eagerly launched it... only
| to have it crash instantly. After a debug session I discovered an
| obscure bug in tflite library that only shows up in release
| builds. 20 minutes ago I pushed a hotfix with an expedited App
| Review request, hoping to spare as many users as possible from
| that crash. I can't wrap my head around how the appstore review
| missed it, especially after rejecting our last build 4 times over
| a barely legible location-permission alert description.
|
| That said, I built my first mobile app 15 years ago, and to this
| day, building for mobile remains the most frustrating part of my
| programming life.
| redbell wrote:
| > If you've ever opened Reddit, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or
| practically any popular service on your phone's web browser,
| you've likely encountered it.
|
| Another website that asks to _Get The App_ is https://imgur.com/
| , every time you open a link to _just_ view that image you
| instantly got asked to Get The App. It 's really annoying!
| frollogaston wrote:
| Also uhh _the default search engine in mobile Safari_. Just
| Google searching gives you a half-page notice to install the
| app. If you have the app, it 's a half-page notice to use the
| app. And guess what's inside the app, a website.
| userbinator wrote:
| I believe that's done based on user-agent header; but it
| shouldn't be surprising that the UA on a mobile browser is the
| hardest to change, showing once again that users' control of
| their computing devices is extremely important. With the
| appropriate UA, imgur will just give you the raw image data
| directly.
| kristopolous wrote:
| The "download app" notifications on reddit are like some kind
| of art project to maximimally annoy you. Probably the worst
| offender is facebook where they have what can only be called an
| intentionally broken mobile website - the idea of losing the
| person's name if you edit a comment, the page deciding to
| reload you back to the main page if you switch tabs to research
| something or the post box clearing out if you switch focus, the
| comment box being nearly impossible to navigate through with
| the cursor, these are all profoundly egregious bugs that have
| been there for years.
|
| Basically if you intend it to do something more substantive
| than comment a series of emojis, they have a bunch of bugs that
| block you.
|
| I'm guessing someone has made the calculation that being
| terrible in these ways are more profitable.
|
| Maybe people doom scroll more if the content is vapid?
|
| I'd love to see the user stories. "Brenda is a 52 year old
| professional who likes commenting "Happy Birthday" to AI
| generated images of people with cakes. She loves multilevel
| marketing and buying stuff on Temu. Her husband Greg, reposts
| memes programmatically generated by content farms using LLMs
| and topic trackers"
| andoando wrote:
| I feel the same way about reddit. Modals are bigger than the
| page with unclickable buttons.
|
| Profile/settings icon/button is rendered half way or fully
| out of the page.
|
| Chat feature is completely unusable
| kristopolous wrote:
| I really think Reddit did it as a rebrand. It's somehow 20
| years old and still gets teenagers.
|
| Social media almost always skews older as it ages, beyond
| the natural pace of time.
|
| AOL became mostly seniors as did Facebook and Yahoo. Reddit
| has not only shaken off most of the aging legacy users but
| had also captured a new generation of effectively children.
|
| I personally don't like what they've done but it's worked.
|
| The younger users view it as an app with a website as
| opposed to a website with an app
| econ wrote:
| The formula to clear out the old people is to clear out
| their input area half way the first draft of their TL;DR
| They will just go away for a few years.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Unfortunately they have a major problem that is going to
| hit them soon: they rely on volunteer moderators to run
| the site for them, and the young people aren't doing it.
| kristopolous wrote:
| They'll LLM that, or at least they'll majorly try.
| jorisboris wrote:
| And it literally blocks users from using messenger in the
| mobile browser, I need to ask for desktop website
| create-username wrote:
| Websites shouldn't know if you're on desktop because they
| are clearly gonna abuse that bit of information.
|
| Web browsers were designed by naive, pre surveillance
| capitalism developers
| Tempat1 wrote:
| Reddit used to have a really excellent mobile experience at
| i.reddit.com. It was a minimalist fast-loading mobile-first
| formatted version of the website. Unfortunately they shut it
| down not too long ago.
| 3036e4 wrote:
| That was the day I stopped reading reddit.
| donatj wrote:
| I personally really like the old.reddit.com experience on
| my phone. Everything works surprisingly well. Sure you have
| to zoom in and scroll around and I know some people hate
| zooming in but it's never bothered me.
|
| I personally can't stand apps that stop me from zooming in
| on things.
|
| My sister complains about the information density of old
| Reddit being too high but that's exactly what I like about
| it!
| dontlaugh wrote:
| I'm one of those people that dislike having to zoom and
| (importantly) pan around on a 2D canvas.
|
| I miss Apollo.
| lelandfe wrote:
| A recent mobile web A/B test on Reddit will tell you when
| opening a link that the subreddit has not "been reviewed" and
| blocks access unless you open on the app or login.
|
| They're this close to just 100% shutting down the mobile web
| version.
| Winsaucerer wrote:
| I hate Imgur. Even with the app installed I find it doesn't
| work well. I don't understand why people use it -- does it just
| work for them in a way it doesn't for me, or are they more
| tolerant of its terrible usability?
| WD-42 wrote:
| It's not designed to work well, it's designed to serve ads.
| LostMyLogin wrote:
| The worst for me is when you open Google Maps in the browser
| and the appears with the blue continue button. If you click it,
| it opens the iOS store page. If you then move back to your
| browser it re-opens and focuses the iOS store page one more
| time.
| h4ck_th3_pl4n3t wrote:
| I hate imgur with their freaking redirects of deep links that
| have .jpg or .png in their URLs. They redirect to the HTML and
| then ask me to download a shitty app and prevent me from
| looking at the damn content.
|
| If you cannot afford the web traffic, just shut down your
| webservers instead of this bullshit.
| myHNAccount123 wrote:
| the imgur website is one of THE shittiest ever made. Just try
| it on mobile or without ad blocks. They can't even play a gif
| properly.
| cibyr wrote:
| Imgur is particularly infuriating because it was initially
| touted as an alternative to the shitty image-sharing sites of
| the day (photobucket and the like) - one that would let you
| just link to an image without any bullshit. Now it's completely
| unusable.
| progbits wrote:
| We just need to repeat the cycle again.
|
| Every ~5 years someone makes a new good site, it's great at
| first, funded from donations. Then they hire people, feature
| creep, add ads, sellout to VC, enshittyfi, rinse and repeat.
| quitit wrote:
| And a big thumbs down to Google Maps, that when presenting a
| location on the web, that's already being shown, it will cover
| it with a pop-up heavily steering the user to download the app.
| rustystump wrote:
| I cannot agree more and this has always been a pet peeve of mine.
|
| Most native apps are some half gig large where even the heaviest
| website is a few mb. They dont let you highlight text and have
| other bizarre design choices. Even worse, they request importing
| contacts list which isnt even an option on the web.
|
| Native apps could be butter but more often than not they are like
| margarine. Smooth, oily, and not good for you.
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| 500MB average seems like a gross exaggeration. I agree apps are
| oversize but I have maybe 2 native apps on mobile that are so
| large.
| dbtc wrote:
| Chase Mobile for iOS is 350MB; far from 500, but still
| baffling why an app would need to be that large just to show
| me some numbers.
|
| Capital One is 435MB...
|
| Garmin Connect is 518MB for some stupid reason, while Strava
| is half that and Gaia GPS (great app), is under 100.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Almost certainly has to do with how the app is built. Most
| thoughtfully built native SDK (UIKit, etc) apps clock in
| well under the 100MB mark, often under half or a quarter
| that.
|
| Bloat like that is usually due to unnecessarily convoluted
| tech stacks pulling in a list of dependencies that goes out
| to Mars and back, or for globally targeted apps sometimes
| it's translations for everything in the app for hundreds of
| different languages.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Yeah but the native SDK sucks and isn't cross-platform, I
| don't blame anyone for not using it
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| UIKit is fine, good even, SwiftUI isn't fully baked yet,
| Android Framework definitely sucks, and Jetpack Compose
| is decent but needs work. Both platforms have at least
| one SDK that's good to use, and personally I'd take them
| over fighting the extra layer of issues something like RN
| adds _on top_ of the native issues that devs will
| encounter regardless of the SDK used.
|
| Cross platform frameworks really aren't the magic wand
| they're sold as.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Cross-platform is very much not a magic wand, but it's
| still often easier than building the same thing in two
| different native SDKs, and I can see why people do it.
|
| Disagree about UIKit, mainly cause of Autolayout, unless
| it's gotten reworked in the past 8 years. When I started
| using RN, I had zero web experience, and still it was way
| quicker to set up a basic UI than in the UIKit stuff I'd
| been doing for years. And for all that setup, Autolayout
| doesn't even seem to future-proof your stuff that well.
| An abandoned ObjC iPhone app I wrote in high school using
| C-style macros for layout worked perfectly fine on the
| newer screen sizes that broke most other apps.
|
| I thought maybe I was stupid, but the other iPhone devs I
| worked with constantly had problems with Autolayout.
| Maybe a real expert iPhone dev won't, but it shouldn't
| take that.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| The thing about UIKit is that you really need to forget
| about the drag and drop UI editor (XIBs and storyboards).
| They make everything including autolayout much more
| painful than they need to be.
|
| Pure code UIKit using autolayout's anchors API is quite
| serviceable, and if you follow recommendations (use safe
| area and keyboard constraints! They exist for a reason)
| reasonably futureproof. The iOS apps I've worked on have
| needed very little change year to year for quite some
| time at this point.
| frollogaston wrote:
| That's true, though some will tell you the opposite. But
| even then, the pure code autolayout seemed a lot harder
| to use than HTML/CSS. The fact that so many people got it
| that wrong says something. Like yeah a desktop website
| might break on mobile, but I'm talking about a mobile
| screen just getting slightly longer or something.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| "clock in well under the 100MB mark"
|
| But this is still incredibly ridiculously comically
| gross. The fact that we can afford it these days is an
| irrelevant seperate thing. These numbers are just
| unjustifiable for what most apps actually do.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Yeah, especially if I can make a desktop app under 10 MB
| with the same functionality and features (obviously non-
| Electron).
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I mean, it scales with complexity. Naturally, well-made
| native SDK apps bumping up against 100MB are more likely
| to be highly functional, while simple apps are very
| small.
|
| For a couple examples pulled from my TestFlight list,
| there's a social media site reader app that's 7.6MB and a
| text editor that's 697KB. Those sizes aren't the least
| bit unreasonable.
| tomrod wrote:
| What are these you are listing?
| AbstractH24 wrote:
| Whats the business case to invest in building these well
| and as small as possible?
|
| Heck, if you are a world business and the app isn't your
| core value prop, whats your case for investing anything
| more than the bare minimum in creating your app?
| megablast wrote:
| Is it? You can't easily tell with iOS apps because the
| container might be that big, but the app on your phone is a
| fraction of that. The container might contain multiple
| versions.
| LostMyLogin wrote:
| Gaia used to be so great and I used it every day but it's
| really hard to support Outside.
| dbtc wrote:
| Yes, the Outside aspect is annoying. Did you switch to
| another app?
| boznz wrote:
| The UK's new electronic visa application form app is over
| 200MB and it is literally only a 3 page application form.
| Program efficiency at its finest!
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Average, yes, probably an exaggeration. Some apps
|
| iOS: wechat: 740meg gmail:
| 672 google chat: 585 uber: 582
| tiktok: 572 headspace: 498
| instagram: 467 doulingo: 462
| bank of america: 456 capital one: 435
| expedia: 412 linkedin: 402
| doordash: 392 google: 379
| facebook: 365 unitied airlines:355
| chase: 352 google photos: 348
| line: 346 amex: 339
| google maps: 336 youtube: 329
| booking.com: 320 citi: 319
| amazon music: 317 snapchat: 316
| lyft: 307 wells fargo: 292
| strava: 283 twitch: 279
| rotten tomatoes: 262 airbnb: 254
| youtube music: 245 whatsapp: 239
| mlb: 220 discord: 212
| tinder: 202
|
| of course Apple doesn't list the size of their own apps like
| Apple Maps, Photos, Music, etc...
|
| I am quite surprised at a few apps I know are just a webpage,
| because I can to go to the webpage and see it's exactly the
| same, are still 40meg to 80meg. I'd expect them be able to be
| as small as a few K. Open a webview, navigate to
| https://mycompany.com. The end
| mh- wrote:
| I thought these couldn't possibly be right and you must be
| including their storage and cache usage, but I'm seeing
| similar reported on my iPhone. Rounded to the nearest
| megabyte. Gmail: 612mb Facebook:
| 359mb YouTube: 303mb Amex: 365mb
|
| I'm still skeptical (or just hopeful?) that there's some
| storage accounting bug here, and it's including caches. I'm
| not in a place to plug it into Xcode right now, maybe
| someone else can check the actual IPAs?
|
| edit: also, I do see Apple's own apps in mine. Music
| reports 39mb; Photos 791kB (lol?)
| jazzypants wrote:
| Amex being 300mb is genuinely hilarious. What does that
| app even do?
| justinclift wrote:
| Probably doing CHIA in the background. ;)
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| its including cache + data files not just an 'APP'
|
| my youtube is literally 10gb because I use it a lot,
| doesnt mean youtube is "bloated" or "heavy"
| mh- wrote:
| I am leaving out the "data" figure in my counts. As I
| said, I think there's a bug/misrepresentation in the
| figures shown in iOS settings.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| they use react native maybe
| chrisandchris wrote:
| > uber: 582
|
| Not to defend Uber, but there was a post here some time ago
| where one engineer explained why it's so large (sadly can't
| find it anymore): it's due to a lot of different
| implementations for different markets (some masks may have
| slight differences in different countries) and their choise
| to re-implement the masks multiple times.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| A few different UIs don't justify hundreds of extra
| megabytes. We just collectively stopped caring.
| mixermachine wrote:
| UI definitions should add very little storage space.
| Different images and videos might add a lot.
| fph wrote:
| Now I understand why those 128 GB get full so quick.
| tpmoney wrote:
| > of course Apple doesn't list the size of their own apps
| like Apple Maps, Photos, Music, etc...
|
| You can find that in the phone storage settings:
| iOS: 12 G Keynote: 498 M
| Numbers: 482 M Pages: 455 M
| Clips: 213 M Maps: 81 M
| Watch: 70 M Find My: 60 M
| Music: 38 M iTunes U: 35 M
| Support: 34 M Podcasts: 32 M
| Books: 31 M iCloud Drive: 30 M
| Freeform: 19 M Fitness: 18 M
| Notes: 17 M Journal: 15 M
| Home: 10 M App Store: 8 M
| Weather: 8 M Mail: 7 M
| Files: 4 M Health: 3 M
| Measure: 3 M Voice Memos: 3 M
| Calendar: 2 M Clock: 2 M
| Safari: 2 M Shortcuts: 2 M
| Translate: 2 M TV: 2 M
| Calculator: 1 M Facetime: 1 M
| iTunes Store: 1 M Tips: 1 M
| Wallet: 934 K Messages: 860 K
| Photos: 791 K Compass: 712 K
| Camera: 635 K Contacts: 598 K
| Phone: 570 K Magnifier: 516 K
| Passwords: 213 K
|
| There's also an "Apple Inc." listing, which appears to be
| "shared" between a lot of their apps which clocks in at
| 204M
|
| My takeaway from having gone through the list and compared
| to the various 3rd party apps:
|
| 1) Apps can absolutely be smaller. Plenty of stuff in the
| <200MB range including things like Signal, OBD Fusion and
| Infuse
|
| 2) Games are often big, but there's a surprising number of
| "simple" apps that are larger than some of the games
|
| 3) The largest apps seem to be from companies that you
| would expect to be doing the most tracking of your data
|
| 4) Apple's first party app sizes probably explain a little
| about why they weren't in a hurry to upgrade storage sizes
| ciabattabread wrote:
| > Maps: 81 M
|
| Is MapKit considered iOS or Maps?
