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.
>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.
> 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.
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
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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".
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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."
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…
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.
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?
>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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :).
> 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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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%.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
:-) 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.
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
> 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
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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"
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
"""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."""
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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?
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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".
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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"
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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)
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.
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 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.
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!
>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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
>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.
> 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
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
>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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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!
> 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".
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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."
> 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.
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…
> 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.
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?
>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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> You get all these popups everywhere, ads are much more intrusive.
I've literally never had that problem. Firefox Mobile + uBlock Origin eliminates ads.
That works well on Android, but on iOS not so much I think? Also, those damn cookie banners in EU.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :).
> 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?
> 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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
Devs are usually disconnected from the average user's experience. I too used to be the same.
Weren't PMs supposed to fix this problem?
The dev's ambassador to the common man.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
People just don't like bloated JS heavy websites
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.
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.
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.
They are potentially operationally cheaper. Answering a few API requests is cheaper than sending the same HTML over and over and over again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
but did the idea pan out? did the users switch to the website or did you lose em?
Well don't leave us hanging! We need the anecdata!
Interesting. Why do you think so many websites try to foist apps on you if people will voluntarily download them anyway?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The ones that do are usually the ones that know people will be reluctant to download.
Maybe OP offers some really valuable products?
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
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.
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
Proper native apps simply have better UX.
Of course it’s possible to mess that up, but the default is superior.
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.
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.
By the latest I also lean the lost secure and patched version of an app. You should care.
There's no reason a website should be more up to date than an app. Could just as well be the other way around.
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.
The question is - did you notice users uptick when adding an app, or just some web users moved to it?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Reddit runs well IMO if you go to old.reddit.com. The mobile site is borderline useless, presumably intentionally.
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.
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.
I’ve worked on teams that made complex production web apps with a tiny tiny fraction of Reddit’s cash flow.
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.
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.
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.
There are extensions that redirect to old.reddit.com with mobile friendly CSS.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
Web apps can do that too with service workers, it is just a bit of a pain in the ass.
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.
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.
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.
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
>fingerprinting entirely mitigated
This is an interest of mine, but I’m still fingerprinted per a recent comment. May I ask:
How?
> a game, try wasm
On iOS? Waste of time for anything but simple 2d games.
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%.
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.
We’ve forgotten what an “app” was
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?
Better features, less ads, smoother experience and in the case of Apollo—the one I used—it just looked much better.
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.
UI/UX is not that tricky. Caring about your users is the hard part usually.
Third party clients could be webapps, too, of course.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
Redreader is still around as a good 3rd party app.
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.
Yeah but if you want some restricted content the app is the only way
That was part of the 3rd party app purge. Before then, the 3rd party apps could see NSFW content just fine.
I use HN+Tildes instead. I left a couple years before the API fiasco because I was sick of the ragebait and toxic culture.
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.
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.
Svelte’s been pretty great in terms of “just use web standards where it makes sense” so far.
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?
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
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
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.
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.
Why tha hell am I required to use a locked down american device to access my public services in Europe? This is not ok.
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.
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.
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.
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.
:-) 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.
> where even the heaviest website is a few mb
Not nowadays they aren't.
And haven't been for at least a decade!
It's such a basic interaction, yet so many apps disable it
What makes margarine not "good for you?"
and don't forget imdb and airbnb, who absolutely _need_ the latest ios to work
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.
Average, yes, probably an exaggeration. Some apps
iOS:
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
> 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:
There's also an "Apple Inc." listing, which appears to be "shared" between a lot of their apps which clocks in at 204MMy 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
> Maps: 81 M
Is MapKit considered iOS or Maps?
> 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.
A few different UIs don't justify hundreds of extra megabytes. We just collectively stopped caring.
UI definitions should add very little storage space. Different images and videos might add a lot.
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.
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.
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?)
Amex being 300mb is genuinely hilarious. What does that app even do?
Probably doing CHIA in the background. ;)
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"
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.
they use react native maybe
Now I understand why those 128 GB get full so quick.
