At this point the barrier for me to install an app is pretty high. If you're going to needlessly gate certain functions behind an app that work on a desktop browser (or could work in-browser), then I just won't use those functions. If by extension that degrades the value I get from your site, then I just won't use the site, and I won't be contributing to ADU stats you promote to advertisers.
Every single company has turned this into a situation where I cannot trust your apps with privacy or security, and the risk and hassle isn't worth the install.
If your app is just a webpage that forces me to use an app just so you can spy on me I just won't use your product. I've switched brokers over it, I swapped banks, I stopped shopping at certain stores.
I'm done. The only say I have is in how I spend my money. Those companies won't get any of mine if I can help it.
Twitter is the worst. You go to a page and scroll down and it banners a beater in the app thing and you can’t dismiss it. You either get the app or close the tab. Close the tab.
In the last couple months if you go to their site in a mobile browser (e.g. from search results), after a short scroll down they have this popup demanding you install their app and it completely takes over the screen. I take it as a reminder never to install their app.
I thought I'd be clever and use iOS's "Hide Distracting Items" to get rid of elements like that. But reddit kills the scroll, too, so even after the dickover[0] is gone the page is still non-functional. Nothing says, "we don't want your business" like a non-functional web page, which seems like a bad move unless you're selling food or potable water. 'cuz I get along just fine w/o reddit.
I've been trying to figure out for years how to keep specific bits of Javascript like that from triggering. But so many modern webpages are procedurally generated messes born from frameworks that I can't reliably track down a way to do it. On Reddit for example there's reddit.com, redd.it, redditstatic.com, and cdn-apple.com that are all subdomains that load on the page, and each pull Javascript from dozens of different sources. If you disable Javascript entirely the page won't load and instead nags you to enable it. I don't want to go digging through the page inspector in my dev console just to track down which .js file is causing that, and then figure out how to only stop it from killing the scrollbar. If you can even do that. Some pages are so labyrinthine that you can't.
I'm sure there must be something on https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/wiki/Resources-Library but I've still not really been able to make sense/use of these rules much. At this point blocking certain things in js universally seems kind of impossible now that everything is webpack-chunked with random names or hidden in react context that seems inaccessible.
But I think this css rule covers many simple cases
html[style*="overflow:hidden"], html[style*="overflow: hidden"]
{
overflow: auto !important;
}
Many websites might be broken, but I’d like a toggle to disable listening for scroll events. And no overflow overrides on major and screen-wide elements.
I use various bookmarklets to address this issue. The javascript is easy enough that you can modify it even if you're not a programmer. For example see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43488943
It's the worst on iPhone, because it won't even let me scroll back up to show the button to open the tabs view, I have to switch out of the browser and re-open it to be able to scroll to show.
I think you can just tap the tab bar to bring the controls back. Works for me on whatever iOS this is before “Lucas would be proud with this numbering” 26.
This sounds cool at first but I think I really want vetted, up-to-date, edge-case-covered community extensions. You know, like we already have without arTiFicIAl ‘inteligence’.
LinkedIn too. The first time they show a bottom sheet dialog thing on the website, and if you dismiss it, it scrolls you all the way to the top. The second time it appears, it messes with the page and sometimes automatically closes the tab.
It's a real face palm how LinkedIn squandered the opportunity to be a relatively benign social media product. School kids would have zero interest in it except for that guy who wears a bowtie to high school. And yet they have made it such a swamp full of dark patterns. What's the marginal gain on that? They're the only game in town for the kinds of people who advertise on LinkedIn.
I think the only answer is that all dating sites are full of dark-patterns, and promise to promote your profile if you pay more money.
Linkedin isn't a dating site? Sure it is. I've seen the messages friends receive, and the way people try to sell themselves in the fakest possible ways - it's the only way to judge it these days.
I love it how a normal social network makes a "ding" sound when somebody likes your post but LinkedIn gives you a "ding" for just posting anything at all! Overall it is a place that sends the message that "standards are low here"; don't know how to write? Microsoft Copilot will do it for you, etc.
Idk Google Maps is pretty bad. Clicking on the search bar force opens the App Store, and trying to load photos does the same and straight up lies to you saying it’s only available in the app. But if you scroll down to the second carousel of images it loads fine in web.
Google Maps has a better excuse for wanting to be an app than most since a primary use case on mobile is turn-by-turn navigation. That's possible to do in a web page now, but several features that improve the experience are not available in browsers.
I’m not sure how that’s a justification. If you want to app-wall the turn by turn directions, that would be one thing. The fact that turn-by-turn directions is better on mobile doesn’t rationalize lying about being unable to show photos, and auto opening the App Store three times every time you want to search for an address somewhere
I'm annoyed by a different thing ... It used to be when you searched for something, maps would always be a tab for results. Now it doesn't seem to be anymore...
What you need to do, in the modern Web, is to flip that around.
Anytime I need to search an entity with physical presence, I use Google Maps first. Maps is very good about getting the first result as intended and not showing superfluous non-matches. Maps will not chirp up with AI-generated responses. Maps will take me right to the place I want, and I can see a lot of profile info at-a-glance, and if I wanted their website, then Maps will give me their main website, and nothing else.
Whether it's a corporate HQ, a clinic, a local restaurant, or a geographic area, Maps can come up with a lot of relevant info and I don't waste my time in an enshittified Search. So I'm thankful for the Maps app and its mobile integrations.
The web browser experience in the browser is dramatically superior to that in the app, which doesn't even let you copy and paste media, for instance to text to others. X wants to force you to do that through a link back to them. Nope.
Most Apps are just emasculated and spyware-infested WebApps version of the website, anyway. Why not just use the Browser and get the real experience?
>The web browser experience in the browser is dramatically superior to that in the app, which doesn't even let you copy and paste media, for instance to text to others. X wants to force you to do that through a link back to them. Nope.
An eye-opener like this is the reddit /s/ share links, which I assume come from copying in the app. They're everywhere, and they never open correctly for me unless maybe ironically I open them up in tor to get the actual thread
It's worse than that. 90% of the time I click on a tweet I just get the fucking login page. It seems to happen unless the tweet is from a very popular twitter account, ie one with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers.
Sorry to go off-topic, but you started it...