| tpmoney wrote:
| No idea, those are the numbers as reported in the
| settings app. I would assume it's part of the OS since
| it's a framework for other apps to tap into mapping
| functionality. For comparison Sygic is 324 MB. Waze is
| 170 MB, Tom Tom is 251 MB, Magic Earth is 135 MB and OSM
| And is 238 MB
| jiehong wrote:
| On Android, is the Gmail app actually a PWA? Saying this as
| Google tried to push PWA hard, but it doesn't seem like
| they do it for their own stuff.
| dsp_person wrote:
| Funny cause I was just thinking about the tradeoff of "internal
| wasm app" vs "internal native app".
|
| The former has convenient distribution, but worse performance
| and other limitations.
|
| The latter can be tricky to keep updated, ensure the
| environment is the same for everyone and/or cross-platform
| differences, etc., but significantly better/faster.
|
| But both binaries about the same size. Assuming using something
| like sokol or SDL3.
| ljm wrote:
| A lot of native apps are just wrappers around a JS context with
| a few bridges into native APIs and they are pure data grabs.
|
| Reddit always asks you to use its native app, for example. Why
| the fuck would I care so much about Reddit that I want it
| outside of my browser? Same goes for any other website.
| spauldo wrote:
| Reddit is one of the cases where a native app makes sense.
| Some of the 3rd party Reddit apps were great.
|
| But I'll eat my hat before I'll install Reddit's own app.
| Reddit killing off 3rd party apps is why I post here and not
| there.
| andoando wrote:
| That's because reddit on mobile browser sucks ass (feels
| like it's intentionally made to suck) even more so than its
| native app.
|
| I don't think being nativr is what made 3rd party apps
| great
| card_zero wrote:
| I too switched from Reddit to HN during the API protests of
| '23. But I always browsed through old.reddit anyway, I
| never used the third party apps. I'm aware of names like
| RIF and that everyone said they were great, but what was
| great about them?
| jombib wrote:
| Better features, less ads, smoother experience and in the
| case of Apollo--the one I used--it just looked much
| better.
| card_zero wrote:
| So apart from the ad blocker, that's ... features,
| smoother, better. What?
|
| Edit: I'm not trying to be rude (it comes naturally). But
| you just explained "great" as "better, with more". I
| guess smooth might mean faster, which might be because it
| isn't doing ads and tracking. It seems to come back to
| third-party being the crucial difference, and "app" not
| mattering.
| notpushkin wrote:
| UI/UX is not that tricky. Caring about your users is the
| hard part usually.
|
| Third party clients could be webapps, too, of course.
| kro wrote:
| Apps can bypass websecurity (CORS fetch), that allows for
| third party clients for example on video platforms using
| their internal APIs.
|
| I don't think the reddit clients work this way though.
| spauldo wrote:
| I imagine it depends on how you use it. I came to Reddit
| late and never got into the old interface. I commented a
| lot on technical subreddits and didn't do much with the
| doomscrolling ones.
|
| I used Boost. Its ads were not intrusive (and I despise
| ads) and the UI was written with a small touchscreen in
| mind. If not for my distaste for phone keyboards, I'd say
| it was a better experience than the website on a desktop.
|
| Would it be possible for a mobile browser to have a
| better experience? I don't know. I value my sanity too
| much to do web development. But Reddit was absolutely
| determined to make its mobile site unusable and the
| official Reddit app had a bad reputation (and I wouldn't
| give those bastards the satisfaction after being nagged
| so much to install it), so a 3rd party app was the only
| reasonable solution.
| card_zero wrote:
| I hold phones sideways, then I forget that it's weird to
| do. People like apps (and mobile versions of sites)
| because of human hand anatomy, I guess.
| proverbialbunny wrote:
| Caching and loading times mostly.
|
| I'm on old.reddit.com too and I use the mobile app
| (including the 3rd party ones back when they existed) for
| one primary reason: Two windows I can quickly switch back
| and forth on. On my phone I use Reddit to look up things.
| I can have a Reddit thread on one window and a Google
| search on the other and go back and forth. In a browser
| switching tabs back and forth is painful, often reloading
| pages, losing the spot in the browser, having this url
| bar and top bar taking up tons of screen space.
| Gigachad wrote:
| How does an app for Reddit make sense? It's an image and
| text platform. There's no weird hardware apis required.
|
| Native apps make sense when you need to tap in to platform
| specific features like the Lidar api and such. They don't
| make any sense for most websites.
| hammock wrote:
| We've forgotten what an "app" was
| galangalalgol wrote:
| There isn't even a need for JavaScript for reddit though
| it does seem to require it. I posted this without
| JavaScript enabled so it obviously would be fine for
| reddit too. Using an app for reddit doesn't make any
| sense to me at all. Banking apps make sense, they are
| doing some crazy device finger-printing to avoid id
| theft. But when the goal is to convey information use
| html and css. If you are taking payments then yeah maybe
| some JS. If it is a game, try wasm. Apps are for things
| that need access to hardware that the browser doesn't
| allow, which these days is a short list.
| chasing0entropy wrote:
| Reddit is in full in AI data hoarding mode. Try to load
| their website with fingerprinting entirely mitigated and
| you'll be greeted by impossible are you a robot
| validation
| Barbing wrote:
| >fingerprinting entirely mitigated
|
| This is an interest of mine, but I'm still fingerprinted
| per a recent comment. May I ask:
|
| How?
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > a game, try wasm
|
| On iOS? Waste of time for anything but simple 2d games.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| The 3rd party Reddit apps made an effort to be more
| 'native', and actually used native UI elements to make
| rendering and interactions faster than the web page
| could.
|
| WAAAAAY too often the 1st party native app is exactly
| what the other poster said: a browser context with access
| to some local native API's in order to hoover more data
| about the user. It is rare that a first-party app
| actually has some effort put into it to be a quality app.
| Is in fact so rare, that the sites that actually put in
| the effort suffer because folks can't believe that a
| native app for a site could actually be better or worth
| it.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| I think the parent's point was that an app for reddit
| only makes sense because they deliberately don't add the
| features you like to the mobile site. There's no reason
| those features couldn't work perfectly well in a browser,
| they just choose not to (and to kill off third party
| apps).
| DrewADesign wrote:
| If Figma runs perfectly well in a web browser, Reddit can
| do the same. It was built for and evolved almost entirely
| within the browser, like many other Internet forums. Pure
| data grab.
| zxexz wrote:
| Reddit runs well IMO if you go to old.reddit.com. The
| mobile site is borderline useless, presumably
| intentionally.
| troupo wrote:
| According to Reddit's "Staff Platform Engineer (Web
| Platform Team)":
|
| --- start quote ---
|
| Old Reddit has the advantage of being pretty much static
| non-interactive content. No video, tiny thumbnails, and
| barely any JS or styling. Some people like this and some
| don't, but the end result is a very lean website that
| performs well out of the box.
|
| https://x.com/jimsimon_/status/1841087335414280571
|
| Suffice to say, I'm on the frontend perf team and we're
| acutely aware of these problems
|
| https://x.com/jimsimon_/status/1841092341991403974
|
| --- end quote ---
|
| This was in October 2024.
|
| Which is of course a bunch of bullshit when you consider
| that Reddit's backend returns most data in under 400ms,
| and it takes Reddit frontend 3+ seconds to render it
|
| It could be that they are just incompetent.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Figma is sort of an Apollo Project among webshit, isn't
| it? IIRC they did rather extreme amount of R&D to make
| the webapp performant in spite of the web as a platform.
| Great that they did, and I hope their insights will keep
| trickling down to everyone else - but I don't think
| they're currently an example anyone can actually follow.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| It's great, but it's not Apollo-level anything. Most
| games are far more interactively and visually complex.
| Apples to oranges with UX and interaction problems to
| solve, but certainly not depth and complexity. I've
| certainly experienced bugs in Reddit's interface before
| -- there seems to be this idea that they have to be so
| risk averse that they can't do anything significant--
| I'll bet you a pizza that their official app which
| implements all the features that people really want to
| use is made with JS/HTML on the back end anyway.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| Figma shows what it is _possible_ to do in a browser, but
| the _cost_ of doing so is basically prohibitive. The
| level of persistence and technical nous needed to stand
| it up are on par with getting a first-person shooter
| running at an interactive frame rate on a 286 -- they
| basically reimplemented a browser within the browser.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| I've worked on teams that made complex production web
| apps with a tiny tiny fraction of Reddit's cash flow.
| landl0rd wrote:
| They're not indifferent to browsers (less data mineable
| contexts) so much as actively hostile. For the past few
| years some things I have to add "-reddit" to my Google
| searches, because they killed i.reddit.com, which was the
| only useable, fast, non-complete-shit mobile site they
| have ever built. Their old. subdomain isn't really
| readable in a cell phone.
|
| Their new version is incredibly slow, moves me to sub-
| pages trying to expand comment threads (very disruptive
| if I saw something in the Google preview snippet and want
| to control F to it, but whatever comment that was
| literally isn't loaded), and sometimes outright fails to
| load. now I can't/wont use it.
|
| So screw reddit, it's a glorified q&a site, with sub
| forums run by fedora neckbeards, that's gotten uppity and
| chosen to be hostile to users. And for some reason Google
| hasn't just downranked it to death. The other day there
| was a thread complaining that their AI responses are
| reducing websites clicks. I hope that it is very damaging
| to reddit.
| marksbrown wrote:
| There are extensions that redirect to old.reddit.com with
| mobile friendly CSS.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| > make rendering and interactions faster than the web
| page could.
|
| McMaster-Carr begs to differ. Hell even old.reddit is
| pretty snappy (but deliberately shittily rendered on
| mobile). Websites can be fast if you don't stuff them
| with bullshit or degrade then on purpose to drive traffic
| to the app.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Right -- their website is a great example of a great web
| app. Their web site is brilliantly organized. But their
| revenue comes from sales of their products, not
| harvesting user data, so they have little need to add all
| the extra jank.
|
| But if they had a native app (do they?) I imagine they
| would have the wherewithal to build the app natively,
| with the same stellar navigation of their website, and
| maybe some native-only features? Imagine if you could use
| the 3d sensor + camera of an iPhone, and point it at an
| assembly, and the app would identify the parts it could,
| and you could order with one click, or integrate with a
| local ERP or other systems...
| craftkiller wrote:
| They would seamlessly in the background pre-cache all the
| articles and images coming up in your feed so if you had
| intermittent connections like on the subway, you could
| browse nearly[0] unaffected.
|
| [0] Unfortunately, the app I used in the before-time did
| not implement queuing for submitting comments/posts so
| that functionality was broken while you were between
| stations, and videos weren't cached.
| DanielHB wrote:
| Web apps can do that too with service workers, it is just
| a bit of a pain in the ass.
| progval wrote:
| And if you ever push a service worker with a bug, then
| you make the browser permanently unable to display the
| site unless the user knows how to manually remove the
| service worker. I've seen it happen on Gmail.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| The main reason they make sense is that no matter which
| version of real reddit you use it's got irritating
| behaviors. But a browser based better reddit wrapper
| could easily also make sense.
| rbits wrote:
| I used vger.app (a frontend for a Reddit alternative) as
| a PWA for a few weeks. Then when the native Android app
| released I switched to it and it felt so much better to
| use. I can't tell you why, it was just more responsive.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| That is in context of Reddit being Reddit. It kept
| screwing with its mobile site for years (now it's FUBAR
| btw), so third-party apps were the only sane way to use
| it on mobile. Even Reddit's official app used to be a
| decent third party app - Alien Blue. Then Reddit bought
| it and made it pathetic. That's why people used third
| party reddit apps.
|
| On desktop, the browser's always been the best way to use
| Reddit -- as long as old.reddit still works. If you are
| on a non-Safari browser, there's also RES.
|
| Same goes for many other sites. Like HN -- it's fine on
| mobile browser unless I bump the font size, then it
| pretty much breaks. But I'm not installing an HN app for
| something the mobile usage time share is barely 5-10%.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Simply because native UI is faster and more functional
| and better integrated and better thought out than
| anything webdevs of any company can put together even if
| they cared to do it well. Sites like Reddit, or platforms
| like Slack or Discord, are _perfect_ use cases for native
| clients, because there 's a _lot_ of space to make them
| better and more streamlined than the webapp.
|
| Unfortunately, that only ever happens when some third
| party gets involved, and rarely survives long - but the
| experience, however brief, is glorious. See: RIF ("Reddit
| is Fun") on Android; Ripcord (Slack/Discord client) on
| Windows.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I use HN+Tildes instead. I left a couple years before the
| API fiasco because I was sick of the ragebait and toxic
| culture.
| WatchDog wrote:
| Some of the third party apps were quite good, certainly
| better than the reddit mobile site, but that's mostly
| because the reddit mobile site is just so deliberately
| awful.
|
| There aren't really any major technical reasons why the
| mobile site couldn't be as good.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| Redreader is still around as a good 3rd party app.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Some of the 3rd party Reddit apps were great.
|
| Because they were competently designed. But you could put
| that same design into a web page and it would work fine.
| linhns wrote:
| Yeah but if you want some restricted content the app is the
| only way
| spauldo wrote:
| That was part of the 3rd party app purge. Before then,
| the 3rd party apps could see NSFW content just fine.
| xtracto wrote:
| This is so funny. For me, it was as if the "monkey's paw" had
| played me.
|
| Back in the early 2000s, I loved desktop applications. My
| thinking was that there's no way a web app could do what a
| desktop application could. I loathed slow, proprietary,
| online-requiring, HTML based web apps .
|
| 25 years have passed, and now we DO have some "native" device
| apps... but they are just HTML web elements bubdled in a
| freaking custom browser.
|
| Edit: anyone remember the "PortableApps" wave? I loved having
| that in a usb drive.
| reactordev wrote:
| You never experienced the horror that is XAML. Not HTML,
| not native control either, it's a weird middle ground of
| platform lock-in that you couldn't escape until recently.
|
| What I miss are the days where one could Win32 call a
| window up, and it looked like every other. Not sugar for me
| and none for thee.
|
| I cut my teeth programming GUIs, I still like making GUIs -
| immediate mode guis, event based guis, animated guis and
| informational guis. I left front-end web dev when every 6
| months there was a new framework, a new new, and everyone
| dropped everything for it. I understand why React ate the
| world at the time but it's gotten to the point where it's
| no longer standards driven, its ecosystem driven, and even
| then it's leaking.
|
| What I love about these hybrid apps though is that from
| Apache Cordova (PhoneGap) onwards, they've all looked
| really really good. Proving that a normal user can't tell
| the difference. Which makes solo-dev or small-dev dev
| easier. Go with what you know. No need to learn flutter, or
| SwiftUI, or Kotlin.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Svelte's been pretty great in terms of "just use web
| standards where it makes sense" so far.
| notpushkin wrote:
| Speaking of apps that are just wrappers around websites -
| it's possible to do that in just 50 _kb_ :
| https://f-droid.org/packages/us.spotco.maps
| blensor wrote:
| The most annoying thing is repeat questions ( reddit,
| linkedin, facebook, ... ). If I already told the site 10
| times that I don't want to use the mobile app, stop asking
| me. That's even worse than cookie consent banners, at least
| those stay away
| sprior wrote:
| Your comment got me a bit curious and so I spent time playing
| around creating a simple Android app using webView for my
| personal website and got it working, the only permission I
| added was INTERNET. So what's the next level of awfulness -
| do I add additional permissions and then additional
| information can be presented to my website server, or would I
| actually have to implement an additional path to collect the
| kind of info these apps are trying for?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Most apps, these days, seem to be "hybrid," where they use a
| system like Ionic or React. These systems usually slap on some
| considerable libraries.
|
| I understand why, but I'm not a fan of hybrid apps. I like to
| do native, which results in much smaller, faster, and more
| efficient apps. It's just not as cost-effective, if you want to
| support multiple platforms.
|
| However, native apps aren't automatically well-behaved ones. In
| fact, they usually have access to even more tools for eroding
| privacy or user agency.
|
| Good behavior is up to the app developers, and that doesn't
| seem to be much of a priority, these days.
| 65 wrote:
| If it's not a game or a large company's app, it's probably a
| web view app. At my company I work on the website, and we
| have an app that is essentially just a bunch of web views of
| the website. Why we need an app I don't know. I suppose
| people are just used to apps more than they are websites,
| which makes me sad.
| riedel wrote:
| It is just the app producers forcing you. Like AliExpress, the
| app is just the website (it does not even respect the default
| text size), but only the app allows you to do reviews. Some
| only give you rebates if you install their spyware. Many do not
| support notifications for no obvious reason. IMHO we need more
| user scripts to fix some of those stupidities.
| BrtByte wrote:
| It's such a basic interaction, yet so many apps disable it
| abeindoria wrote:
| What makes margarine not "good for you?"
| W3zzy wrote:
| :-) be nice to margarine. It can be used to better your health.
| Because it's not butter, it can be supplemented with vitamins
| and minerals and can be used to lower cholesterol. But, I get
| your point.
| quitit wrote:
| I am particularly incensed by governments that require citizens
| use apps to access their digital services.
|
| Especially so in the EU, where on one hand they're annoyed at
| big tech, and on the other they're forcing citizens to be
| customers. Even services which are web-based rely on an app for
| login authentication.
| Sammi wrote:
| Why tha hell am I required to use a locked down american
| device to access my public services in Europe? This is not
| ok.
| croisillon wrote:
| and don't forget imdb and airbnb, who absolutely _need_ the
| latest ios to work
| 77pt77 wrote:
| > where even the heaviest website is a few mb
|
| Not nowadays they aren't.
|
| And haven't been for at least a decade!
| burnte wrote:
| I totally agree. So many sites nag me to use an app, nope, your
| website is perfect, I don't need your code running on my device
| 24/7.