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.
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.
"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.
Yeah, especially if I can make a desktop app under 10 MB with the same functionality and features (obviously non-Electron).
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.
What are these you are listing?
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?
Yeah but the native SDK sucks and isn't cross-platform, I don't blame anyone for not using it
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gaia used to be so great and I used it every day but it’s really hard to support Outside.
Yes, the Outside aspect is annoying. Did you switch to another app?
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.
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!
> 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!
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"
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.
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.
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!
I'm one of those people that dislike having to zoom and (importantly) pan around on a 2D canvas.
I miss Apollo.
That was the day I stopped reading reddit.
And it literally blocks users from using messenger in the mobile browser, I need to ask for desktop website
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
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
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
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.
They'll LLM that, or at least they'll majorly try.
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.
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.
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.
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?
It’s not designed to work well, it’s designed to serve ads.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
We have moved beyond that. Even if you pay, you’re usually still the product.
moving beyond is usually what happens when something is furtheranced
It is - from the company point of view.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed, this is post-capture monetization.
How do you hold users hostage without providing them value?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
>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.
No, the difference between value and perceived value was pretty much their point.
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.
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.
Monopoly, network effect
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
None of that is unique to the app though, and existed before the app.
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.
We should be able to get that value in a fair way without giving up massive amounts of information in sketchy ways.
You can do that on the website.
I never claimed it doesn't.
Then what was your claim?
Companies have to provide the perception of providing value.
> 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.
How about Google Flights as an example?
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.
I wonder if that explains why focus and scroll (via arrow keys and page up/down) is broken on so many websites.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Google play store is no better
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
>I can't be the only one who _never _ updates software on my phone until I absolutely have to.
right there with you brother
I do the same thing and i wonder why
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I'm not apple lover, but safari support for PWAs is pretty good. What do you think is missing?
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.
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.
For me, the last straw with the Amazon app was when it started injecting ads into the Android text selection UI
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.
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
Many of the “native” apps on mobile app stores are React Native, though.
Why quotes? React native is native
React Native uses native ui.
Isn't the mobile app of Reddit just using electron as well?
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.
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.
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.
>"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.
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.
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.
Which bank is that where you can’t log into their website from PC or mobile?
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.
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.
> 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.
So this is as most things wrong with the EU and tech is about overzealous regulators..
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.
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.
My bank Monzo only has a minimal website. The app is everything.
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.
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.
Similar with Cashapp, Venmo, and Apple Wallet / Credit Card.
You can very much get a physical card for the Apple credit card and make payments on the web.
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)
>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
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.
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.
At least relatively recent versions of Android let you turn off notifications per-app:
https://support.google.com/android/answer/9079661?hl=en
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.
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.
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).
Even better, apps have to ask you for permission to even show notifications!
Game? Doesn't need notfications, deny, done!
These are so infuriating they should be illegal.
Especially when they come from apps you can't delete like your bannking app.
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.
Does it work the way CAN-SPAM is supposed to work (marketing can be unsubscribed from with rules about what constitutes "transactional" messages)?
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."""
not having a way to divide notification channels, transactional vs promotional, make it worse than android.
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.
>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
Haha true, or better yet a U2 album
Hasn’t seemed to work…
Totally with you on this. Every extra app feels like mental clutter
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just don't collect any data. Having an app doesn't mean you need to collect any data.
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.
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.
Could you elaborate on how they don't deal with the AppStore and the Play Store? I'm new to this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you leaving money on the table or is your business in such a niche that people will jump through hoops for the results?
I feel like this is the point of the original post, it is not jumping through hoops to use a website.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
Browser push isn’t enabled by default which ime is a huge difference.
On iPhone at least, neither is app push
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.
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).
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
Or just disable notifications for the various apps you don't want to hear from.
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.”
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.
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.
> Idc about privacy
Until you do. Then it is too late
Yes, except I won't care even when it's too late.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
If you use a third party for identification that works out better.