Disagreeing with Musk politically is OK, but it might be advisable to not let your hatred warp the reality...Easily searchable _facts_:
X remains a large, influential real-time news and conversation platform (~half a billion combined MAUs)
- About 550 million monthly active users across X + Grok combined as of March 2026
- Up from about 520 million in December 2025
- ~ 350 million daily posts; 1.3 billion accounts active in the prior 12 months
He was complaining a lot about bots when he tried to back out of the sale. He's now built a bot into it. I find myself unable to trust his statistics, not only because of his history, but also due to what I hear from people who run advertising campaigns.
Are there any 3rd party estimates of twitter's user base/MAUs?
Considering the number of users, even official government departments, it still has, you would have to be very myopic and have very few interests for this to be true. The fact you're posting on Hacker News at all invalidates it; a huge portion of the type of people who hit the front page here are on Twitter.
The overwhelming majority of folks on twitter (>99.9999999%) are non-nazis. Oh, I don't use Twitter myself but that's because its also overwhelmingly social media spam on steroids.
A small assortment of people that I found interesting/insightful/amusing at some point, plus a few local orgs occasionally announcing things. Why does anything need to be "so important"?
Without wishing to sound trite, what interesting/insightful/amusing people are still on that platform?
Ditto local organisations announcing things: are there any respectable originations (such as local government and sports groups) that still wish to be associated with the cesspool Xitter has become?
I know a guy (not quite close enough to call him a friend, but I know him from non-tech activities) who's member of the w3c, tech researcher, great and interesting speaker, and has tons of interesting insights to share. He talks a lot about open standards and what's wrong with all sorts of tech hypes, and yet the only way to follow him is on Facebook and LinkedIn. Why aren't you on the Fediverse!? Can't I just RSS your blog? Aren't you undermining your message by the way you share it?
> are there any respectable originations that still wish to be associated with the cesspool Xitter has become?
Yes, that was the biggest topic under discussion in the threads about the Nitter C&D. And most of sports is apparently still on there, to the point I hear people talking about how they only use it for sports news.
Honestly, the belief that Twitter has suddenly become a cesspool and everyone left is a (vocal) minority view, and it's only the liberal tech/terminally online left echo chamber chamber that thinks that.
People saying that "The MechaHitler App" is a cesspool are the out of touch ones?
The vast majority of users rely on the algorithm that suppressed posts that Musk doesn't like and promotes insane white supremacist propaganda.
You say that you can avoid that, and I agree. You can use other apps. There are other ways to get the information you're interested in, there are other ways to disseminate information. You don't need to participate in that insanity while pretending not to.
> People saying that "The MechaHitler App" is a cesspool are the out of touch ones?
No, I chose my words carefully. Thinking it suddenly became a cesspool makes you out of touch. Twitter, like all big social media, was a cesspool before Musk bought it, and that hasn't meaningfully changed since. And also like all big social media, it's basically fine and not a cesspool if you put a little effort into curating it. Twitter is actually better than some of the others, even, in my experience (though maybe I've just been more diligent in my curation of it).
There was a minor inflection point where a lot of very politically vocal people left, but for the majority, especially institutions, not much changed.
(And yeah, I'm not denying that Elon puts his hand on the scales of the algorithm. Some of what it pushes is disgusting and obnoxious. But I see disgusting/obnoxious stuff on other platforms too -- and that includes bluesky/mastodon)
Aside from the stupid rename, I haven't noticed it become any more of a cesspool than it was before the takeover, and in some ways it's arguably healthier (less echo-chamber-ey, and community notes can be useful). Again, this is purely talking about desktop web and avoiding the algorithmic feed.
I think you're taking a very particular partisan US view and projecting it onto the rest of the world.
The problem now is everything you see if paid for ad. Even the people you follow if they have paid (blue checkmark) to have their posts raise higher in the feed (which is the same as an ad). It is all ads.
I feel like suing every blue checkmark person for deceptive advertising.
Lots of local LLM people with cool setups and ideas, conspiracy stuff, politics beyond Politico/Atlantic/etc. So mostly stuff that gets one banned on Bluesky and Mastodon that's not on nostr.
There's plenty of funny people on Twitter, folks like Mr. Chau, Brooks Otterlake, Will Sennet to name a few. For news, Joe Weisenthal and David Weigel are two guys that are pretty hip to current goings-on in economics and politics respectively.
For whatever reason, I can't reply to your comment further down. I'd be perfectly happy to follow them on another platform if their tweets were piped elsewhere.
> For whatever reason, I can't reply to your comment further down.
In case you happen to read this, that is (presumably) due to an anti-flamewar feature on HN, which hides the reply button for the first few minutes of posts in deep comment threads. You can either wait to comment, or comment by clicking the "X minutes ago" text next to the commenter's username.
Worse, to sell a tesla, you are the person saying "ok, install the app, then I can transfer ownership to you, conveniently!"
and this is getting normalized with other car manufacturers.
(and it ALL goes back to apple... who started the whole app nonsense, and promoted a look-and-feel that gave tesla a terrible tap and swipe iphone/ipad type ui in a moving car)
You can absolutely buy a Tesla and operate it for the life of the vehicle without an app or even a smartphone. They have key fobs and keycards for this purpose. Go into the store or order online. Everything can be handled by the Tesla store if you are selling the car and need to transfer it to another person.
Of course, having to go to the original store to sell a product second-hand ain't exactly the best user experience either.
(It's fine by me, if that's their design and I don't think they are hiding it or tricking anyone. People should be allowed to buy products that I don't like.)
> that gave tesla a terrible tap and swipe iphone/ipad type ui in a moving car
Not sure why you’re blaming Apple for Tesla’s mistake of thinking a phone UI is appropriate for a car system UI.
Besides, you can “trace it back” to anyone you want really. The problem is not Apple. The problem is people accepting this nonsense from bullshit companies and apps in the first place.
This. I get Frame.work and install Fedora. Use Firefox for everything possible. Once my current phone dies, I'll get a Fair phone, Motorola, or whatever gives me control.
Can't complain if I keep choosing hostile products for some convenience
Especially if they're actively engaged in making it more and more difficult to escape their platforms: Google force-doxxing developers soon, banks & other charlatans not working on GrapheneOS because sEcUrItY, the list goes on.
Most people using this sort of rhetoric probably don't like black kids working in mines and yet they still use devices or cars built off of that produce.
Well said. Are there any mainstream apps "website as app" that do not come with the spying/telemetry/doxing (given on a plate by our two choices, ios/android) that almost always comes with them?