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| I agree. The intended audience agrees. The general population
| could care less and will continue to use spyware. I think the
| real question should be how do we go about making the public
| care?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I don't think we need to. You appeal to regulators and they can
| manage it in lieu of the public. That's what the DMA is doing
| in the EU. Most initiatives happen from action of a relative
| minority interest.
| hnpolicestate wrote:
| True. Responsible and ethical regulators who look out for an
| uninterested public is probably as good as it would get.
| smcleod wrote:
| I'd much rather run a (native) app than have yet another browser
| tab. What I don't want is bloated Electron apps.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Most apps today are just wrappers around the web site anyway.
| rtaylorgarlock wrote:
| I want to love Tapatalk and forums so badly, but i will never
| forgive them for the years of spammy begs to download or 'open in
| browser.'
| paranoidrobot wrote:
| The government where I live has a no-interest loan scheme for
| installing energy efficient appliances. Handy, so I used it to
| fund heat pumps and insulation.
|
| The scheme is administered by Brighte. I signed up on their
| website. Everything going well for 6 months or so.
|
| Then out of the blue, an email from them: "We just launched our
| app". Yeah, no, not interested.
|
| A few weeks later, another "You should use our app, it's so
| convenient!". No, the website works fine. Can I unsubscribe from
| these notices? Customer service says no.
|
| A few weeks after that: "Switch to our app. We are removing the
| website".
|
| I email them to complain: I don't want or need their app, just
| let me use the website. No,they say, it's definitely being
| removed. I ask how people who don't want to or can't use their
| app are supposed to interact with them now? "you can always call
| us instead".
|
| The idea of removing a perfectly functional website just to force
| everyone onto an app is insane.
| dbetteridge wrote:
| Victoria?
|
| But agreed the push to apps sucks, I just assume in these cases
| it's so they can spam you with notifications about "new
| products" they're offering, like my bank likes to regularly
| offer me loans at terrible interest rates
| paranoidrobot wrote:
| Tasmania.
|
| Yeah I'm assuming it's because they want to sell me more.
|
| I'm probably not earning them much with the no-interest
| scheme. But their approach has guaranteed I won't use them
| for anything else - I was looking at financing the solar and
| battery system but this just put me off.
| ElectroSlayer wrote:
| PWA stores:
|
| https://progressivewebapp.store/
|
| https://store.app/
|
| https://www.pwa.com/
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Websites can also access your GPS location and all of the other
| permissions the article named you have to give the app specific
| permissions for it. A website can track you across websites much
| easier than apps can
| sans_souse wrote:
| I like the post. But I feel like I am reading a slightly edited
| Gemini AI response. Just me?
| poemxo wrote:
| Depends on the app for me. I'd never install Facebook or
| Instagram just because of how aggressive they want your data.
| Reddit seems sus recently too. I install Discord though.
| xivzgrev wrote:
| If the website even lets you access. I use empower personal
| capital to track finances and on mobile they only support their
| app. And if it's broken (like it has been for the past month),
| tough noogies!
| zholer wrote:
| The primary challenge here is that companies are hamstrung by
| browser-level API's by companies like Google and Apple where they
| provide them only if you build an app. This forces developers to
| keep maintaining and providing apps, even though every developer
| knows that their headaches would be less than halved if they
| could just support the same capabilities via browser-level apis.
| zholer wrote:
| Google is a lot better in this regard though, but supporting
| most things on Safari are an absolute PITA
| chpatrick wrote:
| 99% of apps don't need any native feature.
| zholer wrote:
| true, but 99% of the apps don't generate any traffic at all
| :) If you look at the top 1% of apps, all of them could have
| been PWA's but can't. Here is a case study from aliexpress
| who achieved a 104% increase across all users for conversions
| when they deployed as a PWA: https://web.dev/case-
| studies/aliexpress
| beached_whale wrote:
| And Aliexpress is annoying as heck because they keep trying
| to redirect to app owned URI's for things like tracking.
| I'm already there to buy. The privacy of apps is just not
| as good as web with no benefit to me.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| I think that's more cultural. Mobile apps are very much
| the default in China and websites are rarely used through
| a browser, but rather as mini-apps inside other apps.
| beached_whale wrote:
| Could be, I shop there despite it but it is annoying.
| EasyMark wrote:
| the things I want a web app for are banks, shopping, various
| utilities, etc. They don't need a complex interface, and
| sticking to web standards should not be hard to be useful to
| 99% of the users out there, and should only simplify the
| developer's life.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > every developer
|
| You know. Every developer _you know_.
|
| I know many devs who in fact expliticly do _not_ think that at
| all, quite the opposite at a minimum.
| bugsMarathon88 wrote:
| Remove the ability for your phone to get "apps" from an "app
| store" - the same ability allows a remote party full and
| unilateral access to your device without your consent nor
| knowledge. GrapheneOS is a great start if this reality bothers
| you.
| throwaway13337 wrote:
| The web gives us control over the way we interact with
| governments and companies. Because it allows modification, it can
| be used flexibly in ways that the organization did not think
| about or intend. This is always beneficial to the user.
|
| With the web, we have: - Translation -
| Read outloud - Plugins for dark mode - Ad blocking
|
| With apps, we have only what they give us.
|
| Apps are enshitification.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Use the open source alternative app instead, companies apps and
| websites are usually both proprietary.
| delfugal wrote:
| 100%
| kstonekuan wrote:
| It's unfortunate that progressive web apps didn't really take
| off, I hate downloading so many new apps especially for mobile
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Yes and no. As an alternative to apps, it's a far better far
| more distributed system.
|
| But man. PWAs copy app behavior. And app behavior is garbage!
| The web has my back: I have forward/back buttons, urls,
| history, tabs, extensions, and so many other excellent amazing
| web things. The PWA is a vast improvement over apps, but it
| still misses 75% of what is so so good about the web, is still
| a place where you have only what the app developer grants you.
| The web is quite clearly better, is such a fairer shake, and
| it's so sad to lower oneself to an app experience, even if it
| is a "progressive web" app. It's a regressively sadly native
| apps, an RSNA. Boo that; give me the capable can do web instead
| please.
|
| I do think there's a lot of successes for PWA. It's on offer in
| a lot of places and a far better far safer option than native.
| But it's so curious to me that PWA was a thing, given that it
| has always felt like such a remarkable downgrade going from web
| to app, always. Appealing only to Stockholm Syndrome sufferers.
| Why? Why do worse?
| fsflover wrote:
| You can thank Apple for this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14864131
| chr15m wrote:
| This website needs an "upvote harder" button.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| Let's look at a few use cases:
|
| Bank app: they use apps for increased security.
|
| Map apps: of course they need your location. And wow it works way
| better than web based.
|
| TikTok: in yeah they need access to audio to record audio. And
| wow the UI is smoother.
|
| Games: don't ask for anything. Except more money through in app
| payments.
|
| Weather, uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart: needs location.
|
| Streaming apps: actually sometimes need location to prevent you
| from streaming outside the jurisdiction. And it's a better
| experience.
|
| Lots of other apps: don't ask for anything.
|
| Does anyone let an app have access to their contacts? (Ok maybe
| just us nerds don't)
|
| So, no. It's not usually about data. Sure, some of it is. But
| this is the wrong thread to pull on. It isn't why they all force
| us to use apps.
|
| The reason is that Apple has hampered the web experience to push
| everyone to apps. All of these problems are solvable with a web
| browsers, if it worked better. We have the technology. But Apple
| does not have an incentive to make the web work as well as apps.
| It destroys their revenue streams. They lose control. The problem
| is Apple, not all these apps that are trying to find their way in
| the walled Apple garden.
|
| Of course this isn't true for everything. But it is true enough.
| Why would they kill the golden goose?
| sergiotapia wrote:
| All of those shortcomings were deliberately orchestrated by
| Google and Apple to keep taxing developers.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Even Signal asks for Contacts. Whatsapp asks every other time
| you open the app.
|
| I can't use Zelle on my bank's web page any more, they just
| redirect to their app which is literally just their website in
| an app.
| efskap wrote:
| >needs location
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation...
| nightsd01 wrote:
| Thanks to the EU for ruining the web by forcing everyone to show
| the ridiculous "Accept Cookies!" agreement. No wonder people
| prefer native apps. They're better - for a lot of reasons, both
| because they can interface more cleanly with OS specific features
| and also for performance.
|
| And 'privacy' is a horrible argument to prefer websites over
| apps. For the average person (not a privacy obsessed techie) -
| the web is just as bad if not worse from a privacy perspective
| than native apps.
|
| I do agree that not everything needs an app - websites have their
| place. But when I go to browse HN on my phone, I don't do it
| through the web, I do it through Octal (which is open source).
|
| Frankly I am tired of privacy-obsessed techies ruining tech for
| everyone else. Let's face it - 99% of the things you're worried
| about are simply going to let companies....show you ads that are
| more relevant to your life. The horror!
| ac1spkrbox wrote:
| The website is often user-hostile, in hopes of pushing you to the
| app.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| For me it's ads when using the website with Firefox and unlock I
| know I won't get ads
| Mehuleo wrote:
| I think for companies, the main advantage of an app is the
| opportunity for uncontrolled data ab/use.
|
| Let me explain. Say you order food online -- you'd want a
| notification to update you, instead of having to manually refresh
| a webpage. So you prefer using the app. But what's the guarantee
| the company won't also send you marketing notifications? You give
| contact permission to access just one contact, but what's
| stopping the app from uploading your whole contact list to their
| servers? You allow location for one check-in, but they start
| logging your GPS every minute? Every permission asked & given for
| right purpose end up as consent-full data siphons.
|
| And honestly, if the app world hadn't taken off, the web would
| have invented its own version of permission systems. So yeah, I
| dis/agree with the article's title -- web can do everything apps
| can; including the shady data siphoning.
|
| Some people might argue that they need excessive data to serve
| right ads, make money and keep the app free -- the only way. But
| I don't think so, even if you pay for the app, they will need
| excessive data to ensure you keep renewing.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| It's free advertising. Almost every time you use your phone,
| you see their logo. That's dozens of free impressions per day
| per person.
| WWLink wrote:
| > Say you order food online -- you'd want a notification to
| update you, instead of having to manually refresh a webpage
|
| Browsers have a notification feature where websites can send
| you notifications, and it's usually enabled by default.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| I recommend to put the filter list adguard mobile popups, you can
| install it in unlock
| jay-barronville wrote:
| > And let's be honest, how many of us meticulously read through
| every single permission pop-up? Most of the time, we just tap
| "Allow" to get to what we want to do.
|
| I do. I also, without exception, read and make sure that I
| understand every single word of every piece of legalese that I'm
| presented with to agree to and/or sign. My wife sometimes jokes
| that she married me so that I could become her in-house attorney.
| I digress...
|
| You should regularly review and reevaluate all of your devices'
| configurations/settings from a privacy and security perspective
| (I do so _at least_ once every two weeks).
| windex wrote:
| Even on the web, you have to explicitly request the desktop site
| using options. Else you get served dark patterns.
| themingus wrote:
| I've found it somewhat kludgy to use most apps in their mobile
| web version, which was for me a benefit more than a curse. The
| friction in using Instagram on the web was just enough to stop me
| from doomscrolling, without obstructing all access to seeing what
| is happening with the people I care about.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| I don't offer a native app for my business. We have a PWA. It
| works great on mobile. Yet users keep asking for an app. They're
| so conditioned to look in the app store now. I keep having to
| tell them to just pin the website to their desktop. Just a couple
| taps. All good.
|
| I don't need or want their data. It's a liability. They pay a
| monthly subscription. I want their money. Not their data.
| apigalore wrote:
| Just don't collect any data. Having an app doesn't mean you
| need to collect any data.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Sometimes it is not whether or not you _do_ , but if you send
| the signal that you could.
|
| By refusing to provide a (superfluous) app, not only do you
| spare yourself the dev (and continued maintenance) costs, you
| also are not even as exposed to the data protection argument.
| usr1106 wrote:
| But you need to develop and maintain 2 apps. And to deal with
| 2 ugly companies. And even F-Droid if you were an ethically
| responsible business. So the GP's approach makes sense if you
| want to run your business in a lightway fashion.
| devjab wrote:
| I know it's not exactly the same because these tools are
| for internal use and never see the public, but react native
| works well while keeping the maintainence at a minimum. I'm
| not in on the ops site of device control, but our IT
| installs the APK packages directly through the enterprise
| control they have, so we don't have to deal with Apple or
| Google. So I agree with you completely on that part, but
| cross platform maintainence isn't as hard as it used to be
| if your toolsets support it.
|
| I did maintain the Apple account for a previous place where
| I worked though, and holy hell that sucks. Not so much the
| day to day work, but being from the Scotish part of
| Denmark, it hurt my soul to pay them money (it wasn't even
| mine) to use their platform. Not sure if Google is as shit,
| never tried their store from the developer side.
| Einenlum wrote:
| Could you elaborate on how they don't deal with the
| AppStore and the Play Store? I'm new to this.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| I don't have the time to build a native app that will
| constantly be out of feature parity with the web app.
|
| I _also_ work for a large company and we can 't keep all the
| apps in sync even with thousands of employees. It's just
| dumb.
| xmprt wrote:
| Why not create a simple app with a webview so your users are
| happy? I can't imagine that would take more than a couple hours
| of work. Google can be burdensome but that's only if you
| require things like payment and data collection in the app
| which a webview doesn't need. Otherwise, it's probably less
| than an hour of work per year to maintain.
