At this point the barrier for me to install an app is pretty high. If you're going to needlessly gate certain functions behind an app that work on a desktop browser (or could work in-browser), then I just won't use those functions. If by extension that degrades the value I get from your site, then I just won't use the site, and I won't be contributing to ADU stats you promote to advertisers.
Every single company has turned this into a situation where I cannot trust your apps with privacy or security, and the risk and hassle isn't worth the install.
If your app is just a webpage that forces me to use an app just so you can spy on me I just won't use your product. I've switched brokers over it, I swapped banks, I stopped shopping at certain stores.
I'm done. The only say I have is in how I spend my money. Those companies won't get any of mine if I can help it.
That’s an illusion that died a long time ago, unfortunately.
Just because you’re using their service on a browser doesn’t stop them from harvesting data from your usage, especially if you’re logging in (and if you’re using their services, chances are that you are).
Using browser over app can help, but it doesn’t eliminate it.
Like it or not, we’re the product, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Worse, to sell a tesla, you are the person saying "ok, install the app, then I can transfer ownership to you, conveniently!"
and this is getting normalized with other car manufacturers.
(and it ALL goes back to apple... who started the whole app nonsense, and promoted a look-and-feel that gave tesla a terrible tap and swipe iphone/ipad type ui in a moving car)
Twitter is the worst. You go to a page and scroll down and it banners a beater in the app thing and you can’t dismiss it. You either get the app or close the tab. Close the tab.
LinkedIn too. The first time they show a bottom sheet dialog thing on the website, and if you dismiss it, it scrolls you all the way to the top. The second time it appears, it messes with the page and sometimes automatically closes the tab.
Idk Google Maps is pretty bad. Clicking on the search bar force opens the App Store, and trying to load photos does the same and straight up lies to you saying it’s only available in the app. But if you scroll down to the second carousel of images it loads fine in web.
This. I get Frame.work and install Fedora. Use Firefox for everything possible. Once my current phone dies, I'll get a Fair phone, Motorola, or whatever gives me control.
Can't complain if I keep choosing hostile products for some convenience
100% same. So many apps are just a WebView vessel for Crashlytics and Sentry and Dog knows how much more tracking. (My phone is always VPNed into my home network which has DNS-level ad and tracker blocking. This doesn't cover all the bases though.)
Some, like Home Depot, have websites that are terrible and battery-draining enough to make the app nominally useful by comparison.
>Some, like Home Depot, have websites that are terrible and battery-draining enough to make the app nominally useful by comparison.
I don't take this as a signal to install the app. It is a signal to avoid the store. They clearly don't feel like they need to work to gain your business, and instead take it for granted. You can see this indicated by their actions - they clearly feel that it is more profitable to inconvenience you for a token amount of tracking data than to serve your needs. Why continue to use them?
What really grinds my gears is when the app is a _broken_ version of the website. I find the app really expects you to be on the happy path in a way the website does not.
Uhaul is a great example of this. The app looks a little better on mobile, but if you don’t make an account and search by reservation ID, all features related to things like extending a reservation time are nonfunctional. I have to go to the mobile site which looks bad and has poor navigation, trying to hijack my session and redirect me to the app, but at least it works.
UHaul is the only app I've ever encountered that is less efficient than talking to a human being behind a counter. I have tried multiple times to pick up a reservation via the app and it has taken so long or failed at some point that I had to walk into the store anyway.
And it wants a photo of my license EVERY GODDAMN TIME. And no I can't store a photo of my license on my phone and just upload it - it has to take a photo directly. And boy does it not like to take photos in bright sunlight. You know, when I'm outside in a parking lot beside a white truck.
Their scheduling software is also blatantly broken. I understand the difficulty in monitoring a large distributed fleet, but their software loves to say trucks are unavailable where a quick phone call reveals they can accommodate the exact request.
A particularly worrying trend that keeps spreading is the one of restricting significant amounts of (often non-financial) functionality to the apps only, gated behind your phone passing device integrity checks, in what seems to be a poorly thought out attempt at blocking all forms of scraping and automation (AI or not). The worst offender right now is probably Twitter, which alongside the recent Nitter cease-and-desist now appears to require client integrity on all logged out access.
I think the average user doesn't know the app is there to circumvent tracking protections in browsers and doesn't realise the app is most likely just a web page in a wrapper.
I was at a car park in UK and you didn't have to install an app, just scan the QR to go to the web page, simple payment. Sadly they then messed it all up by not offering payment through normal services.
The actual reality is that it's impossible to have people go to a web site from a physical ad/offer/thing without using a QR (or paying Google). Google (and friends) managed to hide the URL almost totally, people don't even know that you can go somewhere without searching on google. So the options are: paying google to have your name point to you (an expensive choice depending on the actual name) or use a QR. Weirdly enough people uses QRs this way. I think the restaurants/bars menus after the pandemic only digital via QR opened this way (again, it was trendy also many years ago).
Did domain names stop functioning all of the sudden? Going to somedipshitsbar.com/menu is about as complicated as entering a wifi password at a coffee shop.
Indeed, I've no interest in native apps to do something that can be done in a web app and if you don't let me do it in a web app I'll bounce and either find someone who can or do without unless there is a seriously compelling use case (I'm not that dogmatic).
As a result the only native apps I use on my phone are Kindle, Authy and Firefox because I trust Firefox to prevent apps doing a lot of the sketchy shit locally a lot more than I trust an app/the host OS to do so.
- anything privacy sensitive
- anything processing intense (using optimized binaries)
- widgets
- camera and audio based features *can* work, but are more finicky (or outright broken on ios)
- local storage (exists in web app, short lifetimes on web site)
- performance/latency sensitive work
- (I'm less familiar, but probably local sensors, like gps and acceleration)
It's a shrinking area: You can get GPS, accelerometer, etc inputs from a web app nowadays. From my own experience the main areas that are tricky are related to automatically finding and connecting to devices: you can do bluetooth at least, but there's things an app can do with wifi and local connection protocols you can't easily do with a web app.
My credit card doesn't need me to lock/unlock it, doesn't require I have a phone with me, and certainly doesn't require an app. The last thing I ever would want is for the people in charge of "apps" to have access to my finances. All you are doing is creating another layer where something is allowed to tell you "No". Why would you choose this?
> “Just log into your bank account on the mobile web browser” is a pretty clunky way to see why your card declined.
But that's because the user experience as designed is more hostile or not otherwise accounting for mobile use--right? Or are you saying there is a limit to the web platform's ability to reduce friction?
You mean some kind of perceived personal convenience through the uneven-handed profit of others and at the expense of everyone else.
Trying to check why your card was declined at a checkout—while still standing at said checkout? Troubleshooting "PIN issues" (meaning your bad)? Is everyone still standing behind you at this point? LOL. Exactly.
A real native app practically always has better performance than web apps. And your data is on your machine. And it can integrate with the operating system. And you can do work offline. And performance saves battery.
True for genuine native apps, but most apps these days are just wrappers around web apps so you get none of the benefits of a true native app while also losing some of the benefits of a web app.
If you use Android, honestly try Fdroid. It's great. I mean there are obviously huge gaps, you're not going to find banking apps, and there's going to be less polish in a lot of cases. BUT NONE OF THE APPS ARE EVIL.