That’s an illusion that died a long time ago, unfortunately.
Just because you’re using their service on a browser doesn’t stop them from harvesting data from your usage, especially if you’re logging in (and if you’re using their services, chances are that you are).
Using browser over app can help, but it doesn’t eliminate it.
Like it or not, we’re the product, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
They're not able to spy on all the other websites I visit or apps I use via the browsers in the way they are by forcing me to install spyware on the spyware machines from Apple and Google.
I’m pretty sure they actually can actually. On an iPhone with a “ask for no tracking” configuration (no IDFA), I’d wager it’s probably even easier on the web than it is in an app.
100% same. So many apps are just a WebView vessel for Crashlytics and Sentry and Dog knows how much more tracking. (My phone is always VPNed into my home network which has DNS-level ad and tracker blocking. This doesn't cover all the bases though.)
Some, like Home Depot, have websites that are terrible and battery-draining enough to make the app nominally useful by comparison.
>Some, like Home Depot, have websites that are terrible and battery-draining enough to make the app nominally useful by comparison.
I don't take this as a signal to install the app. It is a signal to avoid the store. They clearly don't feel like they need to work to gain your business, and instead take it for granted. You can see this indicated by their actions - they clearly feel that it is more profitable to inconvenience you for a token amount of tracking data than to serve your needs. Why continue to use them?
There are a lot of businesses that have a semi-captive hold on a market. Like a recent example was I drove my daughter and I to a stage play, and to pay for street parking I had to install an app, make an account, and add a credit card. A thing that should have been scan the QR code and click one button to mobile pay became a five minute ordeal.
In theory we could have gotten back in the car and looked for parking elsewhere but the curtain was in 30 minutes and who's to say they didn't have a contract with the city that covered all the parking?
Overall a very hostile experience and I was annoyed about how little I felt I had a choice in it.
Just don’t pay. I stopped paying for street parking a long time ago (around the time they started insisting on apps). You get a ticket once and awhile but it all works out.
Mail in a check a few times a year and park whenever you want.
Valid, though I expect this being down the block from the festival theatre, it probably was being actively patrolled. I was a bit shaken by a prominent sign threatening a $400 fine for illegal parking, though having just checked the website for the City of Stratford, it looks like the standard municipal parking ticket is $40 if paid promptly, so the $400 fine was probably specific to parking in the theatre's dropoff zone or fire access or something.
All that say, I think you're probably right... next time instead of using my phone to install and sign up for a parking app, I'll just use it to check what the fine is and wipe hands on pants.
It's definitely a case where I see the value of the Asia-style super apps, where you just attach transactions like this to LINE or Grab or whatever, and everyone knows what to do with it.
The only thing remotely comparable in Toronto might be if Presto (payment app for multiple transit agencies in GTHA) took on parking payment, but the Presto network now supports just tapping a credit card so I don't know how many people would be getting cards or using the app for that either.
Yes, just a plain tap-to-pay on the meter itself (or a nearby kiosk) is the obvious solution. I think doing it on the meter is awkward because then they all need to be online, so you're either dealing with individual M2M cards or some kind of local mesh network, not to mention powering them all. The kiosk is another thing to have to install and maintain and power. And doing a plain tap would have no way of inputting how long you wanted to pay for.
All that to say, I can fully understand how we ended up with "here's a sticker with a number on it, pay on your phone"; it's just, the pay on your phone option should be a one step apple/google pay webpage where you at most have to enter your license plate, and it certainly should not be collecting credit card details within the app.
Ehh maybe. I mean, it was a three hour show and I don't carry coins any more. So that would have been ATM -> go to a store and break a twenty -> put in a few bucks -> remember to go out at intermission and put in more money.
Paying by phone is a step up from that old world; I just want it to be one tap, not a whole sequence that tries to upsell me on a monthly pass or establishing an in-app "parking wallet" or whatever.
Where I live the city commissioned its own mobile app for parking, and all numbered parking spots in the city use that app.
There are private lots that use Honk or Robbins or whatever, but the municipal lots and all parallel parking spaces downtown all use the same single app and the revenue goes to the city.
The city parking app works reasonably well, no ads, it just does one thing. If you leave early you open the app and hit "stop parking" and it only charges you the 37 cents or whatever that you actually consumed. It sends you a push notification when your parking is about to expire. And if you don't like the app for whatever reason, you can still pay with a card at the pay machines on every block. It's unglamorous, but it's fantastic technology.
That seems reasonable. The kiosk is still there to pay with cards or cash directly, but the app/website lets you skip that, avoid printing a slip, maybe buy a pass or something.
The risk is mainly that down the road someone looks at the usage numbers and goes hmm, well the kiosk is only getting used 5% of the time, let's just discontinue supporting it.
The other risk is that they make it cheaper via the app/website, maybe by offering a pass or something. Then that's effectively discrimination against people who don't have a big tech phone.
You not having coins is one half of the problem. We can't pretend we don't tolerate the abuses of the digital money system, while not carrying analog money - it's completely hypocritical.
Avoiding HD is basically impossible here in the US if you own a home. It's either them, Lowe's or, if you're lucky, some third party mom and pop that will have an even shittier website and probably not what youre looking for.
Not OP, but with DNS ad blocking like pi-hole you need to be aware that any "normies" living with you will hate it. DNS blockers silently break any kind of "sponsored links" in search results and a lot of the links in email marketing, and most people use those frequently. They don't take kindly to being told they're doing it wrong and have to change their browsing habits for benefits they don't perceive.
Pi-hole let's you define different groups with different ad blocking policies. Then you can define which dhcp ips go in each group. Works very well. The "normies" won't even notice
I have a Firewalla. They run a WireGuard proxy (sort of like a DERP in Tailscale), so I use that. It actually works more often than Tailscale somehow, and since it's just WG, it works perfectly with my GL.iNet travel hotspots. Firewalla also has ad blocking baked in with less restrictive blacklists, so that's what I use.
Before I got the FW, I used Tailscale and AdGuard Home.
RethinkDNS does everything for me. You're tied to their DNS server if you want to use the in-app interface to make changes to the blocklists in use, but that's not a hard requirement. As a bonus, it also supports actual VPNs (wireguard, http connect, and socks proxy). If you don't care to micro-manage it, trackercontrol is also pretty good. There's other apps as well, like personalDNSfilter.