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| iOS app store would reject an app like this, according to
| their guidelines. At least Google allows you to put PWA as
| apps in the Play store
|
| https://developer.apple.com/app-
| store/review/guidelines/#min...
|
| 4.2 Minimum Functionality
|
| Your app should include features, content, and UI that
| elevate it beyond a repackaged website.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| I did, for Android. But can't for iOS, like the other
| commenter said.
|
| There's a Web app for turning your web app into an Android
| app. The hardest part is jumping through all the play store
| hoops.
| WA wrote:
| Are you leaving money on the table or is your business in such
| a niche that people will jump through hoops for the results?
| aiisjustanif wrote:
| I feel like this is the point of the original post, it is not
| jumping through hoops to use a website.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| Both. I'm a one man shop. Not sure how many customers I've
| lost for not having an iOS app but I'm not positive it'd be a
| net ROI either. It is niche but not so niche that I don't
| have a few competitors. If an app is a must have ... It might
| be better to lose that customer and focus on the parts that
| set me apart to win others.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I use a mix. I only download apps that I use a _lot_. Everything
| else I use on the website.
| Animats wrote:
| I want a web site for Waymo. I don't have Play Store installed,
| nor do I have a Google account. Even Uber has a web site from
| which you can get a car.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Basically if you arent the major app listed in the article, stop
| trying
| vismit2000 wrote:
| Everyone knows all the apps on your phone (1195 points, 3 months
| ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43518866
| sylens wrote:
| The reason most people use apps instead of websites is that the
| devices they are using do not have a desktop class browser in
| them. iOS and iPadOS devices specifically run the mobile version
| of Safari which makes using modern web apps a painful experience.
|
| The one actual selling point a Microsoft Surface has over an iPad
| at this point is that you get to use real web browsers on it.
| omeid2 wrote:
| What does "desktop class browser" means in practical terms?
| What is it in the mobile version of Safari that holds you back?
| neilalexander wrote:
| Your information is out-of-date. Safari on iPad has served up
| desktop versions of web pages by default for years now.
| mproud wrote:
| This is why, when I need to use it, I only access Facebook from a
| web browser.
| iammrpayments wrote:
| While facebook is still usable, I use instagram on the browser
| and the experience is much worse, here are a few examples:
|
| - videos load much slower
|
| - you can't reply to stories questions
|
| - if you click to see the comments on a video and go back, it
| will scroll to the top of your feed and rewind the video to the
| start.
|
| - you can't go back and forward in a video
|
| - the icons such as like are tiny and take around 4 seconds
| plus to update without feedback while loading.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| I prefer to use web in dekstop but prefer to use app in mobile
|
| I think its just nature of ecosystem
| mastermage wrote:
| Depends on what kinda app i am using. I dictionary no thanks i
| want that as an app downloaded. Something that only works online
| anyways sure.
| bokkies wrote:
| Needed a new SIM in the UK recently so ordered a pay as you go
| one from Vodafone. Discovered to my horror that the new payg
| 'plus' can only be used with an app (that's locked to UK Google
| play Store) and a credit card for monthly recurring payments. No
| possibility of buying credit on a website or In store. Presumably
| so Vodafone can slurp up credit card details and all the juicy
| data mentioned in this article. Tossed in the bin and found a
| regular old school payg sim that I can top up with cash from a
| corner shop, but presumably this won't be possible for much
| longer.
| viccis wrote:
| >The answer, in short, is data. A lot of it. And access. A whole
| lot more of that too.
|
| This is it for reddit. They changed the Best sort to use general
| engagement metrics rather than upvotes (which are just one
| metric) back in 2021 [1], and this means that a lot of their
| metrics (time spent in comments, number of comments up/down
| voted, number of comments left on a post, etc.) benefit greatly
| from their app, which can track that with precision.
|
| This is (IMO) responsible for reddit's degenerated current form,
| as it prioritizes gossip subs, AITA type Jerry Springer subs,
| etc., but that's a whole different conversation.
|
| 1:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/o5tjcn/evolving_the_b...
| Follow_Cloud wrote:
| I totally agree with this point of view. Apps take up too much
| memory on mobile phones. I hope that browsing websites on mobile
| phones can be more convenient.
| almosthere wrote:
| App stores put a lot more crap in to make sure apps are not just
| pulling contacts anymore.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "Websites can try to estimate your location, but it's far less
| precise and requires explicit permission each time."
|
| The better solution is do not use a phone. Using a phone requires
| using a mobile browser. One of the worst "apps" of them all. If
| it is Firefox, then one needs to block a ton of telemetry. It is
| constantly trying to determine if it can reach the internet and
| then trying to access "location.services.mozilla.org" amongst
| numerous other domains. Mozilla partners with Google. They share
| data.
| fsflover wrote:
| > Using a phone requires using a mobile browser.
|
| Not true. Sent from desktop Firefox on my GNU/Linux phone.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| It is possible to avoid using a browser app when accessimg
| websites on a phone.
|
| For example, via the Termux app or "HTTP Shortcuts" app from
| F-Droid or Github.
|
| Sometimes corporate apps use resources from their public
| websites, not a dedicated "endpoint" set up for the app. For
| example, a weather app that uses pages under a folder called
| "widgets" from its website, or a grocery app that sources
| product images from an images folder its website's www
| subdomain. In testing I have accessed such resources outside
| the app, outside the mobile OS, from another computer, using
| any software.
|
| But Termux and HTTP shortcuts are apps, and subject to all the
| corporate mobile OS restrictions.
|
| There is no sysctl, nftables, iptables, tcpdump, etc. on the
| "phone".
|
| The kernel is generally not under the control of the phone's
| owner.
|
| As such, _for me_ the corporate mobile OS even coupled with
| impressive phone hardware, is inferior to a computer that it's
| owner, who is not working for a so-called "tech" company
| selling ad services, can control, by compiling and installing
| their OS of choice. That includes the kernel.
|
| Using Termux, I could submit this reply to HN from a phone
| using the 59-line shell script I normally use on a computer.
| It's possible. But I prefer the computer with the kernel I
| compiled myself.
|
| If I'm going to use a website instead of an app, I would prefer
| to do it on that computer, not a "phone".
| melchebo wrote:
| Browser versions tend to burn more power.
| theanonymousone wrote:
| I was a heavy Quora user from 2014 to 2019 with fairly many
| answers and questions. In 2019 they essentially blocked website
| for mobile users and urged them to download the app. That's when
| I decided to respect my dignity and deleted my account.
|
| If you have a website, everyone with a browser should be able to
| use it.
| can16358p wrote:
| Quora has been known for its dark patterns. At one point they
| didnt't show you a page if you clicked a link to it within
| their site and prompted to login, though if you copy paste the
| page link to a new tab it opened.
|
| They've never had my trust, and never will.
| BrtByte wrote:
| Companies aren't just chasing engagement; they want persistent
| surveillance endpoints in your pocket
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Most annoying to me is Google maps. On web it is wasting so much
| more screen real-estate when showing a route, I can barely see
| the map itself. The app has much smaller ui components. (android)
| BrtByte wrote:
| Feels like it's actively trying to punish you for not using the
| app
| madduci wrote:
| One big drawback is represented by banking apps, that force the
| usage of their apps to act as a 2 Factor Authentication
| mechanism, sending a request for logging in.
|
| I would like to use only the browser, but unfortunately for some
| use cases it isn't really possible.
| pastage wrote:
| If you use a third party for identification that works out
| better.
| madduci wrote:
| Unfortunately my bank requires the usage of their own app,
| since they send an.authentication request similar to the
| Google "confirmation"
| xyse53 wrote:
| I don't install apps for simple websites, ever.
|
| Banking happens to be the one where I do keep the app for each
| bank/brokerage that I have an account with. Some of the
| features like mobile deposit work better. And the biometric
| login on Android is convenient when I'm looking up things
| quickly.
|
| (I use the banking websites too, and for those prefer hardware
| passkey where supported, and if not everything else is in
| bitwarden).
| zkmon wrote:
| The problem is, this article assumes that you have an option to
| choose between the app and web page. This is not true in most
| important cases. The web site is gone or made a useless page
| which only tells you to download the app. Banks won't allow you
| to do much on their website. Infact, you can't login to their
| website if you don't have the app. I can't login into my work PC
| or laptop, if I don't use my company apps.
|
| Same goes for every serious app which need to ID you. The app-
| based 2FA/MFA is becoming the standard for the web access. This
| is a need or pattern created by availability of a bad solution.
| Similar to how the cars created sprawling cities in the USA which
| prohibits you using your legs.
|
| So, telling people to use website instead of app, is the same as
| telling them to walk to the corner shop instead of using a car.
| You can't walk to the many other essential places anymore,
| though.
|
| You can escape from the car if you live a small village that has
| everything you need. But you can't escape from apps and internet
| if you need to feel that you exist in this world.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Which bank is that where you can't log into their website from
| PC or mobile?
| msephton wrote:
| My bank Monzo only has a minimal website. The app is
| everything.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| This must be a thing outside the US as far as not being
| able to do everything on the banking website even on
| mobile. The exception is depositing a check.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Monzo et al. aren't "real" (i.e. traditional banks) they
| are purely online and entirely built around mobile apps.
| So there was probably no real demand for actual websites
| since all the banks clients signed up through the app to
| begin with.
| aiisjustanif wrote:
| Similar with Cashapp, Venmo, and Apple Wallet / Credit
| Card.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| You can very much get a physical card for the Apple
| credit card and make payments on the web.
| zkmon wrote:
| All European banks require you have the app to be able to do
| anything with your account. The is more of
| compliance/regulatory thing.
|
| And to login into my work, I need to first login into my
| laptop and then enter into a very elaborate way of login into
| VPN or company WiFi. VPN/WiFi login requires you to first
| login into company app on your mobile to get a temp password.
| The company app need to work with other auth apps in a very
| complex way, making you hop through multiple ID checks. It is
| very likely that one of these apps might not like your speed
| of response and block you, requiring you create an incident
| ticket which itself requires logging into your account first.
| Since you can't create the ticket, you will call help desk
| and wait for half-day as they keep shifting your ticket
| across support queues.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| So this is as most things wrong with the EU and tech is
| about overzealous regulators..
| andreasgl wrote:
| > All European banks require you have the app to be able to
| do anything with your account. The is more of
| compliance/regulatory thing.
|
| This is not true in Sweden. I use three different banks in
| Sweden, and they all offer equal or more functionality on
| their mobile version websites.
|
| This wasn't always the case, though. In the early 2010s, I
| remember a bank blocking mobile user agents and referring
| to their app instead, due to "security". I'm glad there has
| been some progress in the right direction since then.
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| Not true in all of Europe. Here in Denmark you need to have
| the state-issued identification app MitId ("My Id"), and
| most (all?) banks use it for authentication. Both for
| websites, and even when making a (larger?) transfer in
| their own app. You practically need that MitId app anyway,
| it is used for so many things, from the tax office to
| online payments to library cards.
|
| Things are the other way in Finland, where each bank has
| its own identification app, and many official sites require
| you to use one for identifying yourself.
| threecheese wrote:
| One of the two medical networks in my area just locked their
| EHR portal down and require the mobile app, there is no way
| to access it from their website on mobile or desktop.
|
| I wouldn't care, except they require it for payments and in
| 2024 they auto-enrolled us in "paperless". Fixable - by using
| the EHR systems configuration (needs a mobile app to access)
| back to mailed bills.
|
| Major issue is though, I was sending their voluminous useless
| survey emails to spam, as they do not allow patients to
| unenroll their email address (it's the primary key
| essentially), and their unsubscribe is essentially useless,
| and so I did not see repeated requests for payment.
|
| This resulted in a $90 copay *going to collections*. Which of
| course sent me a paper bill, thankfully, and I got to it
| before it impacted our ability to access credit.
| npteljes wrote:
| OTP in Hungary is sunsetting their mobile web site in favor
| of the app. Website still accessible from PC. App seems to be
| a webview of the actual website.
| dartharva wrote:
| I periodically delete my browser history and data for privacy
| (and many OEM Androids have a "cleaner" function that does the
| same). Having to log in every time is a hassle that's avoided by
| having dedicated apps.
| tempestn wrote:
| At AutoTempest we resisted making an app for years, because
| anything that a hypothetical app could do, we could do with the
| website. And in my opinion, when searching for cars, it's more
| convenient to be in your browser where you can easily open new
| tabs, bookmark results, etc.
|
| And for years, it was our most requested feature, by far. We had
| instructions for how to pin the site to your home screen, and
| would explain to users how the website does everything an app can
| do. Still, constant requests for an app. Finally we relented and
| released one, and very quickly around half our mobile traffic
| moved to the app without us really trying to nudge people at all.
|
| People just really like apps! I think it suits our mental model
| of different tools for different uses. We've also found that app
| users are much more engaged than website users, but of course
| much of that will be selection bias. Still, I can see how having
| your app on someone's home screen could provide a significant
| boost to retention, compared to a website they're liable to
| forget. For us now, that's the main benefit we see. Certainly
| don't use any additional data, though I won't argue that other
| companies don't.
| rplnt wrote:
| > People just really like apps!
|
| I would say people really hate websites on mobile. The browsers
| are horrible, the pages are slow and oftentimes broken in some
| way. You get all these popups everywhere, ads are much more
| intrusive. It's just bad experience, so of course people would
| prefer app for something they use.
|
| I avoid the browser on mobile as much as possible and I don't
| remember ever having a good time using it.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| Mostly that's because devs want to drive people to the app,
| where they can track you a lot better, so they make their
| mobile sites shitty on purpose. Plenty of mobile apps are
| just webapps anyway under the hood. There's absolutely no
| reason for a mobile site to be massively worse than the app
| unless the devs want it that way.
| RealCodingOtaku wrote:
| This. I dislike most mobile websites as much as I hate the
| mobile apps. So to pick my poison, I have a formula.
|
| - Banking: Install it on a different android profile because
| my websites forces me to use the App one way or the other
| anyway.
|
| - If the site uses an existing open protocol to interact
| (IndieWeb, Fediverse, etc), use a non-browser/non-electron
| app that can handle multiple instances of such protocols.
|
| - If not, and it has PWA, is responsive, and I use it at
| least twice a day, use the PWA (so far I have one).
|
| - If it does not have PWA, but have has nice responsive
| layout, Firefox Android with uBlock Origin (I use Iornfox).
|
| - For everything else, if I'm outside without a laptop,
| whine, complain, and use the website in the mobile browser,
| enable desktop mode if it has a crappy UI.
|
| - If I'm not outside, browse it from my laptop.
| Einenlum wrote:
| I honestly hate PWAs. Last time I tried it, I realized I
| couldn't open a link in a new tab. Some people tried to
| make me use the PWA instead of browsing the website, but to
| me, it just makes my life harder.
| brulard wrote:
| On desktop you can, but it opens the tab in the browser.
| crinkly wrote:
| I hate everything on mobile. The apps are badly put together.
| The web sites are crap.
|
| I think Apple's core apps that ship with iOS are about the
| only things that don't annoy me. They work offline and
| disconnected for days at a time quite happily and generally
| work as intended. No one else seems to bother with that and
| rather ships some fat web turd instead that works
| occasionally and forces you to sign in all the time.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| right, and the problem is that even if you have a good site
| on mobile it is sitting in the browser, the gateway to all
| the awful site experiences, to get to your good site people
| may go through a bunch of crap. Thus they would rather have
| an app.
|
| The problem is not just to make your site mobile friendly, it
| is also that the rest of the web isn't.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I think this is a much more accurate characterization,
| especially in AutoTempest's case. Their experience on mobile
| has always been slow and glitchy. I'm not sure what makes
| their web "app" so heavy, but it's very noticeable.
| tempestn wrote:
| Can you share details? Or feel free to email me directly,
| nathan at autotempest. I'd like to learn more about your
| device, browser, and search criteria so we can try and
| reproduce what you described.
| jajko wrote:
| Thats because you don't use mobile firefox with ublock origin
| (on android). I very much prefer sites for stuff I do, they
| provide 100% of same experience, with one exception - can't
| easily block ads in apps.
|
| Thus mobile is often even a better experience.
| tempestn wrote:
| Many of those things are true in general, but fwiw I think
| we've done a decent job making the site fast and usable on
| mobile. It's comparable to the app in most ways, but many
| still prefer that.
| gcanyon wrote:
| I refuse to use Facebook's app. It's been years, I don't
| remember why, don't ask me.
|
| Their web app is fundamentally broken in half a dozen ways,
| and has been for years. A couple examples (not all):
|
| If you are in the middle of typing a comment and switch to
| another app, when you come back, it will reload the display,
| losing your comment.
|
| Video shorts load in a way that hides the video after about
| two seconds. Editing the URL to remove the parameters fixes
| this.
|
| The layout of comments/posts often breaks, forcing me to
| switch to "ask for desktop version" to make one feature work,
| then switch back to "mobile version" to make another feature
| work. Neither is completely functional.
|
| As I said, there are more. As I said, I don't even remember
| why I rejected their app, but at this point, if they can't
| make a mobile web site, why would I trust them to make an
| app?
| devnullbrain wrote:
| >If you are in the middle of typing a comment and switch to
| another app, when you come back, it will reload the
| display, losing your comment.
|
| This is the rule for a lot of apps and mobile websites now.
| I don't understand why - we have _so much_ RAM available -
| but they love to refresh whether there 's a reason to or
| not. And even if there's a reason not to. I can't count the
| number of times I've tapped on a tab that has a minature
| version of all the information I want, only for it to be
| replaced by a loading screen or 404.
|
| A while ago I noticed my battery usage had gone way up. It
| was because any time I was distracted from my phone (or
| lost internet connection on a train), I would just leave
| the display on. Locking the phone meant that I'd lose
| whatever context I had.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > I don't understand why - we have so _much_ RAM
| available
|
| It's not even that. There are APIs to persist state
| beyond app termination. Even if your app gets killed due
| to memory pressure, it should continue where it left off.
| Frotag wrote:
| It's probably refreshing because iOS is aggressive about
| killing websockets, even if you only backgrounded safari
| for a few seconds. And it's easier to do a reload than
| determine which messages were missed. It's hard to even
| tell if the websocket is dead since it just stays open
| but is unable to receive / send messages.
|
| Or at least this was my experience working on a mobile
| PWA a few years ago. I don't even own an apple device,
| it's just the ios bugs were always the most painful /
| memorable.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Companies intentionally make their web experiences worse
| because they can track you better in apps. Even if the
| trackers are technically the same, even somewhat savvy
| people using blockers or browser protections generally
| don't use them on their phones.
| prmph wrote:
| Why are people still using Meta's products? Their products
| are among the most unbelievably user-hostile things I come
| across on the web; I wonder why there hasn't been a revolt
| yet against them
| driverdan wrote:
| > You get all these popups everywhere, ads are much more
| intrusive.
|
| I've literally never had that problem. Firefox Mobile +
| uBlock Origin eliminates ads.
| rplnt wrote:
| That works well on Android, but on iOS not so much I think?
| Also, those damn cookie banners in EU.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Interesting. Why do you think so many websites try to foist
| apps on you if people will voluntarily download them anyway?