Fdroid harbors the paradise we imagined in the early days where we just had these little computers in our pockets and didn't have to worry that everything on them was drowning in ads, scams and surveillance.
So if I do think I might want or need an app I immediately go and check on Fdroid. I can install apps from there without fear. If Fdroid doesn't have what I need, most likely I'm just tapping out. I won't use my phone. I barely use it these days when I'm not on the go anyway.
The flip side is: I have an Audioguide app with reams of fancy of AI features. Even a basic non-AI one is we use GPS in the background to auto-trigger when you approach certain checkpoints on your tour, and we don't want you staring or constantly manually fiddling with the phone when you're on a tour in a neighborhood. This is all stuff just not possible with the web app
I get it, "I'm just traveling, why do I need to download an app which will be useless when I'm done traveling". Just delete it then, takes two steps!
Our reviews between our Web App and iOS app are like 2 sigma apart. Un-intuitively, our web app users are out fiddling with the app 2-3x more than our iOS app.
If you're going to needlessly gate certain functions behind an app that work on a desktop browser (or could work in-browser), then I just won't use those functions.
Amusingly, I know of a very large hospital chain that has it the other way around.
The app version is the most limited. Mobile web has some more options. But if you want everything, that's desktop only.
Except for scheduled ordering from the coffee shops or placing in-patient meal orders. Those require an app. Except with the meal app, you get more menu choices from the web version.
Theres a gym I work out at, and that I have been going to for nearly a year now, and they have an app you can use to check in, schedule classes, whatever. I don't actually know because I never downloaded the app, I just use my phone number to check in every time I go. I don't want more apps on my phone, not for the gym, not for fast food, maybe my bank and the apps I need to communicate with friends and family, but the majority of it is pointless bloat they push on you for no good reason.
I’m living in peak appification at my gym. It’s one of those 24x7 places and an app is required to unlock the door. I find it amusing that part of the installation process requires me to deny always-on location sharing - why would I need the app to know my location when I’m not at the door?
You should find it insulting that they are likely selling that location data, not even to the highest bidder, but to a data broker that resells that data to anyone that will buy it for any price they'll pay.
In Google's defense, they weren't the ones that championed the "everything must be an app" movement. My memory of the 2010s is that Google (and while they were relevant, Palm) pushed cross-platform web apps, but Apple ran a successful marketing campaign to convince everyone that everything on mobile must be a native app for reasons[1]. So we end up with a walled garden of native apps that must be approved by and pay a tax to the company that makes the OS.
The result is that instead of building one app that works on all platforms, software companies need to build three apps: Web, iOS, and Android. I'm sympathetic to why most software companies (including my own) choose to just build a web app wrapped in a native wrapper. If a company does decide to build a totally separate iOS app, I dunno, it seems reasonable not to build support for every single niche feature that the web app has. I'm not sure I get the outrage here, especially since Google has a long track record of preferring web apps to native.
[1]The "reasons" primarily are that Apple refused to support PWAs, hamstrung mobile Safari, and refused to allow third-party browsers. So while it's true that native apps can offer a better experience than mobile web apps, that's mostly just because Apple artificially restricts web apps.
Even Apple, before caving in, didn't want apps. On the original iPhone there was no SDK, Jobs' "sweet solution" to expanding functionality was web apps pinned to the home screen.
Everyone complained, loudly, and they caved in and launched the app store.
Oh don't, I remember being at a Google PWA Conference where they showed a world where you walked up to a coffee machine which served you a website over some local Bluetooth beacons, you asked for a coffee and it made it. It was such a hopeful concept looking back.
So in the future, when you have those three versions you need to build, its starting to make sense to have the mobile version be the full functionality version. Although, I guess it would be crazy to go to a link on your computer and be told it only works on mobile.
Guy has a problem with a Google service on a Google Pixel phone running a Google made, almost 20 year old operating system that controls >70% of the global market. Alongside a web that has overwhelmingly been defined by Google. This is one situation where Google utterly owns 100% of the space.
HN's take -- Clearly this is Apple's fault.
ROFL. I mean, this is beyond parody at this point.
I noticed a long time ago that Google apps are designed by people who never actually use them. Here's one example. I'm a big fan of reading, and it happened that I stack dozens and dozens of books on my GDrive, so naturally I use mobile Google Drive to download and send those books to the reader app on my iDevices. Finished books are renamed to have an exclamation mark at the beginning of the file name - that puts those books at the start of the list, so it is easier to visually tell apart once I've read them and have not. Obviously, the unstarted books fell off the bottom of the list. And here's the crazy thing - Google has put a big-ass plus button and a "scan document" button right in the bottom-right corner of the app screen, which effectively prevents me from opening the file menu for the last 2 books in the list. Very nice!
IDK to me this is the opposite of the usual problem, which is that some features are only available in the app. I will happily use the desktop browser.
If the barrier to entry is "own a smartphone", there will inevitably be people who will be excluded. Lots of fantastic reasons to unplug in 2026, year of our plague. Even if you don't go so far, conservative allowances for data collection are one of the few digital freedoms left.
What’s even worse is intentionally degrading performance for sign-in’s. This is still circumstantial but I’ve been looking into that over the past few weeks.
When switching between google accounts on a random app or game, no issue. Quick code, you’re in. When I switch between accounts on Claude on mobile, I have to sign in, enter the code, screen freezes, I sign in again, can’t verify it’s me, I sign again, wait 30 seconds, I’m in.
I have to sign in three separate times when signing into a single google account in Claude. For every single other app it’s very quick.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Anthropic and google are working together to degrade sign-in performance for multi-account users. I can’t fully prove it yet but I plan to be able to in the week or two.
It is possible that Anthropic (and OpenAI for that matter) actually put out some pretty low quality software.
If you’ve used Claude Code for any length of time you’re familiar with all of the strange rendering bugs, freezes, etc. OpenAI is even worse, their horrific software makes it difficult to _pay_ them, which should be top priority for a company.
I don't mind apps, even apps that are basically just browsers showing a web site.
The biggest reason is that apps, at least on iOS, just behaves better. It might be that the auth persists longer or that there are notifications or whatever.
It's not without issues obviously. Most of the time the first thing I have to do is update the damn app just to order a burger or park my car or whatever it is I'm using it for. And it's dumb that we need to have a 150 meg download (per update...) for what's basically a bookmark.
But still, the better integration with my phone's native stuff like keychain etc usually means I'm more satisfied after using an app to do something, than using the _exact same web page_ in my mobile browser.
> Most of the time the first thing I have to do is update the damn app just to order a burger or park my car or whatever it is I'm using it for
It's interesting how different things bother people in different ways. Because when this happens to me, I want to throw my phone into the sun. It's a viscerally irritating experience that sticks with me for the rest of the day.
I have my essentials (browser, email, Signal) of course. But besides that, nearly all my apps fit into one of the following 3 categories: transit (airlines, rideshare, city bikes), finance (banks, brokerage), and...
baseball. MLB has put a shocking amount of effort into their apps. The ticketing experience is genuinely really good, so much better than any ticketmaster trash. All apps are trash, unless you're a baseball fan, in which case all but 2 apps are trash. I guess.