Unfortunately my bank requires the usage of their own app, since they send an.authentication request similar to the Google "confirmation"
A reminder of all the features available right now with PWAs - https://whatpwacando.today
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it should be standard to allow registering multiple tokens, which would be equivalent to a backup for your purposes.
You can copy this if you buy two. You would have to store one somewhere, where it can be fedexed to you.
No need to fedex, just have a trusted person read you the code back over the phone.
I don't want a hardware token generator since it is guaranteed that I will lose it.
Carry two, leave another in a safe somewhere in your home country?
Otherwise, yeah... Passkey it is
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.
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.
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)
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.
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/
TOTP is able to be intercepted on the device.
Yes, and that's also true for SMS messages and your passwords. That is why having MFA is important.
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.
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?
> password is known
What password?
This could have just been TOTP.
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.
>"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.
That would've been nice, cause instead Passkeys are kinda locked into whatever walled garden you chose.
At that scale, the amount of support getting a city of people to understand that is overwhelming.
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.
Another advantage to using the Discord website is that it's easier to style/modify using extensions such as tampermonkey.
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.)
It remembers all the tabs: it just doesn't open them all. Ctrl+Shift+T should bring the rest back.
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.
> 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.
New Microsoft Edge has a weird key combination mapping; I assumed that was a Chromium thing.
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.
Is that how it works? Don't you need to call into it with the Social SDK?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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".
> 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.
Why is that a bad thing? Wouldn't we be better off with all of them being PWA's?
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.
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.
Sure, native apps can be good for users in some cases, but this post isn't about those.
How many apps that could be websites have in app purchases of digital goods?
Gotta love the HN bubble. Users want apps, not PWAs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If apps were interchangeable with PWAs we'd just call PWAs apps. What would be the difference, besides distribution?
That would be good too, "progressive web app" is a silly name
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.
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).
Given how much it seems Apple detests PWAs, I don't ever see this happening. One can dream.
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.
It's sort of the opposite: Developer have to shrink the websites' functionality to obey this rule.
Usually they don’t, though. They add one iOS feature instead.
Which could work fine in PWA.
then they can't charge their app tax!
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.
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.
99% of apps don't need any native feature.
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
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.
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.
Could be, I shop there despite it but it is annoying.
Google is a lot better in this regard though, but supporting most things on Safari are an absolute PITA
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.
> 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.
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.
Native app UX is much more superior unfortunately. For almost everything like Zillow, Booking.com, Reddit, Gmail, Map, and etc.
"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.
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".
> Using a phone requires using a mobile browser.
Not true. Sent from desktop Firefox on my GNU/Linux phone.
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
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.
RRR is also a fun film.
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
This is getting less and less true though. Also WiFi permission is not a thing on iOS.
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.
This is on android. iOS has usually less privacy issues.
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Crazy this has to be said but then again people are morons
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.
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:
With apps, we have only what they give us.Apps are enshitification.
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.
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?
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
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.
Are there porn apps? I believe App Store restrictions wouldn't allow that.
An app can’t be hidden easily, in a browser you just go incognito. Some people just don’t want others to know.
PWA stores:
https://progressivewebapp.store/
https://store.app/
https://www.pwa.com/
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.
> 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?
just for those who don't know:
https://old.reddit.com/
Unfortunately, i.reddit.com is no longer available :(
Fortunately, Redlib exists: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
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.
do you have the same problem at the grocery store?
Surprisingly, no. I make a list know the aisles, pick stuff. But it’s not the same case on the web.
I thought the main reason is because it's a lot more difficult blocking advertisements in an app.
I VPN home where I run Piholes and block all outbound DNS, DoT and port 443 to known DoH hosts.
Works like a charm.
I hate how Android ALWAYS asks to use the App. There is no "I prefer websites" button.
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.
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?
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
You should! The browser APIs are straightforward:
Then you get those native media controls. Even stuff like "hey google, play/pause/skip"Does it work on iOS too?
Yes: https://caniuse.com/mdn-api_navigator_mediasession
Try using Spotify's mobile web app for an example. Works great.