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| My guess would be that it's because (as the above poster
| says) "app users are much more engaged than website users"
| and only "half our" moved without nudging - the sites would
| like more engagement from _all_ users.
|
| That said, the harder you "nudge" me, the more I want to
| avoid the app _and the whole business_. Especially if you
| have any other dark patterns - I will assume you want me to
| download your app just so you can abuse me better.
| W3zzy wrote:
| My wife and daughter seem to be very receptive to dark
| patterns. It's about education and understanding but you
| also need to care. They don't. Alas.
| figassis wrote:
| The ones that do are usually the ones that know people will
| be reluctant to download.
| melagonster wrote:
| Maybe OP offers some really valuable products?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Because they don't accept their website _is not worth an
| app_. Most of that long tail of businesses has a
| transactional relationship with users, who by very nature
| would ideally want to think about them as little as possible
| and only for the short moment of actual transaction.
|
| In short: I do install apps of main platforms and physical
| shops I frequent. It's usually vastly better than a website,
| even if it just wraps a webview. But I don't want to install
| an app for _every_ site I visit, for the same reason I don 't
| want to go on a date with every stranger that smiles at me
| when I pass them by on the street.
| tempestn wrote:
| Yeah, as others have said, I'm guessing it's primarily for
| the enhanced engagement and retention. And come to think of
| it, I've experienced it myself in reverse, in that social
| media is much easier to ignore when the app icon isn't right
| there on your home screen.
| rchaud wrote:
| Apps have the ability to send notifications, web apps
| meanwhile have to deal with a pesky browser that prompts you
| to provide explicit consent for them to do that.
| kelthuzad wrote:
| >We had instructions for how to pin the site to your home
| screen, and would explain to users how the website does
| everything an app can do. Still, constant requests for an app.
|
| This is the result of the inconsistent user experience to which
| gatekeepers like Apple have been actively contributing through
| active sabotage of web apps, such that all profitable apps can
| be more effectively and reliably taxed through Apple's App
| Store.
|
| The manufactured perception of the general public then became
| that web apps are not "real apps" despite offering the exact
| same features. They have been dragged down by the subtle
| artificial friction that makes the UX feel subpar.
|
| This reminds me of my own experience of mobile websites when
| they first emerged. I thought that the desktop version of a
| website is the "real website" i.e. that there is only one
| static original website and that its mobile version was some
| fake substitute, so I always activated the option "show desktop
| version". Then I learned about responsive web design and it
| clicked for me. I predict that a similar epiphany will occur
| among casuals once the active sabotage of web apps stops due to
| regulations reigning in the anti-competitive business practices
| of gatekeepers.
|
| I'm sure that some people will still prefer "native" apps for
| whatever reason. However, if regulators do a proper job and
| allow web apps to compete on a level playing field, then a lay
| person wouldn't even be able to differentiate between them.
| This is even the case today where some developers simply wrap
| their web app in a WebView and ship it as a "native" app.
| troupo wrote:
| > This is the result of the inconsistent user experience to
| which gatekeepers like Apple have been actively contributing
| through active sabotage of web apps, such that all profitable
| apps can be more effectively and reliably taxed through
| Apple's App Store.
|
| If web apps were any good, we'd see a plethora of them on
| Android. There are none (or very, very, very few).
|
| If web apps were any good, nothing Apple "gatekeeps" would
| prevent you from building an amazing web app for iOS. The
| things Apple "gatekeeps" (such as mobile push) would not
| prevent you from making a smooth fast web app.
|
| And yet here we are.
|
| > if regulators do a proper job and allow web apps to compete
| on a level playing field
|
| They already are competing on a level playing field. It's not
| "lack of NFC" or "lack of Bluetooth" or "lack of <another
| moving goalpost>" that prevent you from having good web apps.
| kelthuzad wrote:
| >If web apps were any good, we'd see a plethora of them on
| Android. There are none (or very, very, very few).
|
| This statement alone is evidence that you didn't understand
| the crux of the issue. You are also confusing cause and
| effect. I clearly explained the root causes for that. The
| reason there are not more web apps is not that they aren't
| "good" - what does that even mean? what is the criterion
| for "good" here? If you say that it's because they lack
| certain features, then you confirmed my point that it's due
| to active sabotage and denial of equal rights. Be specific,
| why are they not "good"? There wouldn't be coincidentally a
| mysterious opposing force that actively prevents developers
| from improving those aspects, right?
|
| >There are none (or very, very, very few).
|
| X (Twitter) - has PWA
|
| Pinterest - has PWA
|
| Spotify - has PWA
|
| Uber - Hybrid
|
| Starbucks - has PWA
|
| Again, you're confusing cause and effect. It's like
| actively sabotaging a runner and saying: "See? that runner
| sucks!!" - Yeah because that runner is being actively
| sabotaged. You're completely ignoring all the evidence and
| simply claiming that they are unpopular because they are
| not "good" when in reality they are unpopular because they
| have been sabotaged to prevent them from challenging the
| gatekeeper's taxation funnels.
|
| >If web apps were any good, nothing Apple "gatekeeps" would
| prevent you from building an amazing web app for iOS. The
| things Apple "gatekeeps" (such as mobile push) would not
| prevent you from making a smooth fast web app.
|
| That's not even a coherent argument. Gatekeepers can
| sabotage competitors in many subtle ways to make the user
| experience subpar, it's not a 1-dimensional game where only
| feature parity can be weaponized. It's clear that you are
| actively refusing to understand the points being made.
| There is also documented evidence that Apple _consistently_
| engaged in practices that made any competing platform a
| worse experience. Gatekeepers have a conflict of interest
| and they consistently act in a manner that makes that bias
| glaring. Gatekeepers are also not morons, they know that it
| doesn 't take much to introduce artificial friction while
| also maintaining plausible deniability. e.g. see court
| documents where Apple's engineers admit that they
| strategically use "scare screens" and that their managers
| would "definitely like that".
|
| >They already are competing on a level playing field. It's
| not "lack of NFC" or "lack of Bluetooth" or "lack of
| <another moving goalpost>" that prevent you from having
| good web apps.
|
| That's factually incorrect. As previously stated, it's not
| just a 1-dimensional form of sabotage where only feature
| parity is being weaponized but any form of artificially
| introduced friction, while being able to maintain plausible
| deniability - any of that will get the job done of shutting
| down any threat to the gatekeeper's taxation funnel.
| Furthermore, as open-web-advocacy.org states:
|
| - #AppleBrowserBan Apple's ban of third party browsers on
| iOS is deeply anti-competitive, starves the Safari/WebKit
| team of funding and has stalled innovation for the past 10
| years and prevented Web Apps from taking off on mobile.
| (https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-
| ban...)
|
| -Deep System Integration
|
| Web Apps need to become just Apps. Apps built with the free
| and open web need equal treatment and integration. Closed
| and heavily taxed proprietary ecosystems should not receive
| any preference.
|
| - Web App Equality
|
| All artifical barriers placed by gatekeepers must be
| removed. Web Apps if allowed can offer equivalent
| functionality with greater privacy and security for
| demanding use-cases.
| troupo wrote:
| > This statement alone is evidence that you didn't
| understand the crux of the issue.
|
| I do
|
| > You are also confusing cause and effect.
|
| I don't
|
| > I clearly explained the root causes for that.
|
| You didn't. You went on a rant about "public perception"
| and your own experience building mobile web sites.
|
| > If you say that it's because they lack certain
| features, then you confirmed my point that it's due to
| active sabotage and denial of equal rights.
|
| See. Again with the rant.
|
| > Be specific, why are they not "good"?
|
| E.g. Reddit's mobile web site loads every post in 3+
| seconds. And reloads the full page when you click on a
| subtree in the comments.
|
| When you scroll through Twitter, it will just randomly
| load a bunch of stuff and replace your content losing
| your scroll position. Same with going back from a tweet
| to the timeline.
|
| Most websites take multiple seconds to display text-only
| information with broken layouts, layout shifts, and
| multiple loading states.
|
| To quote myself from 3 years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34517503
|
| --- start quote ---
|
| Features HN developers think are missing from the web to
| deliver an experience "as polished as a native app":
| notifications, prompt banners, link interception, Chrome-
| only non-standards like bluetooth etc.
|
| Features actual users think are missing from the web to
| deliver an experience "as polished as a native app":
| actual native-like experience: responsiveness, smooth
| animations, polished usable and accesible controls,
| maintaining scroll position and location in the app, fast
| scrolling through large lists, no loading states for the
| simplest actions...
|
| I mean, people people keep bringing up Twitter's
| objectively bad web app as an example of one of the best
| PWA apps... Have these people never seen an actual native
| app?
|
| --- end quote ---
|
| > There wouldn't be coincidentally a mysterious opposing
| force that actively prevents developers from improving
| those aspects, right?
|
| There is no such entity. Besides, Google invested
| hundreds of millions of dollars into PWAs, and there are
| still so few that people can point to even on Android.
|
| > X (formerly Twitter) - has PWA
|
| Yup.
| akdev1l wrote:
| We have really complex web applications like Photopea.
|
| They work fine performance-wise. The example of Reddit's
| website being shit is just pointing out that Reddit's
| website is shit.
|
| Google maps web applications also works really well. Both
| Photopea and Google Maps are far more complex than
| reddit.
|
| At this point I am sure reddit's website is shit so
| people are forced to use their app so they can track
| users better. Not because of some underlying limitation
| of web technologies.
| kelthuzad wrote:
| ht>> I clearly explained the root causes for that.
|
| >You didn't. You went on a rant about "public perception"
| and your own experience building mobile web sites.
|
| I have no time to engage in your shallow kind of tit for
| tat, where I do all of the work and you simply respond
| with infantile one word responses with zero elaboration
| or outright denial, misrepresentation or just repetition
| of already debunked narratives. I will still briefly
| debunk the parts where you put in at least some minor
| effort of trying to substantiate.
|
| For a more elaborate analysis:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44694037
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44692287
|
| >> Be specific, why are they not "good"? > E.g. Reddit's
| mobile web site loads every post in 3+ seconds. And
| reloads the full page when you click on a subtree in the
| comments. When you scroll through Twitter, it will just
| randomly load a bunch of stuff and replace your content
| losing your scroll position. Same with going back from a
| tweet to the timeline. Most websites take multiple
| seconds to display text-only information with broken
| layouts, layout shifts, and multiple loading states.
|
| Those are some specific apps that have bad
| implementations, not an inherent limitation of the
| technology, so it's irrelevant to the bigger picture. I
| asked you for the specific technology. That's like me
| saying "Give me a specific reason why electric cars will
| never be a viable technology as you claimed" then you
| respond with "This specific brand has an electric car
| with this specific issue". It's such a transparent
| strategy of deliberately missing the point.
|
| > --- start quote ---
|
| Features HN developers think are missing from the web to
| deliver an experience ... --- end quote ---
|
| All of those are issues that have already been fixed, so
| I don't get why you would bring up your severely outdated
| comment. It also contains aspects for which I clearly
| explained why and who is to blame for those.
|
| >There is no such entity. Besides, Google invested
| hundreds of millions of dollars into PWAs, and there are
| still so few that people can point to even on Android.
|
| I already responded to this in many different comments:
|
| "Google is the primary champion of PWAs, they have a
| vested interest in its success. The reason I focused on
| Apple is because its actions are one of a profit-
| maximizing gatekeeper actively defending its most
| lucrative business against an existential threat that is
| PWA. Every bug, every delayed feature, and every
| artificial limitation imposed on PWAs on iOS is a
| calculated strategic move in this defense of its walled
| garden that makes maximum taxation possible."