This is a constant argument i have with by business partner. He's always asking me "when are we making an app for our <SaaS>" and I always reply back: "We already have an app! It's just a PWA"
PWA's are freaking awesome for both users and developers. Users don't have to install a massive app and me as a developer can focus on making one platform better rather than 3.
And they are pretty freaking powerful in what you can do. Not to toot my own horn too much but I created an "app"[1] for viewing cities on the other side of the earth from where you're standing. It's got camera, gyro and GPS to determine what you're looking at to the folks I've shown it too, anyone non-technical has been completely fooled and thought it was a proper app.
Though you’re limiting your growth potential here by letting your ideology get in the way. Mobile platform users when surveyed almost always overwhelmingly prefer native apps and it’s not even close.
I anticipate if you start getting public feature requests a native app will be at the top of the list.
I agree, presentation is a big issue with PWA's since you have to know how to add it vs just searching in the app store. I'm sure were going to get a native app eventually, though customers have not asked for one yet and seem to be pretty happy with the PWA.
Imo, you already lost the argument when you have to explain that PWA is the "app". For most users, app is something they install from App Store or Google Play. I get the point of view from developers point of view, but unless the majority of the users are technical people, there's no reason to use PWA these days.
The author said it perself, "the greatest minds of our generation" working at Google, so those jagged edges are surely by design, and it's the rational most efficient solution in a economy of attention where the line between the product and the user is blurred.
In some cases it's just because the userbase using the web on their phone instead of the app is incredibly small and it's not worth funding feature parity. It can be difficult to distinguish this case from more hostile takes like reddit and Twitter.
Reddit has started putting up a paywall of sorts to block mobile web users, saying that instead, users should install the app. old.reddit.com remains as an ugly workaround.
The whole thing is nuts:
1. All of reddit's content is UGC. They write literally nothing themselves. There's a strong argument that everything there written by unpaid users should be considered a public good.
2. Tech companies are now, ostensibly, aware of value of having users who engage intentionally instead of compulsively. Mobile apps, with their notifications etc., encourage compulsion. Websites less so.
It will be an interesting reckoning when the polity wakes up to the idea that as social media companies don't pay for the content, they should have no right to restrict access to it. LLMs likewise wouldn't work at all without the petabytes of data they either got for free from users or purloined, and so the argument for their weights being public goods is similar.
On mobile, Googling 'radio 4 schedule' is the quickest way, and the only negative bit about the entire experience is the popup that tells me 'it's better in the app'.
It's not. Not by any metric.
My search and opening a webpage takes a second or two. Opening the app takes several seconds, then navigating to the Radio 4 page and scrolling down the schedule takes several more.
I submitted a bug report on the topic and they basically told me "we hear you but shush and use the app".
I recently decided to use my google calendar to track my mood, as part of my CBT therapy.
What baffles me is that, there's no way in the web app to assign a default calendar for new events. When I create a new event on the web, I have to scroll through all the calendars that I have and choose the one that I want every time. Meanwhile, in the mobile app, I can simply tap on a new block, the event window appears, and the selected calendar defaults to what I used for my last added event.
I think the bigger issue there is that you're trusting Google with your health data. Surely there's an offline calendar app that could help you track it just as well. Anyway, I hope you benefit from the therapy regardless of how you decide to track it.
On an iPad, the web version is almost always objectively better.
Since about 2018 or so, most apps have failed to properly support rotating the device. When you load the same service in a web browser, you gain that feature back. Facebook is a big example.
Other apps actually have MORE functionality in the browser than their app version. This is why PWAs are now much more preferable than before.
As a user, I don't want to install an app if I can do it on the web. Most "apps" these days are just web sites wrapped in an app. What's more, they're usually 100% dependent on REST APIs so there's little advantage to having the app anyway.
As a developer and (web) app vendor, I understand that many users still want apps. I just had a user ask when we'd be releasing our app for iOS. I explained that we did have an app and that it would be identical to what we'd release for iOS. Then I explained the maze of submenus she'd have to click through to get the icon on her home screen.
Apple and Google hate the open web so they make it excessively difficult to "install" PWAs and then in some cases, they're less functional than the website itself. More blame lies at the feet of Apple and Google than on web-first vendors who release sub-optimal apps as a delivery workaround.
We're not releasing apps yet precisely because I want us to be focusing on features. Having to target two additional platforms increases the surface area for testing and takes time away from developing features with the potential cost of releasing a "sub-optimal" app.
Unfortunately it's the norm in large companies to never polish anything. Google has gotten worse and worse at this. But Microsoft is king. They bring a team together to build a new thing and then as soon as they can check that feature box on their sales deck they move that team off onto something else. Loop is a good example of this. Microsoft started building a Notion competitor and then just stopped. The Loop component model got pulled into Copilot and integrated everywhere. But you still cannot move a document between workspaces - one of the most basic pieces of user functionality ever.
I also look at Application Insights / Azure Monitor w/ their OTel SDK, Teams, SharePoint, Visio, <insert MS product here>. Basic functionality is missing and requests are left open for years or decades. Nothing is ever polished. Nothing is ever finished. Everything is good-enough.
When I got a new phone about a year ago, I decided that I wouldn't be installing any traditional social media apps (Tusky doesn't count) and that I'd use the web when "necessary". This has been a very successful experiment and resulted in me looking at Instagram _maybe_ once per week.
Most YouTubers still have sponsor sections on their videos so you probably do see some ads. Also why not pay for YouTube premium to remove the ads while still supporting the creators?
If you want to support the creators is through affiliate marketing by buying whatever they're selling, or by subscribing to them on Patreon – they earn next to nothing from YouTube.
They artificially lock it down, because the app will give them more data to collect than the web app plus a larger surface to annoy the user with notifications, widgets, and other advertisement.
When I rejoined X at the start of this year I consciously decided not to install the app on my phone. It's addicting enough in the web browser on my laptop.
So I have zero social media networks on my phone and, looking at everyone around me who does, I'm very pleased with this decision.
I found that installing facebook dot com to my Home Screen on iOS works acceptably. Lets me check in on things every now and then and still be confident they’re very limited in what they can track.
Messenger doesn’t work but luckily I rarely if ever use it.
I just finished making a social application (for skateboarding) with the express intent of making it fully featured/pleasant to use on mobile simply as web app, without login or installation.
Web is such a powerful platform and so many people still treat their web applications like they're just interactive documents. I think the most bothersome thing on mobile web is if an application has shifting framing ("chrome") when you pan around, like you're looking at a PDF.
Let me know, but I developed it almost entirely focused on iPhone SE as a target to give myself the most claustrophobic possible experience, and I think that helped guide a lot of the decisions.
I've had an issue where, when clicking a "locations" link on a web site, Google Maps "permanently" added a bunch of locations to my map. This was quite unexpected on my part.
(I think it was for a chain or churches or a similar civic organization)
IE, I think someone made a group of locations in Google Maps, and then for the "Locations" link on their website, just linked to the group of locations in Google Maps. In the browser, this works fine, but on mobile, Google Maps just imports the link to my account without asking.
I use LineageOS with MicroG and decided probably 5 years ago to just use PWAs instead of apps for any online service and grab whatever other utilities I might need from Obtanium or F-Droid. Also the experience on my Thinkphone is the exact same as it was on my Pixel XL 2.
I know not everyone can do this, and some PWAs are downright terrible if they work at all, but for my usecase it has been great.