In this setup you're explaining, the phone is doing all the work though right? Filtering DNS and sending traffic to a wireguard VPN, is all done on the phone.
But it's not tunnelling traffic to a desktop station which then processes that traffic like its own (filters DNS as set up on the desktop, and forwards traffic through the same VPN that is set up on the desktop). Am I getting this right?
My setup is similar: A server at home runs Unbound for recursive DNS, filtered by Hagezi's blacklists. The phone (running GrapheneOS) consumes the DNS service through a Wireguard tunnel. This is 100% self-hosted and does not rely on Tailscale or a third-party DNS service. All the mobile carrier or WiFi hotspot used sees is a single encrypted connection to the server.
I absolutely love this. I thought Tailscale was necessary to establish that kind of wireguard tunnel. Would you have a link to a tutorial or write-up on how you got this set up?
I'm also interested. I use tailscale and there is supposed to be a way to configure it to use my pihole DNS, but there is something in Android that prevents that. I think I have to set a custom DNS on the phone.
What really grinds my gears is when the app is a _broken_ version of the website. I find the app really expects you to be on the happy path in a way the website does not.
Uhaul is a great example of this. The app looks a little better on mobile, but if you don’t make an account and search by reservation ID, all features related to things like extending a reservation time are nonfunctional. I have to go to the mobile site which looks bad and has poor navigation, trying to hijack my session and redirect me to the app, but at least it works.
UHaul is the only app I've ever encountered that is less efficient than talking to a human being behind a counter. I have tried multiple times to pick up a reservation via the app and it has taken so long or failed at some point that I had to walk into the store anyway.
And it wants a photo of my license EVERY GODDAMN TIME. And no I can't store a photo of my license on my phone and just upload it - it has to take a photo directly. And boy does it not like to take photos in bright sunlight. You know, when I'm outside in a parking lot beside a white truck.
That's funny, I've NEVER, not even once, encountered ANY app from any company, in any business, that is easier or more efficient than talking to a human being behind a counter. (So long as the human behind the counter is not also hamstrung by dreadful Indian crapware...)
Seriously, like most people, I have dozens of apps on my phone, forced on me by various needs. The ONLY one that makes anything easier or better is my password manager, which I have to have to safely keep and lookup the logins and passwords for all the damn apps...
I dunno. It's so hard to get a plain ordinary brewed coffee at Dunkin these days, the kind of coffee I used to get there back in the 1980s. On the app I could actually pick one out, in person I'm likely to have a teenager give me something else and then have a nervous breakdown when I point out the one thing I care about on their digital signs: "If we get your order wrong we'll re-do it"
I pretty much exclusively drink black coffee or plain espresso and I’ve yet to encounter any issues getting it.
I have seen lots of complaints and memes to this effect, but never has it been my lived experience. I’ve also never had an issue with politely saying “excuse me, I actually ordered X and I got Y by mistake.” No nervous breakdown at all
I grew up in New Hampshire where it is almost as much as a religion as it in Massachusetts. We had one in Ithaca for a short time when I was in grad school which didn't last very long, I remember sitting there while a schizophrenic woman told me that the mob ran absolutely everything in New York, it was closed a long time, then a Thai restaurant moved in and then, decades later, a Dunkin moved in next door.
Early on I learned that the P&C supermarket made better donuts so when a dunkin opened across the street I wasn't so interested. And of course Dunkin used to be known for good coffee but now you can find good coffee anyhwhere except for a Starbucks and Collegetown Bagels.
The car rental desk at airports is one of the worst customer experiences I've ever seen. It's sometimes worse than what seems possible. It's sometimes bad in ways that don't even make sense.
Their scheduling software is also blatantly broken. I understand the difficulty in monitoring a large distributed fleet, but their software loves to say trucks are unavailable where a quick phone call reveals they can accommodate the exact request.
> What really grinds my gears is when the app is a _broken_ version of the website. I find the app really expects you to be on the happy path in a way the website does not.
I think the average user doesn't know the app is there to circumvent tracking protections in browsers and doesn't realise the app is most likely just a web page in a wrapper.
I was at a car park in UK and you didn't have to install an app, just scan the QR to go to the web page, simple payment. Sadly they then messed it all up by not offering payment through normal services.
The actual reality is that it's impossible to have people go to a web site from a physical ad/offer/thing without using a QR (or paying Google). Google (and friends) managed to hide the URL almost totally, people don't even know that you can go somewhere without searching on google. So the options are: paying google to have your name point to you (an expensive choice depending on the actual name) or use a QR. Weirdly enough people uses QRs this way. I think the restaurants/bars menus after the pandemic only digital via QR opened this way (again, it was trendy also many years ago).
Did domain names stop functioning all of the sudden? Going to somedipshitsbar.com/menu is about as complicated as entering a wifi password at a coffee shop.
You type in and trust random URLs? You just click on random URLs?
No, I don't just go around and scan every random QR code sticker on every single lamp post without any kind of context. But a QR code on the back of a business card with their contact information already nicely digitally formatted? Sure. A friend's QR code of their WiFi credentials on a little plaque in the den? Sure. A QR code at the bar showing the live tap list menu? Sure. A presenter giving the presentation slides by QR code? Sure.
And I pay attention to the URL that QR code is sending me to before I actually decide to go there. The QR code is just so I don't have to type in reallylongannoyingurl.ninja/some-horrific%20path/and?with=junkinit. It shows me the URL and asks "Do you want to go to obviousgoatse.com?" after it scans the code. That's the tap 2 of the two taps.
Consumers don't care. QR is easier for them and owners get analytics plus built in table identified ordering. I brought up the attack vector to a table full of developers back when this was taking off, just shrugs.
They'll get analytics from digital menus regardless of if a QR code is scanned or not. The QR code isn't really making a difference here, other than maybe adding in a specific table ID.
> built in table identified ordering...attack vector
Oh no, they're going to know table 36 ordered the appetizer sampler and a few beers. The horror. They couldn't have possibly known that before.
They're going to get a lot more verifiable information about me when they run my payment card than what they'll glean from a fresh browser tab.
The analytics are very different when you have locality built in. You know exactly how many times your menu was scanned in house.. how long they spent on the page etc has much more meaning. An open website mixes traffic.