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| > Web Apps need to become just Apps. Apps built with the
| free and open web need equal treatment and integration.
| Closed and heavily taxed proprietary ecosystems should
| not receive any preference.
|
| That basically already exists on the desktop in the form
| of Electron apps. Those apps are universally hated
| because of it.
|
| Web technology is not suitable for making applications.
| It was designed to format text documents and that's all
| it's really good at. That's why we have the web-
| framework-of-the-week problem, everyone is desperately
| trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Web apps
| are janky, fragile and feel out of place on every OS.
| It's a 'one size fits no one' solution.
| kelthuzad wrote:
| >That basically already exists on the desktop in the form
| of Electron apps. Those apps are universally hated
| because of it.
|
| Discord and Visual Studio Code are among the most popular
| apps on mac, those are electron apps. None of that is
| relevant to the core issue either way. It's not up to
| Apple to decide any of that, that's what the market and
| regulators are for. Apple uses and pushes self-serving
| and false narratives as pretext to engage in anti-
| competitive business practices.
|
| >Web technology is not suitable for making applications.
| It was designed to format text documents and that's all
| it's really good at.
|
| That statement might have been true in 1995, but today
| it's categorically false.
|
| > Web apps are janky, fragile and feel out of place on
| every OS. It's a 'one size fits no one' solution.
|
| I've already debunked this manufactured, reductionist and
| false narrative above.
| jdiff wrote:
| You really haven't. You are up and down this thread
| saying these things, but you haven't already proven them
| or even addressed them.
|
| You have points, I agree that web technology is well
| suited in 2025 to make interactive applications. I agree
| that web apps are being held back from expressing their
| true potential. And while Electron is largely skewered
| for being bloated and heavy, the web _can be_ fast and
| fluid.
|
| But you haven't proven that web apps don't feel janky,
| fragile, and out of place. Because they just factually
| do. The native UI elements of each OS that you can tap
| into from the web is limited, and not enough to create
| the same UI in a WebView that you can in a native Swift
| app, for instance. You of course can coerce the web into
| imitating any appearance you care to recreate, but it
| won't look that way by default, and it'll now look even
| more starkly out of place on every other platform besides
| the single one you targeted. This is all an intentional
| aspect of the web as a cross-platform platform.
|
| The web's internet-native status means a bad internet
| connection or a brief crossing through a dead zone will
| kill almost any web app. Yes, there's strategies around
| this with web workers nowadays, but those are quite
| complex to implement for even simple applications and
| often aren't worth the effort to do anything more than
| pop up a branded "you're offline" page. An app can be
| completely cut off from the internet, it doesn't have
| that base assumption of network connectivity and isn't
| built from the ground up from network-based parts.
| kelthuzad wrote:
| I already responded to any of your points that are
| relevant to the core discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44694037
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44692287
|
| For the rest refer to https://whatpwacando.today
| jdiff wrote:
| You still haven't. The whole point of my comment is that
| you haven't, and I brought up specific points that remain
| un-addressed by _any_ of your comments in your thread,
| despite your insistence. Linking to comments that largely
| consist of the next layer of "I already addressed your
| points elsewhere!" is not a response. The world exists
| beyond Apple, and "Apple decrees it" is not a sufficient
| to explain much of your claims.
|
| If you don't care to engage with the substance of my
| points, fine, nobody is owed discussion, but this style
| of conversation is deeply unproductive and I believe even
| you are losing track of what you have and haven't said.
| kelthuzad wrote:
| >You have points, I agree that web technology is well
| suited in 2025 to make interactive applications. I agree
| that web apps are being held back from expressing their
| true potential. And while Electron is largely skewered
| for being bloated and heavy, the web can be fast and
| fluid.
|
| The main topic originated through OP's "why some users
| demand a 'native' app when the web app should be enough"
| for which I provided explanations as to why web apps
| haven't lived up to their potential i.e. conflict of
| interest and the corresponding sabotage by a gatekeeper
| in contrast to the manufactured narrative of "they are
| unpopular because they suck". That's a false narrative
| which I've explained in many comments:
|
| - "A Progressive Web App, if allowed to reach its full,
| un-sabotaged potential, is the technological
| manifestation of the Digital Markets Act's goals. So it
| would be utterly absurd for Apple to pour hundreds of
| millions of dollars into fighting the DMA, just to let
| PWAs pass which achieves the exact same goals."
|
| - "The reason I focused on Apple is because its actions
| are one of a profit-maximizing gatekeeper actively
| defending its most lucrative business against an
| existential threat that is PWA. Every bug, every delayed
| feature, and every artificial limitation imposed on PWAs
| on iOS is a calculated strategic move in this defense of
| its walled garden that makes maximum taxation possible."
|
| Since you've stated that "I agree that web apps are being
| held back from expressing their true potential" you
| confirmed my thesis. That's why I stated: "I already
| responded to any of your points that are RELEVANT to the
| CORE DISCUSSION"
|
| >But you haven't proven that web apps don't feel janky,
| fragile, and out of place.
|
| That's not even part of the core issue and it has still
| been explained in my post anyway, which you even
| confirmed by saying "I agree that web apps are being held
| back from expressing their true potential" and is also
| expressed here:
|
| - Apple's ban of third party browsers on iOS is deeply
| anti-competitive, STARVES the Safari/WebKit team of
| funding and has STALLED innovation for the past 10 YEARS
| and PREVENTED Web Apps from taking off on mobile.
| (https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-
| engine-ban...)
|
| -Deep System Integration
|
| Web Apps need to become just Apps. Apps built with the
| free and open web need equal treatment and integration.
| Closed and heavily taxed proprietary ecosystems should
| not receive any preference.
|
| - Web App Equality
|
| All artificial barriers placed by gatekeepers must be
| removed. Web Apps if allowed can offer equivalent
| functionality with greater privacy and security for
| demanding use-cases.
|
| These are all factors that have already been mentioned
| and they fix all the real issues that are not the product
| of active sabotage.
|
| Furthermore, I'm using many web apps like Discord and
| Visual Studio Code and they do not feel janky, fragile or
| out of place, that's your subjective perception. And even
| if that were an objective fact, which they are not, it
| would still not be relevant to the core discussion since
| they are not inherent to the technology but product-
| management related trade-offs that can be improved and
| fixed.
|
| >The web's internet-native status means a bad internet
| connection or a brief crossing through a dead zone will
| kill almost any web app. Yes, there's strategies around
| this with web workers nowadays, but those are quite
| complex to implement for even simple applications and
| often aren't worth the effort to do anything more than
| pop up a branded "you're offline" page.
|
| Your first claim is just factually wrong, but you admit
| that in the following statement which contains another
| claim that is also wrong. Those are exactly the kind of
| problems that PWAs solve and the user experience in that
| regard has been steadily improving (see also
| https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first )
|
| >An app can be completely cut off from the internet, it
| doesn't have that base assumption of network connectivity
| and isn't built from the ground up from network-based
| parts.
|
| That's just straight up nonsense. Any native or web app
| that relies on internet connectivity will be equally
| affected. Any native or web app developed with a local-
| first or local-only approach will work perfectly fine
| without internet. You clearly have outdated knowledge on
| the matter. (see https://whatpwacando.today)
|
| So I really had addressed your points that were relevant
| to the core issue, but you just wanted to nitpick details
| that had already been partially or fully addressed and
| are also insignificant in the bigger picture of the topic
| and technological progress in general. Those ones you
| listed are based on your subjective experience, your
| outdated knowledge on the tech or simply a transitory
| state of software that can be easily improved since they
| are not an inherent technological limitation.
| akdev1l wrote:
| > Those apps are universally hated because of it.
|
| Maybe they are hated by nerds on reddit and hackernews.
|
| I gather most people are just using the apps and have no
| idea how they're built.
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| > I gather most people are just using the apps and have
| no idea how they're built.
|
| They may have no idea how they are built, but they do
| notice how janky and out of place they are. Take for
| example Microsoft Teams, have you ever met anyone who
| actually likes that app? It's insane that a simple chat
| app uses well over a gigabyte of RAM.
|
| It's absurd that one of the biggest software companies in
| the world can't seem to produce a sleek, native app. It's
| purely a cost saving measure. They decided mediocrity is
| good enough for them and they get away with it because
| the people making the purchase decisions are not the
| people who have to use it daily.
| jen20 wrote:
| > one of the biggest software companies in the world
| can't seem to produce a sleek, native app
|
| For their own operating system that they own the APIs and
| development tools for, no less!
| abustamam wrote:
| I hate teams as much as anyone but it seems a bit
| reductive to call it a simple chat app. It certainly
| doesn't need to take 1GB of RAM, but it's more complex
| than say, AIM or IRC are.
| brulard wrote:
| Teams is one of the worst apps I ever had the misfortune
| to use. But that is no fault of electron. Slack was built
| with electron and it's night and day difference to Teams.
| troupo wrote:
| > I gather most people are just using the apps and have
| no idea how they're built.
|
| Because people who develop these only care about one
| thing: ease of development. They couldn't care less about
| what users say, and if they cared they wouldn't
| understand users, because users don't use terms like
| "latency", or "startup time", or "lag".
| brulard wrote:
| Do you have any idea of the software development cost?
| You may care about your users all you want, maintaining
| web app and its desktop native counterparts (would you
| like distinct windows/linux/macos versions?) may be
| completely unaffordable.
| jen20 wrote:
| They may not why they're slow, buggy and not platform
| integrated, but they certainly know. I just watched this
| as my employer switched to Slack. Thousands of non-IT
| professionals have many (valid) criticisms about the
| client hogging memory and generally being awful. Sadly
| most of the other options are worse, and also electron
| slop.
| rpdillon wrote:
| I understand where you're coming from, but then I think
| about my daily work.
|
| All of my documents, my spreadsheets, email, chat, and
| video calling is all done from my browser. I keep Emacs
| open for scratch just because I can't quit Emacs and I
| have a terminal open to run some servers. And this has
| been my working model for at least the last five to six
| years.
|
| What's remarkable about it is that web apps are doing
| almost all of the heavy lifting of my work every day. I
| thought this was worth noting in the context of your
| comment that web technology is not suitable for making
| applications.
| clippyplz wrote:
| > If you say that [PWAs] lack certain features, then you
| confirmed my point that it's due to active sabotage and
| denial of equal rights
|
| How does that follow?
|
| More generally, do you have any sources for your repeated
| claims of intentional sabotage? You make accusations of
| ignoring evidence but you have provided none - unless
| you're saying that apple has already poisoned the well
| and anything they do is suspect.
| kelthuzad wrote:
| All of your questions have already been answered above,
| but you clearly didn't have much interest in reading it.
| I will still elaborate more so you don't even have the
| chance to delude yourself into thinking that you have any
| point whatsoever.
|
| Apple has a 10/10 vested interest in the kneecapping of
| PWAs - why?
|
| A Progressive Web App, if allowed to reach its full, un-
| sabotaged potential, is the technological manifestation
| of the Digital Markets Act's goals. So it would be
| utterly absurd for Apple to pour hundreds of millions of
| dollars into fighting the DMA, just to let PWAs pass
| which achieves the exact same goals.
|
| Many of the DMA's mandates are an existential threat to
| Apple's business model and the PWA is the DMA in
| disguise:
|
| - DMA mandates Apple to allow alternative App Stores &
| sideloading i.e. Force Apple to end its monopoly on app
| distribution. PWAs are sideloading by nature. A user
| "installs" a PWA directly from the web. The browser is
| the app store. The open web is the distribution platform.
| This completely bypasses the App Store.
|
| - DMA mandates Apple to allow alternative payment
| systems. Forcing Apple to let developers use their own
| payment processors and avoid the 15-30% commission. PWAs
| use Open Web payments. It can use Stripe, PayPal, or any
| other payment processor with standard web APIs. Apple
| gets a 0% cut.
|
| - DMA mandates Apple to increase Developer & User Choice.
| Give developers the freedom to choose their tools and
| give users the freedom to choose their apps without being
| locked in. PWAs are the epitome of choice. They are built
| with the most universal, open technologies on earth
| (HTML, CSS, JS). They are cross-platform by default and
| free users from being locked into a single company's
| hardware/software ecosystem.
|
| Why would Apple have ANY interest in nurturing a
| technology that would voluntarily subject them to the
| very conditions they are spending hundreds of millions of
| dollars in lobbying and legal fees to fight against?
|
| The answer is: They wouldn't and they don't.
|
| Apple's actions are not those of a company with simply
| "low interest". They are the actions of a profit-
| maximizing gatekeeper actively defending its most
| lucrative business against an existential threat. Every
| bug, every delayed feature, and every artificial
| limitation imposed on PWAs on iOS is a calculated
| strategic move in this defense. The brief, hostile
| removal of PWA functionality in the EU was not an
| outlier, it was Apple showing its true face when it
| thought it could get away with it.
| realusername wrote:
| > If web apps were any good, we'd see a plethora of them on
| Android. There are none (or very, very, very few).
|
| Android also benefits immensely from the store revenue,
| it's not called a duopoly for no reason.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| personally i've also seen dev orgs push hard for native
| apps because they believe it's better for their skill
| sets and their future professional prospects snd current
| comp...
| threatofrain wrote:
| There isn't just Apple, there's also Google which is a big
| promoter of PWA's, and in fact they popularized the term.
| PWA's just never took off.
| kelthuzad wrote:
| > There isn't just Apple, there's also Google which is a
| big promoter of PWA's, and in fact they popularized the
| term.
|
| Google is the primary champion of PWAs, they have a vested
| interest in its success. The reason I focused on Apple is
| because its actions are one of a profit-maximizing
| gatekeeper actively defending its most lucrative business
| against an existential threat that is PWA. Every bug, every
| delayed feature, and every artificial limitation imposed on
| PWAs on iOS is a calculated strategic move in this defense
| of its walled garden that makes maximum taxation possible.
|
| >PWA's just never took off.
|
| That's just the lazy manufactured and false narrative that
| I've already thoroughly debunked. I'm not going to repeat
| it, since you would just ignore it again.
| kldg wrote:
| I use PWAs for my home websites (things like calendars and
| thermostat) running on tablets. They're a bit awkward, or
| I'm just ignorant of The Correct Way. I have to set
| metadata in a file for some reason I don't understand (most
| importantly, it must have a dedicated icon to display
| because ???). Then whenever tablet is restarted, I have to
| tap the website icon to launch it, then push up from bottom
| of screen to top and hold it up to bring up whatever
| Android calls the app manager, and then I tap and hold the
| window of my app and tap to pin it. -and if Android decides
| to reboot for whatever reason, I must do this again.
|
| -But it's less pain than trying to turn a generic Android
| tablet into something more like a kiosk, best I can tell
| (there are third-party apps that do this, which survives
| reboots, I'm led to believe, but I'd rather not mess with
| third-party stuff). I previously made Android apps in Java
| for the tablets, and while I enjoyed the fragment system it
| uses, the permissions handling was always a nightmare
| whenever I wanted to do something neat or experimental --
| TTS and mic listening in a PWA makes me much less
| frustrated than trying to do it via native app (which seems
| backwards to me), and I can still use the website on any
| non-Android device.
| gargan wrote:
| Isn't the Mac way a good thing though? For example everything
| on Windows is moving to web apps where I feel they can load
| just as many trackers onto you eg
| https://www.theverge.com/news/710509/whatsapp-windows-app-
| we...
|
| Whereas on Mac, Meta are keeping their native app presumably
| because they can't be in the Mac app store with just a web
| wrapper
|
| But maybe I've just got the exact delusion youre talking
| about in that I view the app as having more functionality.
| Maybe they need to free web apps to be on a level playing
| field as you say
| akdev1l wrote:
| Most apps on Mac are not on the App Store
|
| You download a DMG file or something, then you drag and
| drop some icon into your "applications" folder
|
| It is kind of dumb. I haven't seen any graphical package
| manage interface to handle this.
| jdiff wrote:
| The App Store is the graphical package manager interface.
| Or in the case of apps that haven't published, the
| Finder/Applications folder itself. It makes a lot of
| sense, similar to the way GoboLinux stashed packages in
| its new world filesystem hierarchy. One folder, one
| package.
| johnisgood wrote:
| You do not need a new filesystem hierarchy for it. I have
| a "one folder one package" kind of setup (among others),
| e.g. packages are at ~/.local/pkg and I have them
| symlinked from there to ~/.local. It works for many
| programs. I use "zpkg", but you could use "GNU stow",
| too.