Then you have other sites/companies that go the opposite way: having functionality that is App-only.
As an extreme example: my health insurance provider in Spain (Alan) is app-only. They don’t even have a website one can use. It is maddening for those of us who always prefer desktop over mobile.
Ryan Air just introduced the super-annoying requirements of needing the app to download your boarding pass (which of course they could just provide from the website).
I think they do it to be able to send you notifications and sell you more flights, but I don't understand why they need to be so anti-user. I try to NOT fly Ryan Air unless there is no other airline available. I'd rather pay twice as much than support their poor and sometimes borderline-criminal business practices.
The most painful part of this is that, at a certain point in mobile app development, many of them switched to using web frameworks instead of native. We're literally figuratively building web apps to replace native apps that replaced web apps, and hoping to performance optimize them back into near-native.
I don't like paying $1K for a phone. My current one was CAD$140 at Costco three years ago. It has 32GB of built-in storage which is always 90% full regardless how diligent I am at moving stuff to the SD card, and it has 3GB RAM which was fine three years ago, but is now insufficient to run certain apps at all. Without anything else (that you have control over!) running, start the app, immediately killed due to out of memory. These are apps which were snappy and reliable a few (forced) updates ago. No new features, maybe some UI restyle, but now too bloated to use.
Time to upgrade to the latest cheapy? Well, thanks AI boom, there aren't really any cheapies any more. And even $600+ phones now come with... drum roll... 5GB of RAM. OK, which maybe covers me for another two years of bloat until I'm right back where I started.
Yes, it's possible to stay ahead of the bloat if you pay $1.5K+ for your phone and upgrade somewhat regularly. A colleague has hundreds of apps on his phone and they all work.
Me, I use a desktop browser. Except for certain things that are only available as an app. The xda-developers types say no problem, just unlock and root the d*mn thing and then you can run debloating tools and if you jump through all the right hoops the banking app will still work. Bleech.
I have moved out of the U.S. into South America and one of the nice side-effects of this is that apps from local companies are well optimized here. It's not that there's an extreme level of competency or an optimizing culture. It's simpler.
People have cheaper phones here, so devs are naturally more exposed to low end hardware.
It's been awesome for me! I have a fairphone 4 which isn't top of the line at all anymore but the apps work MUCH better here on average than when I was in the US. Websites also load quicker too for similar reasons.
App vs website is purely taste. Some people will never install an app but will use your website. Some people love apps and will never use your website. Some people prefer apps to PWA when the app does thing, because what if it changes and enshittifies or just vanishes - an app doesn’t need to be updated. Some people prefer PWAs to apps because why would I bother with the endless updates just fix it on the website, in fact I don’t even want your shitty app at all why in Lord’s name is this an app?!
Sometimes… well sometimes there’s no dev resources available to make an app work in a way you’d expect. Google is just a tiny startup, be reasonable in your expectations.
Point is: if you actually want to reach a large audience — you want both. Also, don’t expect good experience if you use Google’s products.
The simplest barrier to using an app for me is that most do not implement tabs. Tabs are extremely useful! Even when the app interface may be better than the web interface, I will usually find myself opting for web specifically for this reason.
I sell stuff ocassionaly on a "local" platform called MercadoLibre (like, I could afford a new handlebar for my bicycle so I could sell there the old one). Mercadolibre kind of wants to be the argentinian Amazon, even lobbying in the argentinian government so they will ban similar platforms from other countries. With time, MercadoLibre has become incredibly hostile and greedy for us small sellers, while favoring corpos.
They charge you 25% for each sale you do via their platform, but the latest thing they did was to force you to "identify" you are you via a website where they track your face features and scan your ID "because of security". Yeah, that sounds good, so I did that in 2021.
They asked this again last year because of reasons. But this time they won't let you use a regular web browser: they forced you to do this via their app. No matter how much you try, it will always fail citing "compatibility issues" or "errors". I tried to complain but their customer support is incredibly shitty, if you even manage how to find to contact them.
But oh surprise, their "app" is just a web wrapper.
I bet they had to change identity verification providers so that's why you have to re-validate again.
It's a shame there's no alternative to Meli. I'm shopping around for a macbook and I would much rather have a marketplace with verified identities and profiles than the shady whatsapp groups and contacts I'm finding.
One thing that annoys me to no end is when a mobile app can't even load without an internet connection. There's a plague of apps that are thin veneers over a web view. I get that this is easier to deploy and manage, but I find it a really poor experience compared to a well-designed mobile app.
Oh I'm so glad it works this way round too. Kinda sick of the web being ruined by http pages that tell you to download a binary. Is anyone bothering trying to narrow that gap between native and web on phones so we can resume the process we were undertaking back in 2010 before smartphones re-promoted binary applications for whatever reason?
The Google Calendar app has a long standing bug where the search view will not show the latest calendar entries unless you manually scroll to the bottom and hold the scroll view there. It’s been like this for years despite repeated bug reports!
What really gets me is when an app highjacks a link to the site, and then doesn't know what to do with it, when just opening the link in the browser would have been perfectly functional. Email unsubscribe links are a particularly annoying example of this.
When I was job hunting earlier this year, LinkedIn on my phone told me to install the app. Sure, why not? So I did. It refused to authenticate and never worked. One good point is that at least the mobile web version didn't lock me out with an impassable overlay like some websites are starting to do.
> and think you're too thick to use your browser's bookmarks feature
To be fair, bookmarking is easy but browsing and locating a bookmarked URL is far from easy. To bookmark in chrome on desktop requires pressing an obvious star button on the right of the address bar (it's always there, so easy to locate). But browsing/locating a bookmark requires clicking on the vertical ellipses on the right-most of the browser, finding 'Bookmarks and lists' amongst a lot of wordy options, then the fun starts: you can scroll bookmarks but cannot even see the full bookmark (only the first 40 characters and favicon) and they're not even in alphabetical order. If you have several hundred, like I do, that's a lot of work, and consequently, I approximately never do it. Easier to copy the url into an email and send it to yourself.
For folks like myself who use different browsers across operating systems, it's even more convoluted for obvious reasons (e.g. I use safari on iOS and chrome on macOS, so something bookmarked on iPhone doesn't make it to macbook and vice-versa).
tl;dr bookmarks are a mess, even for the tech-savvy
Calendar on Android already talks to the network...the same URL only subscribes from desktop.
So is that missing webcal/text/calendar handoff, or a Play-release hole?
I don’t understand all the technical challenges, but I sure hope we can close the gap between what we can do in the browser versus an app. What apps do is gate communities and gate information and gate people and this is the opposite of an open Internet that should be a benefit to humanity.
It’s a shame the web was so slow to adapt to this new mobile world. When it all started things like offline capabilities were very difficult to do on the web and native development felt necessary. These days the web can actually do a lot… but it’s too late. People expect to find something in the App Store, pinning a web site to their Home Screen is just not something they know they can do. So a lot of people waste an enormous amount of money on three different implementations for, often, simple CRUD operations.
That's not it. It's Apple. They are crippling the web on purpose.
We can't even have haptic vibration on Safari. And when we did for a little while earlier this year, it was because of a "bug" that that they promptly fixed.
Apple is not interested in making with apps as seamless and integrated as native because: money.