MDN says yes as of iOS 15. Don't have an iPhone to double check atm.
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
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.
You sure can: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MediaSessio...
The Video Background Play Fix extension for Firefox on Android comes close.
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.
iOS Safari does this, at least on bandcamp and SoundCloud.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I'm thinking of closing my ICICI bank account because the app requires granting SMS permissions.
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
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!”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
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?
>needs location
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation...
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.
All of those shortcomings were deliberately orchestrated by Google and Apple to keep taxing developers.
I use a mix. I only download apps that I use a lot. Everything else I use on the website.
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.
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.
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.
Do you have an iPhone? Safari for iOS deletes all cookies older than a week unless you add the site to your home screen.
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?
Note that Safari will remove storage for a site if it hasn't been accessed in 7 days.
That doesn't sound right. Have you seen documentation on this?
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)
Feels like it's actively trying to punish you for not using the app
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.
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.
Why would you use their app if they are bostile towards you. That doesn't make any sense.
Because they’re my bank, or some service essential to my life with no good alternative. Google maps, for instance.
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.
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.
Why would you even use Yelp the website?
What's the alternative? I don't use Google products and Apple maps shows Yelp reviews.
I use yelp exclusively for photos of the menu, food, and display cases (with prices).
Everyone knows all the apps on your phone (1195 points, 3 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43518866
What about:
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.
The website is often user-hostile, in hopes of pushing you to the app.
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!
>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...
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.
This website needs an "upvote harder" button.
Companies aren't just chasing engagement; they want persistent surveillance endpoints in your pocket
It’s unfortunate that progressive web apps didn’t really take off, I hate downloading so many new apps especially for mobile
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?
You can thank Apple for this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14864131
Apps are just faster than websites
I don't see anybody in the comments mentioning it.
They don't have to be with the power of modern phones. It's probably a deliberate trick to push you to use apps.
Even on the web, you have to explicitly request the desktop site using options. Else you get served dark patterns.
App stores put a lot more crap in to make sure apps are not just pulling contacts anymore.
I'd much rather run a (native) app than have yet another browser tab. What I don't want is bloated Electron apps.
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.
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.
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.
‘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’.
Use the open source alternative app instead, companies apps and websites are usually both proprietary.
For me it's ads when using the website with Firefox and unlock I know I won't get ads
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.
I recommend to put the filter list adguard mobile popups, you can install it in unlock
This is why, when I need to use it, I only access Facebook from a web browser.
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.
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.
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?
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
https://darekasan-net.hatenablog.com/entry/2021/04/23/145516
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I advise non-technical and elderly friends to use the app simply because it's so much more secure than browsing the open web.
Secure against which threats?
> 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?
Browser versions tend to burn more power.
Most apps today are just wrappers around the web site anyway.
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.
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
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.
Reddit tries very hard to make you move to their app.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
But it’s better in the app! (not for users, but for the website entity)
100%
I prefer to use web in dekstop but prefer to use app in mobile
I think its just nature of ecosystem
i use spotlight to switch apps. having everything in a browser messes with that.
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.
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
I like the post. But I feel like I am reading a slightly edited Gemini AI response. Just me?
But the experience is better on the app!
[ DOWNLOAD APP NOW ]
[continue with chrome like a scrub]
Continue with firefox like an old (wise) person.
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.
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.
Basically if you arent the major app listed in the article, stop trying
> 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).
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?
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.
True. Responsible and ethical regulators who look out for an uninterested public is probably as good as it would get.
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.
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.
> 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.
"so they can orifice this services"
haha, that was a funny autocorrect (or diction) error, or maybe an even funnier Freudian slip!
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.
The same is true for Android.
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.
Sure, that's possible.
But nobody in that ecosystem deserves the benefit of the doubt.
But knowing the truth gives you power.
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!
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.
Your information is out-of-date. Safari on iPad has served up desktop versions of web pages by default for years now.
What does "desktop class browser" means in practical terms? What is it in the mobile version of Safari that holds you back?