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| new to mac and when i dis this the first time i was "wtf
| is this made for children"
|
| but I understand more. Its more a folder oriented system.
| kind of
| TingPing wrote:
| Its fine, it just has the quirk that sharing folders
| sucks and you have to put it in a container so it's a
| single file.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > many trackers
|
| A native app has access to OS information for the same kind
| of fingerprinting as with browsers, except with more bits
| of information. The reason, for example, iOS has the "ask
| app not to track" button is because the tracking could
| still happen, even more comprehensively than in a browser.
| Not exactly sure about macOS but I don't see why it would
| be different.
|
| Meta is keeping their apps as native presumably because
| native apps make better spyware. I think they literally do
| not have any other reason; if web apps made better spyware,
| Meta would push people to use their web apps, simple as.
| _Meta is a spyware company._ Technical decisions about
| deploying /developing their spyware will be informed
| primarily by their desire to make it more effective as
| such.
| Sophira wrote:
| > I thought that the desktop version of a website is the
| "real website" i.e. that there is only one static original
| website and that its mobile version was some fake substitute,
| so I always activated the option "show desktop version".
|
| It wasn't that long ago that when you used the mobile
| internet, you _would_ be getting a "fake version" of the
| site that could render speedily, despite the limited speed of
| 2G networks.
|
| First it was all about WML[0], which would be processed by a
| proxy that would deliver the file in a binary format that
| would be smaller.
|
| And even when mobile phones that could access proper HTML
| content hit the market, it was often still accessed through
| the use of an accelerator proxy[1] which would optimize the
| page (stripping unnecessary parts) that you were trying to
| access so that it could be downloaded faster.
|
| These technologies are still in use in some places, as I
| understand it. But it's generally not necessary nowadays for
| locations with access to 3G or better.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_accelerator
| prmph wrote:
| Exactly, web apps are superior in most ways to mobile apps
| for the user experience, but only if vendors support the web
| and stop actively trying to make it like apps are the better
| option.
|
| The preference for apps is a learned behavior, not something
| fundamental. The vast majority of people with real
| understanding would prefer the web
| squarefoot wrote:
| I couldn't agree more. If vendors decided to give the web
| development the resources it deserves, the experience would
| turn out vastly superior for the users: no apps to download
| (browser is usually bundled), well standardized consistent
| interface where you know what a control does and how does
| it look like, more control on security and safety, and a
| lot less resources consumption. Unfortunately heavy
| advertising, catchy effects, colorful interfaces, and not
| caring for the web side, convinced most users that the apps
| approach is the best one, while it's actually the other way
| around. Apps also give vendors a tool to more easily
| infiltrate users devices and grab much of their personal
| data so I guess the motivation to change that is less than
| nil.
| thephyber wrote:
| This seems like an extremely biased opinion.
|
| PWAs are only as good of a user experience as the developer
| programs it to be. The average local TV news affiliate
| website spends 5MB-20MB of bandwidth within a minute of
| downloading 1 page. My last iOS app was only 5MB shipped
| and only consumes a few KB of bandwidth per session.
|
| There are massive convenience features that native apps
| support which aren't available to browser APIs. Auth,
| payments, notifications, parental controls, power
| efficiency, and perhaps security and privacy (depending on
| how prevalent analytics/ tracking/ advertising libraries
| are on native apps).
|
| A well crafted PWA can compete on most features with a well
| crafted app, but ultimately the App Store review process
| means native apps have a decently high floor, whereas PWAs
| have zero floor.
| o_m wrote:
| At the last company I worked for we wanted to shut down our app
| to save expenses. The idea being that most people would just
| the website if we removed the app. It seems like you didn't
| gain anything by making an app, you just created more expenses
| and complexity.
| oc1 wrote:
| but did the idea pan out? did the users switch to the website
| or did you lose em?
| djeastm wrote:
| Well don't leave us hanging! We need the anecdata!
| silisili wrote:
| My wife is one of these people. We couldn't be more different
| in that regard. I loathe apps and generally only install them
| when there's no alternative. She seems to either not understand
| or trust websites, and wants an app.
|
| Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Every time I
| grab her phone I get dizzy and lost from the hundreds of apps.
| When she grabs mine, she wonders how I accomplish anything at
| all.
| W3zzy wrote:
| Your wife probably just wants a smooth user experience and an
| app delivers on that. Apps have a clear way of installing and
| onboarding.
|
| I discovered that all our self hosted applications were
| easily adopted after I added SSO. My wife just wants one
| account to rule them all.
|
| I got her accustomed to installing web apps by adding all the
| links in a shared note. She clicks the link, pins the site
| and uses SSO to log in. Easy.
| AbstractH24 wrote:
| > Your wife probably just wants a smooth user experience
| and an app delivers on that. Apps have a clear way of
| installing and onboarding.
|
| To a certain extent, I fall in this camp. With privacy in
| general.
|
| Without dedicating my life to it I won't be able to beat
| the system I live in, so why not just accept it and take
| what I can from it?
| W3zzy wrote:
| I would say using the web"app" give a better user experience
| since you always have the latest version without the need for
| updates. Only if offline use is possible an app would be
| necesarry.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| I don't really know or care whether I'm using the latest
| version of anything. To care about that, I would first of all
| need to be _aware_ that I 'm not using the latest version.
| W3zzy wrote:
| By the latest I also lean the lost secure and patched
| version of an app. You should care.
| distances wrote:
| There's no reason a website should be more up to date than an
| app. Could just as well be the other way around.
| W3zzy wrote:
| You need to update the app on your device. That's automated
| for a lot of users but not all. A web app should be
| maintained by the developers and should be updated to the
| latest stable version at all times. A web app shouldn't
| depend on your OS either so it would also run on OS'es that
| aren't supported anymore.
| distances wrote:
| That's fair, but the number of people who don't have
| automatic app updates is clearly miniscule, not really
| relevant for this consideration.
|
| I do grant that web is likely more up to date. But only
| because they can ship immediately, without the app store
| review process. Technically web could also be slower to
| release, nothing guarantees web freshness.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Thank you for this extensive analysis. In my country now's the
| phase that every shop, even small one, wants me to download an
| app (for the client identification purposes). And tbh one thing
| is making an app for people who want it, another is requiring
| an app. Those "loyalty card" apps all weigh at least 100MB
| because of the browser bundled inside, and they are too heavy
| for my phone. I mitigated it using catima, an open source
| loyalty card wallet, but some of the app creators started to
| generate time based codes, so it's no longer a viable solution
| for me in those cases, and I started suspecting those apps do
| more than showing a code
| WA wrote:
| Mobile apps do not bundle a browser. They use Chrome/Android
| System WebView on Android or WKWebView on iOS. Capacitor is
| one project that lets you build on top of installed browser
| engines, unlike Electron, which bundles Chrome.
|
| A new Capacitor app has a size of 3-5 MB at most.
|
| If such a simple app has 100 MB, they bundle shit like
| Facebook SDK and such.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > People just really like apps!
|
| This is it. I've worked on plenty of projects that have
| web/iOS/Android, and the reason for offering native apps has
| _always_ been user demand. All of this _"spy on the user"_ crap
| literally never even comes up in conversation. We don't care
| _at all_. We care about native apps because users care about
| native apps.
| landgenoot wrote:
| People just don't like bloated JS heavy websites
| brailsafe wrote:
| I think this is probably more true than not in terms of
| proportion of apps that offer a native client interface to an
| existing web service, but I don't think it's true for Reddit
| or other large companies who's primary business is selling
| advertising and data.
| xigoi wrote:
| If that's the case, why do so many websites try to push you
| into using the app even if you have no problem with using the
| website?
| Einenlum wrote:
| I remember when ChatGPT was released. I talked about it to a
| friend who is not technical. She said "oh wow, I really need to
| try it". She later said "I couldn't find the app in my
| AppStore".
|
| I kept saying they had a website and why would you need an app.
| She couldn't understand what I was saying.
|
| Seems like indeed the general public really likes apps and even
| thinks you can't do so many things in the browser.
| kaptainscarlet wrote:
| Devs are usually disconnected from the average user's
| experience. I too used to be the same.
| AbstractH24 wrote:
| Weren't PMs supposed to fix this problem?
|
| The dev's ambassador to the common man.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > She couldn't understand what I was saying
|
| I don't buy this for one second. The web is well known, and
| well understood - I've never run into anyone, in any age
| group, with any level of education, who wouldn't understand
| what a website is.
|
| Either you're being overly dramatic and exaggerating here, or
| you had a very difficult time pronouncing the words you were
| intending to say.
| tortilla wrote:
| No, a lot of non-technical people don't know the
| difference.
|
| My friend was trying to explain an app to me. How everyone
| at his work was amazed at how well it worked compared to
| their Salesforce solution that they were forced to use.
|
| The app? A website. Not even a web application. It was just
| a brochure type web catalog that allowed them to show their
| customer the brands and products they sold.
|
| Other's I've told about ChatGPT or Claude, have trouble
| finding it. They go into the App Store and search for the
| apps. They are inundated non-official versions. All with
| similar titles. Some stop, some install the wrong versions.
| tempnew wrote:
| It's not a given that "web page" has any particular meaning
| to people who don't own a computer or laptop. Even people
| with only a cell phone, many don't browse the web on
| mobile. Is the google sign in screen that pops up on a
| google tv a webpage, is not a question a lot of people can
| answer with confidence.
| Einenlum wrote:
| You might be surprised. I can assure you it happened. And
| my friend is a 35yo physiotherapist who uses a website on a
| daily basis to manage her appointments. I guess what was
| confusing to her was the fact that it was not just a
| "simple" website where you would find information (blogs,
| Wikipedia, whatever). It was something where you would say
| something and it would respond dynamically. As a software
| engineer, we know there's no difference. It's just a few
| POST endpoints anyway. For a user without technical
| background? The way I described it sounded like it should
| be an app.
|
| Now, you would say that these people (35yo) used to use
| Facebook (and maybe Google meet) and such on desktop. So
| they should know that many things can be achieved through a
| browser. But it seems like when thinking about mobile,
| people think differently. A website that "does something"
| other than displaying information (which is a weird and
| blurry definition) _must_ be an app. I 'm absolutely sure
| my friend has never thought it could be possible to use
| Facebook on through her mobile browser. If you access
| something with your mobile, it must be through an app.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Most people don't know how to use a computer well. Most people
| are just slightly above computer-illiterate. They were
| introduced to phones which have apps. Now in their minds that's
| how everything must be. Anything else induces fear into their
| minds.
|
| While technically competent people might go:
|
| "Oh neat, I don't even need to install an app, if I just put
| the website icon onto my home screen."
|
| Most users are like: "Oh my god noooo! Not another way to do
| something! Aaaaa I cannot cope!" and panic.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Using a website instead of an app isn't signaling some
| particularly strong computer literacy. Not that it matters -
| the web, both mobile and general, has been neutered so much
| over the years that webpages are just as useless, locked down
| experience siloes as apps; really the main difference in
| practice is the icon experience and how unobtrusive
| surveillance is :).
| neilalexander wrote:
| Most people can't explain the difference between a website
| and an app, to them the web browser is just a more
| confusing construct with additional overheads (tabs/links
| etc).
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| > Using a website instead of an app isn't signaling some
| particularly strong computer literacy.
|
| I am not claiming it is. But it is different from what some
| people got introduced to. That's enough already to strike
| fear.
|
| But what do you mean with websites have been neutered?
| Didn't HTML, CSS, and JS only got more capabilities over
| time?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Didn 't HTML, CSS, and JS only got more capabilities
| over time?_
|
| They did, but almost all of them are just there so serve
| _developers_ , to enable them to build even more
| sophisticated interactive _billboards_. The web serves
| marketing and advertising. So do apps, but the web does
| it better in many ways.
|
| What I meant by websites being neutered, is along the
| dimension of empowering users. Webapps as tools that
| provide functionality and play well with others.
| Composability, interoperability, end-user authonomy.
| Those are anathema to modern web.
|
| And as I said, apps ain't better. It's really "pick your
| poison", whether you want to be fighting with your
| browser sandbox, or with your OS sandbox - and half of
| the things you need sit on the server-side anyway, out of
| your reach.
| happyopossum wrote:
| This is an unnecessarily rude and reductive take. Tons of
| people without your exalted computer science background are
| perfectly competent and comfortable with using computers
| "well".
|
| Their mental model of how they LIKE to use them is different
| from yours though - and that should be ok instead of arousing
| angst.
| thiht wrote:
| Why do you think people have to be "computer illiterate" to
| prefer apps? That's pretty narrow, and obviously just an
| explanation you came up with to fit your mental model.
|
| I just find apps more practical and convenient than websites
| in a browser most of the time, on my phone.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| If you read my comment with more attention to detail, you
| will see, that I did not claim, that one has to be computer
| illiterate to prefer apps.
|
| But aside from that, even if I had claimed that, it
| wouldn't imply, that anyone preferring an app must be
| computer illiterate.
| ant_li0n wrote:
| You come off like a dick, but it's really true.
|
| I saw a tweet where some Zoomer was roasting an "Elder
| Millenial" for switching devices from a mobile phone to a
| desktop when making a big purchase (airline tickets? I
| forget).
|
| I didn't feel like wading into that argument (what's the
| point? like spitting in a campfire), but... yeah.
|
| Some folks say that we are regressing wrt technological
| proficiency, but it's really just that more people use
| technology than they used to. Regression to the mean, maybe?
| Is that the right expression?
| matt_kantor wrote:
| This may not be relevant to the tweet, but big purchases
| can involve price discrimination, so making the same
| purchase from a different device/browser/location could get
| a better price.
| jajko wrote:
| The question is - did you notice users uptick when adding an
| app, or just some web users moved to it?
| tempestn wrote:
| Mostly it was just moving from mobile web. I think it it is
| contributing somewhat to long term growth as well, but that's
| more difficult to determine amongst other factors.
| geokon wrote:
| Doesn't an app allow for caching which makes the whole
| experience much more responsive?
|
| I think antifingerprinting means that browsers are constantly
| re-loading and rerendering tons and tons of resources. The web
| is much much slower than it could be in theory. If you have an
| siloed app then you don't need to worry about that and can
| reuse everything. You open a new tab and nearly everything
| displays instantly (except the different car or whatever you're
| displaying)
|
| This would also decrease your network bandwidth load. So a win
| for you and your customers
| bambax wrote:
| This is a very interesting, but it doesn't explain why
| companies push so hard to download their apps. It's even
| contradictory: since it seems users want apps so much, there
| should be no need to push them.
| neilalexander wrote:
| They are potentially operationally cheaper. Answering a few
| API requests is cheaper than sending the same HTML over and
| over and over again.
| graemep wrote:
| The cost is minimal. It also needs to be offset against the
| cost of maintaining both unless you go app only. Some app
| seems to wrap a web view anyway.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| When most people want mobile apps, it makes no sense to
| develop a mobile website with feature parity for the handful
| of people that will use it.
| macNchz wrote:
| Businesses want you to use their app for a few reasons: it's
| stickier because they can start sending you push
| notifications right away without even signing in/making an
| account, they get their logo right on your home screen, there
| are expedited login methods available like FaceID, they
| bypass most normal ad blocking so they can show users ads but
| also get much more reliable telemetry, they get access to
| APIs that allow them to request/slurp additional user data
| like your contacts list, persistent location services, and
| camera roll metadata, plus they can access a broader set of
| system APIs for fingerprinting purposes (even if against the
| ToS).
|
| Then there's a measurement element where app installs became
| an important KPI around the time ad blocking became more
| popular and interfered with detailed website engagement
| tracking, creating a self-fulfilling kind of thing.
|
| On top of this I think another factor is that many websites
| are in terrible shape, super bloated by ten thousand tracking
| pixels and third party snippets added willy nilly by
| marketing teams using Tag Manager, so apps benefit from
| gatekeeping that bloat to a degree.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Proper native apps simply have better UX.
|
| Of course it's possible to mess that up, but the default is
| superior.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| What about just using PWABuilder? Sure maybe it's not as nice
| an experience as a native app, but the savings on costs and
| time with having 1 product mean you can do way more innovation
| elsewhere
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Thank you for trying to resist app-insanity. It really sucks
| that my doctor's office tries to get me to use one. No, I don't
| want to download an app for the one time I need it each year.
| Just make a freaking website. There are some exceptions like a
| calculator app that is completely offline.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| God I hate apps, but holy hell do a bunch of users prefer them.
|
| I don't get it at all, to me apps are sort of borderline
| comparable to having a stranger sleep in your closet, but it is
| what it is.
|
| And companies love it.
| hhhhhhhhhn wrote:
| The control aspect is another downside to (proprietary) native
| apps. It is much easier to modify a website's behaviour with
| extensions and userscripts than it is to create a mod for a
| native application to do the same thing.
| d13z wrote:
| I think we are missing the biggest elephant in the room:
| advertisement.
|
| An ad show on a native mobile app pays between 5x to 10x more
| than the same ad in a webpage.
|
| Advertiser's also get way more data from the mobile app than the
| data they can get from a webpage.
|
| The company I work for makes 75% of their revenue from showing
| ads and they pushed very aggressively to install their app.
| penguin_booze wrote:
| On Android, I use the Hermit app. It containerizes webpages to
| give it an app-like look, feel, and some behaviours. It saves me
| from installing a lot of apps whose services offer website.
|
| I'd argue that a this task can be taken up by the mobile browser
| itself: i.e., to offer to install a shortcut icon that'll launch
| the page within an app container/sandbox. The common resistance
| to using website directly--and thus the preference to use the
| app, other than for performance reasons--stems from the
| inconvenience of typing and navigating on a small screen. If the
| browser helpfully offers to bypass that step (you've to do that
| at most once), a large number of apps would suddenly lose their
| pull.
| msephton wrote:
| I advise non-technical and elderly friends to use the app simply
| because it's so much more secure than browsing the open web.
| fsflover wrote:
| Secure against which threats?