I agree that Apple has been awful here. But there are countries deeply dominated by Android that still heavily use apps when they could be using PWAs. I don’t mean to let Apple off the hook but I also don’t think they’re the only ones to blame.
As an iPhone user: good. There is no good that can come from some dipshit website product manager being able to make my phone vibrate on a website. None at all.
Is there any good that can come from a dipshit mobile product manager being able to make your phone vibrate on an app? Is there actually a meaningful difference?
I believe it is more nefarious than that. The web strived for mobile native parity but web standards committees are mostly headed by delegates of companies like google and apple; the same companies that have an interest in crippling native web features to push users to their app stores, where they can extract money via fees. PWAs on iOS are a good example of how this kind of gate-keeping looks like
I miss the mobile-versions of websites for low-bandwidth connections (the ones that started with "m."). They were lightning fast, even on slow networks, and were laser-focused on top-of-funnel user activities. Facebook's implementation was extremely solid (when I used them). Messaging worked as well until they gated that behind full Facebook.
Have you ever tried communicating this to consumers of a web app? Our android customers get a nice little install popup or a push of a button.. it's pretty seamless. With TWA it's also trivial to put it on the play store.
I’m not sure one can say Apple is intentionally making it difficult to install a web app to the Home Screen because they haven’t implemented a draft proposal to the w3c working group that proposes a spec only chrome has implemented and no other browser except chrome and its derivatives supports.
It’s intuitive in as much as anything on smart phones is, because the share menu is the OS mechanism for sending data from any iOS app to somewhere else. You use the same menu to save a file to Dropbox, put a photo into a note, add a bookmark etc. Effectively if you want to take something that lives in an app and have it live somewhere else, you use the share menu.
It made even sadder by the fact that often the "app" is more or less just webview.
More and more I'm giving up on apps, and online self-servicing as the structures and scope of what either one can do is increasing narrowing. It's much much easier to just call these days (fortunately AI answering the phone is still not prevalent). Customer service will obviously inform you that "You can just our self-service solutions in the future", even if you literately just called in because you can't due to inflexibility and options you don't understand.
Also "you can manage it from your phone" is not the sales pitch it once was, because it's no longer the entire truth. You can in fact ONLY manage it from your phone. If whatever you're selling requires an app, chances are that I'm not buying and if it's a service, I will seek out your store or staff and make them do it for me.
My ISP removed the ability to manage your network with a browser. Not over the cloud -- they stripped the admin panel from their firmware and require you to use the app. The app is filled with dark patterns that try to get you to use their firewall and their tracking and enable their public Wi-Fi hotspot and not do port forwarding or DNS configuration or separate SSIDs or etc. Also, every few weeks it decides it's outdated and blocks you from doing anything until you update from the app store. Also, every time you open it there's an annoying loading screen with an advertisement. And all throughout the app, everywhere you go there are advertisements for tertiary purchases and offers. Like, yeah, I get that the app needs to exist for these fancy special stupid animations of the router with the waves coming off of it, yeah I see the wifi coming off of the router with all the buttons around it, showing all the things I can do with it, and then I scroll right past that and have to go down to the equipment details and then go into the advanced settings to even configure any of the stuff I actually want to configure about my network ever. And yeah, I know it's the super duper app with all the special services, I know I can get superduper mobile phone line and also TV and cable and also free Peacock streaming service! with the purchase of whatever, and also, did I know that fiber speeds are now being offered but not in my area? Did I know that other areas benefit from up to 2 gigabit speeds?! I better check now to see if my area qualifies! (It doesn't, I made an FCC complaint about it and they responded to tell me it might happen eventually and it hasn't happened)
Literally bought new networking gear from Ubiquiti because of this crap, and could not be happier with it. Only problem is the ISP literally blocks any modem that's their stupid combo router modem Internet-of-Shit cloud-connected hardware-as-a-service garbage. Modem works for a few hours, then the line goes suddenly dead (even to their own router) until I've called them and gotten told that my modem is faulty even though it was working fine until they cut the line, etc. so I have to deal with still having their router in front of my own gear
And this is why I usually say, I will look at it when I am in front of my computer again for most things, side from a free does where I mainly am reading.
In reality I see the anti-app sentiment as mostly a scheme to get more data into the cloud, more traffic that can be collected and spied on, less power and control for the user, and demonizing local computing and users having control over their data. A scheme to give companies and government more complete control over everything you do. Basically further enshitification of computing infrastructure.
I charitably assume if something can't be been done on a mobile it is because someone was granted an "on a phone" patent or clicking that button on a phone somehow will entitle Apple to 30% of my revenue stream in perpetuity.
I usually don't attribute it to malice or incompetence from hypothetical devs, instead I blame malice or incompetence from hypothetical lawyers.
The solution is for companies to stop half-assing multiple things, and instead whole ass one thing.
It's impossible though. There actually isn't a single company alive that's capable of doing something like that, because it would require a decision maker to say "instead of these two things I want just one thing" and the second that happens it will be the end of the world.
These days, applications (whether they're web, mobile, or desktop) with absurd shortcomings in terms of UI/UX are a daily occurrence, yet most people seem to have become incapable of noticing, or at least of giving sensible feedback on the matter.
Obviously, the bulk of it is noticeable in notoriously crapware software like management systems, but it's increasingly emerging just about everywhere.
I wonder how long it will take to understand even just this small slice of the problem, without even getting into "anything apps" and the need to return to the OS as a single integrated application/framework with end-user programming—a trend of which we're only seeing a few hints.
Most companies mostly want app access because you get a bunch of APIs with which to annoy users with marketing notifications, tracking, and url handling.
> This isn't the most complex software engineering task known to humanity. Add a + button. Pop open a text entry field. Validate. Save. Done. I'm sure even the shitty Gemini model can vibe code that in a couple of months, right?
Sick burn.
I tend to prefer using the browser, where possible, eschewing bespoke apps, but I would expect an app to have more functionality than the browser.
Hah. I was trying to buy something on the BestBuy website. I’m not sure what kinda of bitcoin miner they’re running on that site, but it repeatedly manages to crash the tab as I was trying to browse. I had to eventually just download the app.
The problem is that at big companies such as Google, it can take months to plan out features and put them on the roadmap. That is, if they even get prioritized above other things to begin with.
The no-Google-calendar-sharing-on-mobile is an absolute classic. I have personally seen multiple clumps of people huddled around a phone trying to figure out how to share a calendar with each other - fruitlessly until I butted in, because normal people don't know about desktop mode and even if they did would have no reason to think it necessary.
(If you didn't read the post, it doesn't work in the app either. It only works on "desktop.")
This past weekend I was flying on Delta and my first flight was delayed such that I was going to miss my connecting flight, so I rebooked onto a later one. During my layover I visited the gate agent to get a boarding pass with a seat assignment.
"Do you have the Delta app?"
"Nope."
Then he pressed a few keys on his keyboard and printed out a new boarding pass for me within five seconds. I couldn't believe he was trying to kick me over to the app if it was that easy.
Aer Lingus have introduced app-only self-service bag drops, which are invariably swamped with passengers trying to get them to work while a single staff runs around clearing on-screen errors and directing people to rescan, or reweigh their bags, or move closer to the window to get a 4G signal.
Meanwhile non-app users are directed to the otherwise idle staff at the check-in desk. It's bliss.