I'm not promoting QR codes here. When I can avoid them I do. It's just that the incentives for owners and consumers are better with them and that's the challenge.
> Oh no, they're going to know table 36 ordered the appetizer sampler and a few beers. The horror. They couldn't have possibly known that before
I have no idea what you're on about here. I'm clearly referring to quishing to collect payment info. It's very easy to copy a website and plop a QR code onto a picnic table over the old one.
Do people actually pay through a QR code through a sticker on the table though? I've never seen that nor would I ever do such a thing, because yeah that's obvious.
I will scan a QR code on a check the waiter printed for me and pay through that.
> You know exactly how many times your menu was scanned in house
The vast majority of the time I've seen a QR code stuck to a table its just goosejuicerestaurant.com/menu or https://taplist.io/demo-brewery on the QR code. About the only real time I've seen otherwise has been McDonalds, but they have raised metallic emblems glued to the table, it would be pretty obvious if it was messed with. And I'm not sure if they're even useful outside of the app.
> Do people actually pay through a QR code through a sticker on the table though? I've never seen that nor would I ever do such a thing, because yeah that's obvious.
My company requires everyone in the company to meet our customers in person once a year. Everyone from the CEO on down to tech nerd button pushers like myself.
Our method of telemetry is called "talking to people."
I wouldn't find it productive to talk to 200,000 users in person to determine if it's worth building a native app. I suspect most startups talk to some of their customers in person but I don't know anyone making sweeping product decisions based on that.
Unfortunately consumer preference surveys are all over the place. Most I've seen show they do prefer an app but data isn't exactly open. If you have this data feel free to share.
I'm sure every industry is different. For my current work, our users overwhelmingly want a native app. The majority of traffic is mobile and iOS. Everytime I tell someone about what I do they open up the app store and I have to tell them it's not on there and they ask why.
Anyway, apps have higher monetary conversion. The desire to push users to the app needs no other reason.
Data from your own users is the most useful, but here's some published data. There's plenty more to be found and of course methodology, quality and intention varies.
Indeed, I've no interest in native apps to do something that can be done in a web app and if you don't let me do it in a web app I'll bounce and either find someone who can or do without unless there is a seriously compelling use case (I'm not that dogmatic).
As a result the only native apps I use on my phone are Kindle, Authy and Firefox because I trust Firefox to prevent apps doing a lot of the sketchy shit locally a lot more than I trust an app/the host OS to do so.
A real native app practically always has better performance than web apps. And your data is on your machine. And it can integrate with the operating system. And you can do work offline. And performance saves battery.
True for genuine native apps, but most apps these days are just wrappers around web apps so you get none of the benefits of a true native app while also losing some of the benefits of a web app.
Do they require it though? I've used a few, but it's always been a convenience thing to use the NFC-scanning app; the alternative is just typing in the details manually.
Yes. It offers cryptographic proof that you physically have the passport with you. It also gets a digital copy of the photo and other biometrics held on the NFC chip. From a user point of view it reduces the number of typos entered.
Kazakhstan has an app (QazETA) for its electronic travel authorization, which is required for many passport holders who want to enter under the visa-free regime. (Perhaps it is not strictly required as one could apply for a visa instead.)
Somewhat confusingly, the iOS App Store description [0] of the app says that it is not a government app, while the rest of the internet and Kazakh government sites say that it is the official government app for the purpose of applying for the ETA.
Right. Of course there is some overhead for using WebGL vs native OpenGL calls, but I think that's only noticeable for AAA games. Web audio's extra latency does make it undesirable only for things that require quick response, like realtime synths and maybe DAWs.
Regarding libraries, I wonder if maybe there could be a cacheable package manager system for distributing wasm libraries to webapps.
- anything privacy sensitive
- anything processing intense (using optimized binaries)
- widgets
- camera and audio based features *can* work, but are more finicky (or outright broken on ios)
- local storage (exists in web app, short lifetimes on web site)
- performance/latency sensitive work
- (I'm less familiar, but probably local sensors, like gps and acceleration)
It's a shrinking area: You can get GPS, accelerometer, etc inputs from a web app nowadays. From my own experience the main areas that are tricky are related to automatically finding and connecting to devices: you can do bluetooth at least, but there's things an app can do with wifi and local connection protocols you can't easily do with a web app.
I sign in to video calls using my browser every day. Saying video/audio requires an app beggars belief.
Privacy is the opposite of what you get with an app. Privacy? Really?
Local storage is available to browsers. Office 365 literally functions in a browser with full access to local storage.
Anything processor intensive can be compiled to WASM. This isn't 2005 anymore.
So... widgets?
I can see an argument for games, where you want to pre-install a large amount of resources, and maybe have a better i/o story. Even that is a function of convenience over necessity.
I'd actually prefer that stuff stay in a browser and far away from my local storage on a device I take everywhere. Seems far riskier having it locally.
> anything processing intense
I can play Half-Life 2 in a browser window these days. I can do photo editing and CAD in the browser. I can have entire IDEs in the browser, compilers, non-linear video editors, and more. We're also kind of scoping this to phone apps, they're usually not very processing intense as you quickly hit heat and battery limits.
> camera and audio based features can work, but are more finicky (or outright broken on ios)
Sounds more like an overly restricted OS than anything else.
> local storage (exists in web app, short lifetimes on web site)
Once again, sounds like an overly restricted OS than a browser issue.
> (I'm less familiar, but probably local sensors, like gps and acceleration)
Nope... What you're talking about is not privacy sensitivity, but trust.
For you, you don't trust the provider of the software, so you mean being able to put a barrier around your life, and the delivered software... you think that by running in a browser, you're preventing that code from being connected to anything else... However, anything that happens in that code is directly connected to the provider, whom you don't trust.
I'm referring to the opposite... having something connected to your life, but having a barrier disconnecting it from the outside world... It involves trusting the provider of the software (maybe it's open source), but even if you don't, you can install an app, cut the network, use it locally, then delete it before restoring the network, and you have a guarantee that what you did with it was private... It's possible to build that into a web app, but most websites don't work offline, where most apps (though not all), do work offline... even if it requires an initial network session to establish authorization
My credit card doesn't need me to lock/unlock it, doesn't require I have a phone with me, and certainly doesn't require an app. The last thing I ever would want is for the people in charge of "apps" to have access to my finances. All you are doing is creating another layer where something is allowed to tell you "No". Why would you choose this?