| pflenker wrote:
| Besides collecting data, there are more obvious and less sinister
| reasons for asking people to use an app:
|
| Engagement and real estate.
|
| Keeping the users up to date is way easier with push
| notifications, especially with younger audiences who are less
| likely to read email.
|
| And the app sits there on the Home Screen and advertises itself
| without having to do anything, while a web page relies on the
| user remembering its name and go there.
| echo42null wrote:
| Honestly, this isn't new at all. Most apps are pretty frustrating
| to use compared to just visiting the website. Even basic stuff
| like checking train or bus schedules or planning a route on
| Google Maps. It's often worse in the app. With a browser, you can
| just open multiple tabs, switch between them freely, compare
| things side-by-side. Most apps don't support this kind of
| multitasking at all.
|
| What's even more annoying lately is the whole "scan this QR code"
| or "click this button to open in-app browser" flow. You try to
| log in, get sent an email, and when you click the link, the
| session's already gone in the in-app browser. It's a mess.
|
| So yeah... just use the web version. It's simpler, more flexible,
| and honestly more reliable in most cases.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| But it's better in the app! (not for users, but for the website
| entity)
| bob1029 wrote:
| Lightweight SSR web apps running on modern server stacks can run
| circles around the overall experience of most mobile apps, which
| are oftentimes also just (much worse) web apps under the cover.
|
| HN is a good example of an SSR web experience done right. How
| often do you hear members complaining about lack of official
| hacker news apps? I think the biggest reason is because the site
| is so simple and fast. There is zero jank to run away from. I can
| participate on the site just fine even if I'm on the edge of no
| signal in the desert. I don't need a fancy offline client side
| model. I need it to be tight enough to fit across a shitty pipe
| before it disappears.
|
| UI/UX is one of the hardest things you can do, but when done well
| you can make it work in any medium. Native "feel" is not an
| excuse in my book. Safari feels pretty damn native to me right
| now.
| atroxone wrote:
| The article is a reminder that the "mobile-first" hype never
| really went away - most services still use dark patterns to get
| us to install their native app even when their mobile site works
| fine. Web apps are sandboxed; apart from cookies and basic
| fingerprinting, a site can't do much unless you explicitly upload
| data. Native apps, by design, integrate deeply with the OS. They
| ask to read your contacts, track your precise location and
| movement, access your microphone and see what other apps are
| installed. Once granted, that permission often provides a
| "treasure trove of information and control" - and there's no easy
| way to claw that data back.
|
| However, it isn't just greed. Native apps still have advantages
| the article glosses over: offline support, richer push-
| notification APIs and OS-level integration all contribute to
| better retention and engagement - the first HN commenter notes
| that their mobile traffic shifted to the app almost immediately
| after they released one, despite offering the same functionality
| on the web. Users also perceive mobile browsers as slow and
| bloated, which is partly because platform gatekeepers have
| dragged their feet on enabling powerful web features (service
| workers, better APIs) and have financial incentives to collect
| their 30% cut via app stores. Regulation like the EU's Digital
| Markets Act may help level the playing field, but today the
| trade-off is real: if you want privacy and control, stick with
| the website - just remember that websites can track you too.
| bmacho wrote:
| What about: - make your website not suck -
| provide an app too, for offline usage or when your website has
| become unavailable
| RajBhai wrote:
| I'm thinking of closing my ICICI bank account because the app
| requires granting SMS permissions.
| mixermachine wrote:
| Yer that is likely a bad implementation of the automatic
| confirmation feature. iOS and Android both make it possible to
| register a receiver for very specific SMS messages with
| additional permissions.
|
| ...or it is just a dump data grab
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| We are building a social network with chronological feed and we
| are building a mobile-friendly site instead of an app.
|
| If the site takes off, I think we will have to build a mobile app
| even though we don't want to. Non-tech users don't care about
| web.
|
| As someone who pushed everyone I know to use Firefox with uBlock
| on Android, I am disappointed
|
| But as someone who uses old.reddit.com on mobile, I am not
| surprised
| PeterStuer wrote:
| For a lot of non technical people, if the "website" was in the
| app store and installing just resulted in an icon for the site on
| the home screen they would never clamor for a "real" app. They
| wouldn't know or care about the difference.
| jokoon wrote:
| Apps are just faster than websites
|
| I don't see anybody in the comments mentioning it.
| fsflover wrote:
| They don't have to be with the power of modern phones. It's
| probably a deliberate trick to push you to use apps.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| This is about hijacking your plans.
|
| Having the app installed makes the initial load instant - big
| dopamine rush!
|
| Seeing their logo on the home screen, before you even open your
| browser, means you might forget your big plan to search for
| alternatives. "Oh! Airbnb! I'll just look there!"
| defraudbah wrote:
| I like mobile apps when I need quick access to a feature on the
| go. All my bank operations are done from the mobile app, I rarely
| use the website, and for best banks - never.
|
| Mobile apps are great, but it does not mean you need one
| leontrolski wrote:
| A reminder of all the features available right now with PWAs -
| https://whatpwacando.today
| 44za12 wrote:
| You know what's wild? We've reached a point where the "download
| our app!" pop-up is basically the digital equivalent of a mall
| kiosk worker chasing you down with a lotion sample. I just want
| to read the article, not sign up for a recurring relationship.
| The web is supposed to be open, frictionless, and--dare I say--
| fun. Instead, it's become a minefield of dark patterns, nag
| screens, and "please enable notifications!" popups.
|
| I love that this post is pushing back on the norm. Maybe, just
| maybe, we can start a movement to make the web usable again. Or
| at least make "No, thanks" actually mean "No, thanks."
| amibm wrote:
| Totally agree. It's even difficult to accommodate too many apps
| in the mobile. I myself have been very cautious about the
| permissions, but it's a planned collaborative design of the smart
| phone ecosystem and so it's nearly impossible to protect personal
| data completely.
|
| Also the entire tech industry is almost surviving on the promise
| of surveillance state and economy as if looked carefully there
| aren't that many success stories of the tech outside of the very
| obvious financial and automation industries. And that can serve
| only upto a certain level, but the hype of tech is way beyond
| that. To match that, they are desperate to break any law and all
| morals.
|
| Also a glance at our own investment portfolio will tell us that
| it's our collective quest for wealth growth is the actual driving
| force of this 'everything financial' tech industry.
| zabil wrote:
| I've noticed that every time I open a browser to use the web
| version of an app, I get distracted and end up browsing unrelated
| stuff.
|
| Switching to a standalone app helps me avoid that -- fewer
| distractions, less wasted time. I've tried breaking the habit,
| but this is one reason I still prefer desktop version of the
| website.
| greenchair wrote:
| do you have the same problem at the grocery store?
| zabil wrote:
| Surprisingly, no. I make a list know the aisles, pick stuff.
| But it's not the same case on the web.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > If you've ever opened Reddit, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or
| practically any popular service on your phone's web browser,
| you've likely encountered it.
|
| Why leave out an incredibly egregious offender here in good old
| google? I'd been relatively on the fence google wise until they
| started consistently and repeatedly asking me to install their
| bullshit app. Why on earth would I ever want to install your app
| when all I want to do is run a fucking search query and leave you
| again?
| notarobot123 wrote:
| Who do you trust more with your data: an advertising funded
| platform or a data hungry app?
|
| The whole ecosystem is compromised. We need new protocols.
| ahoog42 wrote:
| regarding data collection, both android and ios provide multiple
| ways to review, approve/deny, and manage access to data. it's
| certainly not perfect but is being constantly improved. And for
| the HN crowd, you can always run mobile security/privacy tools
| like mobSF to inspect the app. I'm not suggesting we should have
| to do this but we can and frankly browser fingerprinting is
| opaque, also constantly evolving and quite good at tracking and
| data collection. i'm not sure avoid the better ux of a native app
| is much worse and given the privacy tools and data available, I
| generally prefer the native app
| dwedge wrote:
| I agree with the article but it's not like there are zero
| benefits to the app. When I have low or intermittent data, a
| local cache plus minimal data sent to an API is usually much more
| responsive
| shahzaibmushtaq wrote:
| In third world countries where literacy rates are below 50%, the
| population only uses smartphones for apps and don't know what
| websites are.
|
| Until the early 2010s this wasn't the case and people were
| educating themselves on how to use websites properly.
|
| If traffic laws can exist, then there must also be international
| app laws to educate people.
| zkmon wrote:
| Today's world requires people to be ID checked everywhere. That
| requires the humans to be connected to internet. But humans are a
| biological things. How can they connect to internet? Well they
| can have chips embedded in them. A simpler approach is ... have a
| mobile phone and an app. Your mobile phone + app is similar to
| the network card that desktop used to have. Network card provided
| identity for the desktop and connected it to internet. Phone+app
| connects humans to internet with ID check. A browser can't do
| that, because browser is not considered 1-to-1 with humans or
| part of the humans, as much as phone is. Phone+app is your
| virtual clone. Browser is not.
| wg0 wrote:
| Unfortunately - its easier said then done.
|
| Specifically with offline first scenarios, you'll end up with
| lots of JS and client side shapes that need local persistence and
| sent back to server.
|
| So while view transitions should be first consideration for
| always online apps such as ticketng system, price comparison,
| classified portals etc but they aren't probably that suitable for
| offline first scenarios that keep operating even in face of few
| days of Internet outage.
| notsydonia wrote:
| Great piece. There was a point last decade where literally every
| person I encountered, upon hearing about my site, would start
| badgering me to "get an app." If asked what this hypothetical app
| could do that the site didn't, the answer was that it would just
| be good to have an app.
|
| Now in 2025 my biggest app-pain is being in the already useless
| live support chat for a phone co or utility company and they keep
| insisting that I'll get actual support if I download their stupid
| app. Again, they can't cite a reason - it's just "better." For
| data-brokering, sure - for the user, barely ever.
| everyone wrote:
| Asking as a software dev, is is better to have a website or an
| app?
|
| I would just assume that a website is better for getting new
| users cus of the lower bar to entry, theres no install, a lot of
| peoples phones are full. Also you can go from QRcode or clicking
| 1 link directly to the app.
|
| Whereas with an app, you have a link or QRcode that goes to the
| correct store, then install on the store, and then open.
|
| I get that an app would be better for retention, as they could
| put the icon on their desktop (or whatever it's called) But I
| assume a site would be better for getting initial visitors cus of
| much lower barrier to entry.
| prepend wrote:
| The main benefit I liked with apps was at least I only logged in
| once and then stayed logged in forever. I liked this with apps
| whose security I didn't care about- lamp bulbs, Alexa, insurance
| benefits, etc.
|
| But now I get prompted to log in again and so I'd rather not take
| up the space for the app on my phone.
|
| Uber Eats is 500MB and should be a web site only app. Etc etc
| yreg wrote:
| The article talks about user data, but for small developers it's
| also about monetization in general.
|
| I have an iOS app that could easily be a PWA. I don't collect any
| data. My advertising budget is $0.
|
| I would never be able to get anywhere near the amount of paid
| customers I have if I have offered the same service through a
| website instead.
| mrbombastic wrote:
| I don't really think the desire for more data holds up as the
| primary motivation for companies wanting apps. To be clear I also
| hate being forced to use apps, but every metric I have seen shows
| app users are more engaged, make more purchases and have better
| retention then website users, I don't remember specifically but
| it was always significant like 3x, and yes they want push
| notifications and those direct channels to customer on their
| devices. Apps are sandboxed and generally pretty privacy focused
| if you just tap no when they ask you for your first born.
| Contacts? You need explicit permission. Photos on device? You
| need explicit permission. Local networking? Explicit permission.
| Push notifications? Explicit permission. Cross site tracking?
| Explicit permission (although that is more recent and i am sure
| bad actors find ways around it).
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| I especially detest companies whose website detects mobile device
| and absolutely forces use of the app when the website is
| perfectly usable from a desktop.
| sprinkly-dust wrote:
| My biggest peeve with the forced push towards apps is that you're
| often forced to fork over permissions to access valuable data
| that they couldn't otherwise gleam glean from a browser. Chief
| amongst this is the Contacts permission.
|
| If you are one to carefully curate your contacts book to contain
| addresses, emails, birthdays for your own convenience and
| productivity, you have now provided a veritable goldmine of
| information for these companies to plunder, and betray the
| confidence of your acquaintances. I really despise this, and I've
| been looking for a solution but none thus far have seemed
| satisfactory.
|
| I know of apps (at least on Android) like Bouncer and
| alternatives from F-Droid that can temporarily grant access to
| certain permissions like Location for a few minutes at a time,
| while giving the apps the illusion of full access.
|
| However, save for using a Private Space or different user profile
| (both similarly require provisioning basically an extra instance
| of Google Play and everything) I haven't yet found a way to feed
| some sort of dummy contacts book to these greedy apps. If anyone
| knows of such a solution that is more convenient than setting up
| a new profile then please enlighten us.
| rishikeshs wrote:
| This is exactly the philosophy of what I'm building at TrackMonk!
| It's a chat-first health tracker. Goal is to reduce as much
| friction as possible when it comes to health tracking!
|
| Link: https://trackmonk.app
| javader wrote:
| The only way to make website usage more prominent is to do the
| Windows Phone approach: make every browser tab the same as an app
| tab. If you treat a website the same as an app, there is less
| need for the app.
|
| Although what sucks with websites is to always see the address
| bar and often having little to no settings nor notification
| support.
| msukkarieh wrote:
| One interesting side effect of this for instagram is that the
| website is much worse than the app, which makes it much harder to
| doom scroll. I have the app deleted on my phone and occasionally
| visit the website to check for messages and updates from friends
| jraby3 wrote:
| I feel like this didn't touch on the second most important reason
| not to download the app.
|
| Most of us over use (or are addicted to) our phones and
| especially to social media. Every barrier you can put in you way
| to prevent opening it is an improvement.
|
| Opening safari and then having to type in the site name is a
| better barrier than just opening an app. Logging out every time
| is a barrier. Putting timers on websites through screen time is a
| barrier. All these tools help us fight against tech controlling
| us instead of us controlling the tech.
| rock_artist wrote:
| I'm also (old enough? to) avoid apps when I can. Sadly the
| history made it a thing. And while it's not only Apple. As the
| early incarnation of mobile web. Apple has a lot of it on its
| name.
|
| 1. Original iPhone aimed for that. No AppStore. But developers
| especially when web stack was poor, wanted native access. It did
| make sense back then to ideas like WhatsApp or some audio and
| video apps.
|
| 2. Then Apple understood they can get a cut if they operate the
| AppStore.
|
| 3. Then companies understood they can benefit from more data....
|
| I've recently moved country and that's real lame. Almost any
| supermarket or restaurant here wants me to become a "member" and
| enforce me to download their app (no web!). I've ended up
| creating another Apple account since those apps weren't available
| in my origin country AppStore.
|
| Most of those apps can pretty much be web apps (they actually are
| :) ) but insist of me downloading something with more data.
| hdb385 wrote:
| Crazy this has to be said but then again people are morons
| ergocoder wrote:
| Native app UX is much more superior unfortunately. For almost
| everything like Zillow, Booking.com, Reddit, Gmail, Map, and etc.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Make the website good. The amount of effort that goes into good
| apps exceeds and detracts from the care that goes into the mobile
| web experience.
| replyifuagree wrote:
| I'd love to. First you need to get Tim Cook to stop sabotaging
| mobile web.
| cjk wrote:
| The author makes some good points, but native apps can absolutely
| provide a better experience than web apps in certain scenarios.
|
| Bloated web apps with megabytes worth of JavaScript and CSS,
| crappy rendering performance, etc. are all too common. Far too
| many web apps are unusable or broken if you have any content/ad
| blockers enabled, which are almost a necessity in order to use
| the modern web.
|
| Conversely, you download a native app once, and update it
| infrequently. Load times can be instantaneous. Offline support is
| far more robust.
|
| To completely write off native apps just because some of those
| apps abuse the trust of users seems silly. Plenty of web apps
| have piles and piles of invasive ads and trackers as well.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-07-26 23:01 UTC)