MLB is the exact opposite of this. You can't get tickets without the Ballpark app. No paper tickets at most stadiums. The app asks for all sorts of personal info too (which I usually spoof). They're even trying for biometric check-in now.
If your app can be implemented in React Native with no developer pain, it should just be a website.
Native is a much better experience than mobile websites when you actually use the features and power of these fairly advanced computers we carry around in our pockets.
Definitely annoying to have random features not work in app. This "subscribe to event" feature for example.
More implicit in this post seems to be an argument against apps entirely, which I cannot agree with. He doesn't exactly say this but it points there.
- never establishes a need or true advantage to an app. does briefly acknowledge apps can do something unique things but then immediately undercuts it. positions Google etc. motivation as wanting to occupy your home screen, dont trust you to use bookmarks, etc.
- says he has experience building phone apps and knows the pain of updating across so many devices and says solutions converge on basically re-implementing web browsers (which I think is a large leap)
So when he says
>If you want an app, fine. Do it. Just finish the job please!
I dont really believe him. From his perspective, why is an app ever necessary? To me it's obvious because I absolutely do not want to use Google Calendar in a phone browser. Primarily because the UI on an app is optimized for the phone. And at that point it feels like imperfect feature parity is just the normal problem of releasing the "same" thing many times.
The title also seems to be pointing to a sort of equivocation where you say a group of People say X, and then blame a Person 1for contradicting X by saying Y. Except We've never established that Person 1 was in the group of People saying X. You see this a lot on reddit, hackernews as well. "Oh, many people in the comment section said said Y before now user123 is saying X thats a contradiction."
Having said all that, the blog is labeled "rant" and I can respect that a lot of the purpose is to blow off steam.
This isn't about the app being unfinished, it's about Google deliberately half-assing support for open standards. They want you to be stuck in their calendar ecosystem so they make sure there's more friction adding a calendar from outside than adding someone else's Google calendar.
There's another class of problem, websites that pretend to work in the browser but refuse to support any reasonable type of login session.
Like, sure, there are login sessions that expire after five seconds of inactivity. Sometimes it even turns out that they don't support passkeys or TOTP, and you have to add a phone number for SMS authentication, which reduces account security by letting attackers prove your identity.
I want a browser extension that automatically clicks those "I'm still here" pop-ups on scummy websites like this...
But they have an app. And they don't even shove it in your face that the experience is better with the app or whatever. But it is for one and literally only ever one singular reason: it doesn't log you out every five seconds
Feels like this field has become a lot about doing the easy, visible parts, getting a month of attention, maybe a promotion, then moving on to the next "new project".
Meanwhile, the people who stay behind and actually make these half-finished apps work properly, maintain them and deal with all the boring problems rarely get the same credit or benefits.
Every single company has turned this into a situation where I cannot trust your apps with privacy or security, and the risk and hassle isn't worth the install.
I'm done. The only say I have is in how I spend my money. Those companies won't get any of mine if I can help it.
I am the customer, not the product dammit.
That’s an illusion that died a long time ago, unfortunately.
Just because you’re using their service on a browser doesn’t stop them from harvesting data from your usage, especially if you’re logging in (and if you’re using their services, chances are that you are).
Using browser over app can help, but it doesn’t eliminate it.
Like it or not, we’re the product, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Worse, to sell a tesla, you are the person saying "ok, install the app, then I can transfer ownership to you, conveniently!"
and this is getting normalized with other car manufacturers.
(and it ALL goes back to apple... who started the whole app nonsense, and promoted a look-and-feel that gave tesla a terrible tap and swipe iphone/ipad type ui in a moving car)
This. I get Frame.work and install Fedora. Use Firefox for everything possible. Once my current phone dies, I'll get a Fair phone, Motorola, or whatever gives me control.
Can't complain if I keep choosing hostile products for some convenience
Some, like Home Depot, have websites that are terrible and battery-draining enough to make the app nominally useful by comparison.
I don't take this as a signal to install the app. It is a signal to avoid the store. They clearly don't feel like they need to work to gain your business, and instead take it for granted. You can see this indicated by their actions - they clearly feel that it is more profitable to inconvenience you for a token amount of tracking data than to serve your needs. Why continue to use them?
Uhaul is a great example of this. The app looks a little better on mobile, but if you don’t make an account and search by reservation ID, all features related to things like extending a reservation time are nonfunctional. I have to go to the mobile site which looks bad and has poor navigation, trying to hijack my session and redirect me to the app, but at least it works.
And it wants a photo of my license EVERY GODDAMN TIME. And no I can't store a photo of my license on my phone and just upload it - it has to take a photo directly. And boy does it not like to take photos in bright sunlight. You know, when I'm outside in a parking lot beside a white truck.
I was at a car park in UK and you didn't have to install an app, just scan the QR to go to the web page, simple payment. Sadly they then messed it all up by not offering payment through normal services.
Lord no!
Scanning a random QR code.... where is the worst it will take you?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crrpknqpgzlo
If they did they would not need to be pushed to apps by "it works better on the app" or offered discounts for using the app.
No, the average middle manager demands an app.
The average user has gotten over the novelty of having seven million apps on their phone.
As a result the only native apps I use on my phone are Kindle, Authy and Firefox because I trust Firefox to prevent apps doing a lot of the sketchy shit locally a lot more than I trust an app/the host OS to do so.
I'll bite. What important features can only be done in an "app" but not a web app nowadays?
You've got that backwards. Web is more private than an app.
Every regulated healthcare company has a web site. None require an "app."
It might be coming to the web - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_NFC_API
No one wants to troubleshoot a card decline by logging into their mobile browser bank account in checkout at the grocery store.
But that's because the user experience as designed is more hostile or not otherwise accounting for mobile use--right? Or are you saying there is a limit to the web platform's ability to reduce friction?
Trying to check why your card was declined at a checkout—while still standing at said checkout? Troubleshooting "PIN issues" (meaning your bad)? Is everyone still standing behind you at this point? LOL. Exactly.
A web app is almost never better.
Not really true anymore, especially on mobile. Plus the privacy invading abilities of native are much higher
> Plus the privacy invading abilities of native are much higher
Your privacy is already completely invaded if your data is in the cloud, as it has to be with web apps.
Fdroid harbors the paradise we imagined in the early days where we just had these little computers in our pockets and didn't have to worry that everything on them was drowning in ads, scams and surveillance.
So if I do think I might want or need an app I immediately go and check on Fdroid. I can install apps from there without fear. If Fdroid doesn't have what I need, most likely I'm just tapping out. I won't use my phone. I barely use it these days when I'm not on the go anyway.
I get it, "I'm just traveling, why do I need to download an app which will be useless when I'm done traveling". Just delete it then, takes two steps!
Our reviews between our Web App and iOS app are like 2 sigma apart. Un-intuitively, our web app users are out fiddling with the app 2-3x more than our iOS app.
Please just put placards on your exhibits, then I can take as long ( or as quickly ) as I need to digest the info.
People can then use their phone to translate into other languages, if needed.
That describes silicon valley tech culture to a tee.
Amusingly, I know of a very large hospital chain that has it the other way around.
The app version is the most limited. Mobile web has some more options. But if you want everything, that's desktop only.
Except for scheduled ordering from the coffee shops or placing in-patient meal orders. Those require an app. Except with the meal app, you get more menu choices from the web version.