> “Just log into your bank account on the mobile web browser” is a pretty clunky way to see why your card declined.
But that's because the user experience as designed is more hostile or not otherwise accounting for mobile use--right? Or are you saying there is a limit to the web platform's ability to reduce friction?
No one wants to troubleshoot a card decline by having to download and install a 700MB bank app in checkout at the grocery store either. Personally I'll take the browser login every time in that situation!
You mean some kind of perceived personal convenience through the uneven-handed profit of others and at the expense of everyone else.
Trying to check why your card was declined at a checkout—while still standing at said checkout? Troubleshooting "PIN issues" (meaning your bad)? Is everyone still standing behind you at this point? LOL. Exactly.
Theres a gym I work out at, and that I have been going to for nearly a year now, and they have an app you can use to check in, schedule classes, whatever. I don't actually know because I never downloaded the app, I just use my phone number to check in every time I go. I don't want more apps on my phone, not for the gym, not for fast food, maybe my bank and the apps I need to communicate with friends and family, but the majority of it is pointless bloat they push on you for no good reason.
I’m living in peak appification at my gym. It’s one of those 24x7 places and an app is required to unlock the door. I find it amusing that part of the installation process requires me to deny always-on location sharing - why would I need the app to know my location when I’m not at the door?
You should find it insulting that they are likely selling that location data, not even to the highest bidder, but to a data broker that resells that data to anyone that will buy it for any price they'll pay.
Yes, this is standard practice in the app industry. I guarantee every app outside of f-droid that has location access is tracking you 24/7 and selling the log.
If you're going to needlessly gate certain functions behind an app that work on a desktop browser (or could work in-browser), then I just won't use those functions.
Amusingly, I know of a very large hospital chain that has it the other way around.
The app version is the most limited. Mobile web has some more options. But if you want everything, that's desktop only.
Except for scheduled ordering from the coffee shops or placing in-patient meal orders. Those require an app. Except with the meal app, you get more menu choices from the web version.
A particularly worrying trend that keeps spreading is the one of restricting significant amounts of (often non-financial) functionality to the apps only, gated behind your phone passing device integrity checks, in what seems to be a poorly thought out attempt at blocking all forms of scraping and automation (AI or not). The worst offender right now is probably Twitter, which alongside the recent Nitter cease-and-desist now appears to require client integrity on all logged out access.
The flip side is: I have an Audioguide app with reams of fancy of AI features. Even a basic non-AI one is we use GPS in the background to auto-trigger when you approach certain checkpoints on your tour, and we don't want you staring or constantly manually fiddling with the phone when you're on a tour in a neighborhood. This is all stuff just not possible with the web app
I get it, "I'm just traveling, why do I need to download an app which will be useless when I'm done traveling". Just delete it then, takes two steps!
Our reviews between our Web App and iOS app are like 2 sigma apart. Un-intuitively, our web app users are out fiddling with the app 2-3x more than our iOS app.
The issue is that people often forget to uninstall these apps almost all the time. Apps like Delta, Southwest etc. are the perfect candidate for this.
We require something similar to ephemeral apps that exist only for a limited period and automatically get deleted later. If the OS could provide such a feature by default, it would be a blessing.
However, this again contradicts the commercial interests of many companies and services, so Android and iOS
will likely never implement it.
Appclips in iOS are a decent shot at that. But require it to be under 15MB, which is really hard to hit, especially if you use RN, but we'll be dumping RN to make this happen as a next step.
>>The issue is that people often forget to uninstall these apps almost all the time
Fundamentally though, iOS will auto-offload the unused apps for you (you won't get any notifications). For all intents and purposes, it is an ephemeral app already.
When it comes to airline tickets I've been able to check in to a flight through a web page and then add the boarding pass to my Google Wallet without having to install that airline's app before. I'm pretty sure Apple has had some similar kind of a workflow but I wouldn't know for sure.
My android phone will put apps into "deep sleep" and remove all their permissions if I haven't opened it in a month or so. I just toss travel apps into a folder in my launcher and they are there if I need them but become just a consumer of drive space on their own.
Deep sleep is a great option. Archive is a couple steps beyond that, it essentially makes it equal to the app being uninstalled, at the cost of a bit of a disk space.
I am the same way but sadly I think average people seem to be the opposite. I’ve seen people asked to do something on some site and their instinct is to go straight to the App Store and search the site there vs using their web browser.
I also have the assumption that apps are shoddily coded. Whenever I go to the App Store I am looking for a specific app because my assumption is that a random app I find is going to be useless and this goes 10x if the app is promoted with paid advertisement. Personally I wish the app store was like the way Google's home page was in 1999 -- the search functionality is the only thing I care about and they hide it in the middle of a lot of not-so-distracting fluff because I don't have the slightest interest in it.
I used to feel similarly but recently i started defaulting to installing apps more, and it's been way better for my quality of life lol. They just tend to work way better. There are some exceptions though, usually for apps that have ads that make them too annoying to use or that require you to have an account that I don't want to create / don't want to sign in with. E.g. youtube, reddit
Interesting. I limit myself to apps from zapstore.dev and I enjoy playing with new apps. The issue with most commercial / mainstream apps for me is that they're riddled with ads, engagement nonsense, lack quality, often use ugly per default frameworks, force sign-up before use, request all sorts of permissions or come bundled with SDKs I don't trust.
Many HN users probably share this distaste for apps that should be websites, but I don't think this is true for the general population.
In addition to choosing not to use needless apps, some HN users here might have the opportunity for a stronger vote: refuse to (or at very least push back on) develop an app that could be a website.
Spotify comes to mind immediately. Of all things, they wall off your saved music - premium doesn't matter. There is literally no reason to prevent web app users from accessing what is essentially just another playlist, other than to coerce the native app adoption.
Yeah, so many sites bug me to install their app just to read their web page. I'm not going to install every app, so just make the website usable. LinkedIn, Instagram, too many others to list them all. I'd rather not use them at all than install their app.
> At this point the barrier for me to install an app is pretty high.
For me, the bar hasn't moved: I will not install any app that isn't a general purpose, open source utility. If something cannot be done in the browser, I will do without it.
I am the same, the sad reality is that companies don't (really) aim to change our (old folk tech peoples) behavior, they are aiming to make a new normal for the next generation of consumers.