Modern tech is a mess.
I try to never use apps anyway, because adblocking on them is hard or impossible (which is the reason they exist in the first place).
You should find it insulting that they are likely selling that location data, not even to the highest bidder, but to a data broker that resells that data to anyone that will buy it for any price they'll pay.
The result is that instead of building one app that works on all platforms, software companies need to build three apps: Web, iOS, and Android. I'm sympathetic to why most software companies (including my own) choose to just build a web app wrapped in a native wrapper. If a company does decide to build a totally separate iOS app, I dunno, it seems reasonable not to build support for every single niche feature that the web app has. I'm not sure I get the outrage here, especially since Google has a long track record of preferring web apps to native.
[1]The "reasons" primarily are that Apple refused to support PWAs, hamstrung mobile Safari, and refused to allow third-party browsers. So while it's true that native apps can offer a better experience than mobile web apps, that's mostly just because Apple artificially restricts web apps.
Everyone complained, loudly, and they caved in and launched the app store.
(Source: https://www.emarketer.com/content/search-behavior-being-rede...)
So in the future, when you have those three versions you need to build, its starting to make sense to have the mobile version be the full functionality version. Although, I guess it would be crazy to go to a link on your computer and be told it only works on mobile.
> …clear that mobile is the future…
And also, "mobile" is tangential to "app" vs "website".
HN's take -- Clearly this is Apple's fault.
ROFL. I mean, this is beyond parody at this point.
When switching between google accounts on a random app or game, no issue. Quick code, you’re in. When I switch between accounts on Claude on mobile, I have to sign in, enter the code, screen freezes, I sign in again, can’t verify it’s me, I sign again, wait 30 seconds, I’m in.
I have to sign in three separate times when signing into a single google account in Claude. For every single other app it’s very quick.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Anthropic and google are working together to degrade sign-in performance for multi-account users. I can’t fully prove it yet but I plan to be able to in the week or two.
If you’ve used Claude Code for any length of time you’re familiar with all of the strange rendering bugs, freezes, etc. OpenAI is even worse, their horrific software makes it difficult to _pay_ them, which should be top priority for a company.
It's not without issues obviously. Most of the time the first thing I have to do is update the damn app just to order a burger or park my car or whatever it is I'm using it for. And it's dumb that we need to have a 150 meg download (per update...) for what's basically a bookmark.
But still, the better integration with my phone's native stuff like keychain etc usually means I'm more satisfied after using an app to do something, than using the _exact same web page_ in my mobile browser.
It's interesting how different things bother people in different ways. Because when this happens to me, I want to throw my phone into the sun. It's a viscerally irritating experience that sticks with me for the rest of the day.
I have my essentials (browser, email, Signal) of course. But besides that, nearly all my apps fit into one of the following 3 categories: transit (airlines, rideshare, city bikes), finance (banks, brokerage), and...
baseball. MLB has put a shocking amount of effort into their apps. The ticketing experience is genuinely really good, so much better than any ticketmaster trash. All apps are trash, unless you're a baseball fan, in which case all but 2 apps are trash. I guess.
PWA's are freaking awesome for both users and developers. Users don't have to install a massive app and me as a developer can focus on making one platform better rather than 3.
And they are pretty freaking powerful in what you can do. Not to toot my own horn too much but I created an "app"[1] for viewing cities on the other side of the earth from where you're standing. It's got camera, gyro and GPS to determine what you're looking at to the folks I've shown it too, anyone non-technical has been completely fooled and thought it was a proper app.
[1]: https://earthview.sunny.gg
I anticipate if you start getting public feature requests a native app will be at the top of the list.
The whole thing is nuts:
1. All of reddit's content is UGC. They write literally nothing themselves. There's a strong argument that everything there written by unpaid users should be considered a public good.
2. Tech companies are now, ostensibly, aware of value of having users who engage intentionally instead of compulsively. Mobile apps, with their notifications etc., encourage compulsion. Websites less so.
It will be an interesting reckoning when the polity wakes up to the idea that as social media companies don't pay for the content, they should have no right to restrict access to it. LLMs likewise wouldn't work at all without the petabytes of data they either got for free from users or purloined, and so the argument for their weights being public goods is similar.
On mobile, Googling 'radio 4 schedule' is the quickest way, and the only negative bit about the entire experience is the popup that tells me 'it's better in the app'.
It's not. Not by any metric.
My search and opening a webpage takes a second or two. Opening the app takes several seconds, then navigating to the Radio 4 page and scrolling down the schedule takes several more.
I submitted a bug report on the topic and they basically told me "we hear you but shush and use the app".
What baffles me is that, there's no way in the web app to assign a default calendar for new events. When I create a new event on the web, I have to scroll through all the calendars that I have and choose the one that I want every time. Meanwhile, in the mobile app, I can simply tap on a new block, the event window appears, and the selected calendar defaults to what I used for my last added event.
Since about 2018 or so, most apps have failed to properly support rotating the device. When you load the same service in a web browser, you gain that feature back. Facebook is a big example.
Other apps actually have MORE functionality in the browser than their app version. This is why PWAs are now much more preferable than before.
As a developer and (web) app vendor, I understand that many users still want apps. I just had a user ask when we'd be releasing our app for iOS. I explained that we did have an app and that it would be identical to what we'd release for iOS. Then I explained the maze of submenus she'd have to click through to get the icon on her home screen.
Apple and Google hate the open web so they make it excessively difficult to "install" PWAs and then in some cases, they're less functional than the website itself. More blame lies at the feet of Apple and Google than on web-first vendors who release sub-optimal apps as a delivery workaround.
We're not releasing apps yet precisely because I want us to be focusing on features. Having to target two additional platforms increases the surface area for testing and takes time away from developing features with the potential cost of releasing a "sub-optimal" app.
I also look at Application Insights / Azure Monitor w/ their OTel SDK, Teams, SharePoint, Visio, <insert MS product here>. Basic functionality is missing and requests are left open for years or decades. Nothing is ever polished. Nothing is ever finished. Everything is good-enough.
Yes we're solving an app problem with another app, but just highlighting that is a solution for the ads.
So I have zero social media networks on my phone and, looking at everyone around me who does, I'm very pleased with this decision.
Messenger doesn’t work but luckily I rarely if ever use it.
They're digital drugs
Web is such a powerful platform and so many people still treat their web applications like they're just interactive documents. I think the most bothersome thing on mobile web is if an application has shifting framing ("chrome") when you pan around, like you're looking at a PDF.
https://skatanica.com
Let me know, but I developed it almost entirely focused on iPhone SE as a target to give myself the most claustrophobic possible experience, and I think that helped guide a lot of the decisions.
(I think it was for a chain or churches or a similar civic organization)
IE, I think someone made a group of locations in Google Maps, and then for the "Locations" link on their website, just linked to the group of locations in Google Maps. In the browser, this works fine, but on mobile, Google Maps just imports the link to my account without asking.
I know not everyone can do this, and some PWAs are downright terrible if they work at all, but for my usecase it has been great.
I think they do it to be able to send you notifications and sell you more flights, but I don't understand why they need to be so anti-user. I try to NOT fly Ryan Air unless there is no other airline available. I'd rather pay twice as much than support their poor and sometimes borderline-criminal business practices.
Time to upgrade to the latest cheapy? Well, thanks AI boom, there aren't really any cheapies any more. And even $600+ phones now come with... drum roll... 5GB of RAM. OK, which maybe covers me for another two years of bloat until I'm right back where I started.
Yes, it's possible to stay ahead of the bloat if you pay $1.5K+ for your phone and upgrade somewhat regularly. A colleague has hundreds of apps on his phone and they all work.
Me, I use a desktop browser. Except for certain things that are only available as an app. The xda-developers types say no problem, just unlock and root the d*mn thing and then you can run debloating tools and if you jump through all the right hoops the banking app will still work. Bleech.
People have cheaper phones here, so devs are naturally more exposed to low end hardware.
It's been awesome for me! I have a fairphone 4 which isn't top of the line at all anymore but the apps work MUCH better here on average than when I was in the US. Websites also load quicker too for similar reasons.
Sometimes… well sometimes there’s no dev resources available to make an app work in a way you’d expect. Google is just a tiny startup, be reasonable in your expectations.
Point is: if you actually want to reach a large audience — you want both. Also, don’t expect good experience if you use Google’s products.
They charge you 25% for each sale you do via their platform, but the latest thing they did was to force you to "identify" you are you via a website where they track your face features and scan your ID "because of security". Yeah, that sounds good, so I did that in 2021.
They asked this again last year because of reasons. But this time they won't let you use a regular web browser: they forced you to do this via their app. No matter how much you try, it will always fail citing "compatibility issues" or "errors". I tried to complain but their customer support is incredibly shitty, if you even manage how to find to contact them.
But oh surprise, their "app" is just a web wrapper.
It's a shame there's no alternative to Meli. I'm shopping around for a macbook and I would much rather have a marketplace with verified identities and profiles than the shady whatsapp groups and contacts I'm finding.
To be fair, bookmarking is easy but browsing and locating a bookmarked URL is far from easy. To bookmark in chrome on desktop requires pressing an obvious star button on the right of the address bar (it's always there, so easy to locate). But browsing/locating a bookmark requires clicking on the vertical ellipses on the right-most of the browser, finding 'Bookmarks and lists' amongst a lot of wordy options, then the fun starts: you can scroll bookmarks but cannot even see the full bookmark (only the first 40 characters and favicon) and they're not even in alphabetical order. If you have several hundred, like I do, that's a lot of work, and consequently, I approximately never do it. Easier to copy the url into an email and send it to yourself.
For folks like myself who use different browsers across operating systems, it's even more convoluted for obvious reasons (e.g. I use safari on iOS and chrome on macOS, so something bookmarked on iPhone doesn't make it to macbook and vice-versa).
tl;dr bookmarks are a mess, even for the tech-savvy
Yes, I know some apps wouldn't make it in the browser. These are sacrifices I am willing to make.
We can't even have haptic vibration on Safari. And when we did for a little while earlier this year, it was because of a "bug" that that they promptly fixed.
Apple is not interested in making with apps as seamless and integrated as native because: money.
https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/
https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/befo...
Yes one can. They got greedy.
https://williamkennedy.ninja/apple/2024/01/30/steve-jobs-int...
I want to pin the app, not share.
That seems purposefully misplaced. As usual with malicious compliance.
In Android: Menu > Install and create shortcut. Much cleaner, intentional, and visible with a single click for me.
I just asked my colleague and they had no clue how to do it in their iPhone. I guess a win for Apple.
More and more I'm giving up on apps, and online self-servicing as the structures and scope of what either one can do is increasing narrowing. It's much much easier to just call these days (fortunately AI answering the phone is still not prevalent). Customer service will obviously inform you that "You can just our self-service solutions in the future", even if you literately just called in because you can't due to inflexibility and options you don't understand.
Also "you can manage it from your phone" is not the sales pitch it once was, because it's no longer the entire truth. You can in fact ONLY manage it from your phone. If whatever you're selling requires an app, chances are that I'm not buying and if it's a service, I will seek out your store or staff and make them do it for me.
Literally bought new networking gear from Ubiquiti because of this crap, and could not be happier with it. Only problem is the ISP literally blocks any modem that's their stupid combo router modem Internet-of-Shit cloud-connected hardware-as-a-service garbage. Modem works for a few hours, then the line goes suddenly dead (even to their own router) until I've called them and gotten told that my modem is faulty even though it was working fine until they cut the line, etc. so I have to deal with still having their router in front of my own gear
I thought that they just want to collect more data about you.
I usually don't attribute it to malice or incompetence from hypothetical devs, instead I blame malice or incompetence from hypothetical lawyers.
My rule for apps these days is that if it is not available through F-Droid, I won't be using it.
It's impossible though. There actually isn't a single company alive that's capable of doing something like that, because it would require a decision maker to say "instead of these two things I want just one thing" and the second that happens it will be the end of the world.
Obviously, the bulk of it is noticeable in notoriously crapware software like management systems, but it's increasingly emerging just about everywhere.
I wonder how long it will take to understand even just this small slice of the problem, without even getting into "anything apps" and the need to return to the OS as a single integrated application/framework with end-user programming—a trend of which we're only seeing a few hints.
Sick burn.
I tend to prefer using the browser, where possible, eschewing bespoke apps, but I would expect an app to have more functionality than the browser.
It's sad, when it doesn't.
(If you didn't read the post, it doesn't work in the app either. It only works on "desktop.")
"Do you have the Delta app?"
"Nope."
Then he pressed a few keys on his keyboard and printed out a new boarding pass for me within five seconds. I couldn't believe he was trying to kick me over to the app if it was that easy.
Meanwhile non-app users are directed to the otherwise idle staff at the check-in desk. It's bliss.
Native is a much better experience than mobile websites when you actually use the features and power of these fairly advanced computers we carry around in our pockets.
Yeah, and I have one on my Android phone!
More implicit in this post seems to be an argument against apps entirely, which I cannot agree with. He doesn't exactly say this but it points there.
So when he says I dont really believe him. From his perspective, why is an app ever necessary? To me it's obvious because I absolutely do not want to use Google Calendar in a phone browser. Primarily because the UI on an app is optimized for the phone. And at that point it feels like imperfect feature parity is just the normal problem of releasing the "same" thing many times.The title also seems to be pointing to a sort of equivocation where you say a group of People say X, and then blame a Person 1for contradicting X by saying Y. Except We've never established that Person 1 was in the group of People saying X. You see this a lot on reddit, hackernews as well. "Oh, many people in the comment section said said Y before now user123 is saying X thats a contradiction."
Having said all that, the blog is labeled "rant" and I can respect that a lot of the purpose is to blow off steam.
Like, sure, there are login sessions that expire after five seconds of inactivity. Sometimes it even turns out that they don't support passkeys or TOTP, and you have to add a phone number for SMS authentication, which reduces account security by letting attackers prove your identity.
I want a browser extension that automatically clicks those "I'm still here" pop-ups on scummy websites like this...
But they have an app. And they don't even shove it in your face that the experience is better with the app or whatever. But it is for one and literally only ever one singular reason: it doesn't log you out every five seconds
Meanwhile, the people who stay behind and actually make these half-finished apps work properly, maintain them and deal with all the boring problems rarely get the same credit or benefits.