If you intend to have a broad userbase, you must prioritize mobile apps. The general public prefers them. I don't like it, but that's the current landscape.
The problem is that my bank is starting to do this, and for things I actually use. I am considering changing banks because of this, but it's a big step.
If you use Android, honestly try Fdroid. It's great. I mean there are obviously huge gaps, you're not going to find banking apps, and there's going to be less polish in a lot of cases. BUT NONE OF THE APPS ARE EVIL.
Fdroid harbors the paradise we imagined in the early days where we just had these little computers in our pockets and didn't have to worry that everything on them was drowning in ads, scams and surveillance.
So if I do think I might want or need an app I immediately go and check on Fdroid. I can install apps from there without fear. If Fdroid doesn't have what I need, most likely I'm just tapping out. I won't use my phone. I barely use it these days when I'm not on the go anyway.
On Android, especially the most recent versions, the archive functionality for apps has been a lifesaver. It basically packs apps into a specific format, keeps their entire state, and stores it on the disk. This also completely stops the app from running in the background and any other functionality that we don't need.
When we need to access the app again, we just have to restore it, which actually downloads the app and puts the app data back into it. It brings us back to exactly where we were before.
I do this to a lot of my apps these days, and it works very well. When we look at it, apps are nothing but a logged-in state for services that makes it easy to access them. On a typical web browser, you would have to keep logging in every now and then. Apps have a more persistent logged-in session that sometimes lasts forever as well.
In Google's defense, they weren't the ones that championed the "everything must be an app" movement. My memory of the 2010s is that Google (and while they were relevant, Palm) pushed cross-platform web apps, but Apple ran a successful marketing campaign to convince everyone that everything on mobile must be a native app for reasons[1]. So we end up with a walled garden of native apps that must be approved by and pay a tax to the company that makes the OS.
The result is that instead of building one app that works on all platforms, software companies need to build three apps: Web, iOS, and Android. I'm sympathetic to why most software companies (including my own) choose to just build a web app wrapped in a native wrapper. If a company does decide to build a totally separate iOS app, I dunno, it seems reasonable not to build support for every single niche feature that the web app has. I'm not sure I get the outrage here, especially since Google has a long track record of preferring web apps to native.
[1]The "reasons" primarily are that Apple refused to support PWAs, hamstrung mobile Safari, and refused to allow third-party browsers. So while it's true that native apps can offer a better experience than mobile web apps, that's mostly just because Apple artificially restricts web apps.
Oh don't, I remember being at a Google PWA Conference where they showed a world where you walked up to a coffee machine which served you a website over some local Bluetooth beacons, you asked for a coffee and it made it. It was such a hopeful concept looking back.
Even Apple, before caving in, didn't want apps. On the original iPhone there was no SDK, Jobs' "sweet solution" to expanding functionality was web apps pinned to the home screen.
Everyone complained, loudly, and they caved in and launched the app store.
The complaints at the time were entirely valid. The state of web development for mobile was pretty dire. HTML 5 wasn't released until 22 January 2008. People wanted to build apps for iOS in XCode. Nothing else would have been acceptable.
IMHO the web community dug their own grave here. WAP/WML and whatever it was the Japanese phones used was a better starting point than HTML etc as they'd already solved a lot the big problems around mobile developement. They were not perfect and support was terrible but they were much more focused on the problem of mobile app development than the "everything is the same nail" approach of HTML.
Even to this day the UX experience of web apps in HTML/Javascript/CSS is subpar to native apps and I say that as someone who spends their day developing such web apps. You can only put so much lipstick on the pig.
They did more than complain. They made their own hacker SDK. It was a pretty awesome time. For the first few years the black market software world on iOS could do a ton of fun things that official apps couldn’t at all.
So in the future, when you have those three versions you need to build, its starting to make sense to have the mobile version be the full functionality version. Although, I guess it would be crazy to go to a link on your computer and be told it only works on mobile.
> [1]The "reasons" primarily are that Apple refused to support PWAs, hamstrung mobile Safari, and refused to allow third-party browsers. So while it's true that native apps can offer a better experience than mobile web apps, that's mostly just because Apple artificially restricts web apps.
This is disingenuous. Quoting Steve Jobs himself:
> We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
> This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.
Originally about Adobe's Flash, but can apply with no editing (!) to Google Chrome :)
Hence Jobs’ rationale for providing native SDKs for iOS development. It wasn’t about any third-party libraries per se, it was about wanting the native SDKs to be the principal way to deliver experiences on the platform. I’m not entirely sure it was borne out by history, but that was his reasoning at least.
Google Earth is a fantastic computer program (which is being retired June 2027; stupid IMHO); Alphabet, Inc., wants you to instead "use the in-browser version of earth.google.com for a better experience."
When I attempt to load earth.google.com it is total dogshit, just a terrible all-around experience (with glitches and an additional layer of obfuscation between map and browsing: a 3rd-party web browser).
My RTX5070Ti renders everything so beautifully within the Google Earth program – smooth and fully-3D everything.
The only reasoning I can muster is that it's harder to embed advertisements/tracking within the program (compared to the website interface); but when I cannot use the application anymore, I will no longer use Google Earth (entirely) – which is unfortunate because it is a fantastic resource (I have a computer dedicated almost-entirely to Google Earth tasks; it is the only machine in my office that can contact Google servers).
Yep. The pro-"web" faction's dominance inside Google died a long time ago.
When I started working there (2012) L&S were already openly pushing "mobile first" and then later even "mobile only" because they saw it (mobile adoption) as existential threat to advertising revenue and worried that us engineers had a desktop bias that was going to set them back. I worked on several products where the PMs saw the web as a hindrance not a goal. e.g. I worked on Google WiFi and there was never an out-of-box experience or administration story for it for browser. Us SWEs asked for it, said we'd build it even, and the PMs and leadership level said no.
Google makes a browser, but a large part of the company is openly hostile to the open web at this point.
"Never let an abuser take you to a secondary location": It's OK to offer an app, but if a site is pushing, pressuring or forcing you to get one, it's almost certainly because they want to do something abusive that they currently can't.
Installing an app is a matter of trust; trying to push me to install one against my will is the best way to demonstrate that you should not be trusted.
(Interestingly, I've heard a stance from technically well-informed iPhone users that don't see an app install as a large trust decision, because they assume that iOS is actually decent at protecting their privacy and rights in general. I don't know if that's true; on Android it certainly isn't.)
I'm a mobile dev and know the iOS ecosystem quite well, i can assure you that iOS APIs are locked and developers can access very little user data without user consent. What an iOS user is vulnerable to is fingerprinting (not too different than what happens on web tbh) and 0days. But given how valuable iOS 0days are it's unlikely they are used inside large scale generic apps and not for targeted attacks. Also it's unlikely that a random company sits on a 0days and uses it against its users.
So ultimately yes, installing an app on iOS is not a trust decision because the dev are very limited in what they can do. The biggest trust decision is toward Apple that might have private secret APIs allowing them to do things developers cannot. That's a possibility, but overall Apple business has never been around ads, big data and users profiling so the chances are not this high.
Actually there are a lot of information that an app can do by default without asking for any permissions.
You can check this opensource iOS app: https://github.com/mysk-research/loupe
For instance: check if some apps are installed or not, and a lot of small informations about your device that can fingerprint your phone with 100% accuracy (like the exact time where the phone was setup).
I know Loupe, very cool project. Yes, as I said fingerprinting is the biggest risk, but personal data, photos, location, microphones, camera access are locked (which is what concerns most people).
Fingerprinting I would argue it's a problem on all platforms though, web included.
> It's OK to offer an app, but if a site is pushing, pressuring or forcing you to get one, it's almost certainly because they want to do something abusive that they currently can't.
With banks I kind of understand it (for key storage/strong biometric authentication), even though the inability to move it to a new phone is a major pain especially on Android (not sure if some banking apps transfer on iOS, on Android, none do and enrolling an extra fingerprint wipes the keys from most/all existing ones...)
That would be my intuition, but can you elaborate what specifically the app (if not given extra permissions) can do? Assuming the user doesn't change settings, web sites (at least if used semi regularly) can store a persistent cookie, so keeping the user identified is possible with both.
The only thing I can think of is regular background pings to track the user through IP geolocation.
Unpermissioned access to all sensors like battery, acceleration. Hardware IDs. Background pings (as you said). Push notifications. Seeing which other apps are installed (maybe, I think that one got locked down). All kinds of fingerprinting.
Push notifications are the most likely abuse vector but are gated behind a separate permission. I think they locked down installed apps, and fingerprinting isn't really relevant if they can just set a cookie. Acceleration is also available on the web. Not sure about battery, but most apps (aside from Uber that increases the price if they think you're desperate) can't really do anything bad with that. So I don't see much left tbh.
The binary decision into which walled garden you allow yourself to be locked in depends on more than one factor, and you don't really have a choice of "neither" nowadays.
I recently had a perfect storm of non-friendly technology.
I made one purchase on Amazon while connected to a VPN.
Amazon froze my account and demanded proof of identity.
Amazon don't accept an existing photo of primary ID for their preferred ID verification check, it must be a photo taken by a camera on-device, and I don't have a webcam on my desktop PC. Once you select the secondary method, it seems you can't go back to the primary.
My bank can't issue a statement on the mobile app.
My bank, even through the website, can't issue a statement that has the required details (name, credit card details - blanked except for last four digits, and transactions) that includes pending transactions.
I had to manually request a statement from my bank (via a phone call) that included the pending transaction, edit it in an image editing app, submit it to Amazon via their web-site.
None of the apps (bank, Amazon, government ID, camera) had the flexibility to solve the problem.
The root cause was using a VPN to make an online purchase of a $12 piece of hobby electronics.
Not only are apps broken, the current state of the internet (and the random ways companies try to enforce "security") is also broken.
>”Amazon don't accept an existing photo of primary ID for their preferred ID verification check, it must be a photo taken by a camera on-device, and I don't have a webcam on my desktop PC”
In my experience, it was not possible to complete the verification via computer, even with a webcam. The verification site assumes and seems to require that you use a cellphone.
If you think a book is made by the physical medium, you must think everything in paper is a book. The prose in a book has certain content structure, intent, and writing.
So unless a napkin and a receipt are books, what actually makes something a book is its content structure, intent, and writing. Not the paper it's printed on.
My Amazon account is, unfortunately, tied to AWS, Prime, Kindle as well as online shopping. I hate this, and I'm in the process of removing all of my stuff from all of these services.
I noticed a long time ago that Google apps are designed by people who never actually use them. Here's one example. I'm a big fan of reading, and it happened that I stack dozens and dozens of books on my GDrive, so naturally I use mobile Google Drive to download and send those books to the reader app on my iDevices. Finished books are renamed to have an exclamation mark at the beginning of the file name - that puts those books at the start of the list, so it is easier to visually tell apart once I've read them and have not. Obviously, the unstarted books fell off the bottom of the list. And here's the crazy thing - Google has put a big-ass plus button and a "scan document" button right in the bottom-right corner of the app screen, which effectively prevents me from opening the file menu for the last 2 books in the list. Very nice!
I think this is much less about Google developers not using their apps. My experience as a Googler is that people are actually quite good about working on apps they themselves use frequently. "Dogfooding" is a common term around the office.
What I think is going on here is:
* You have some app developers working on an app and caring about its particular user experience.
* Then you have framework UX designers/developers working on new design systems and rolling them out across hundreds of apps.
Those two have limited coordination with each other. So when a new design system like Material drops into every app, unconsidered interactions between the design system and the app's specific UI go sideways and no one is in a good position to notice or address it.
Google certainly takes the blame in this case, but I don't think it's a problem unique to Google either. There is always a tension between wanting a consistent user experience across many products and features and wanting a user experience that makes the most sense for one particular product or feature.
Yes, it's annoying that you can't get to stuff under the plus button. But users really do learn that "oh, the plus button will always be on the bottom right" and that provides real value to them for that to be consistently true across many apps. It makes each app easier to be productive in.
User experience design is hard and I don't think there's a silver bullet, though obviously this case is particularly annoying.
There must be someone working on that app who notices those pain points.
"The turtoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over but it can't, not without your help. But you're not helping."
Why is that?
Perhaps they're incentivised not to care. Perhaps the job is just a paycheque. Perhaps they mirror those around them.
Either way, the end result is the same. They don't care and their users suffer.
Caring is a necessary but not sufficient condition. The people who care must also be in positions to do something about it, which can be difficult in very large organizations that are also trying to make large coordinated systemic changes like moving to a new design system.
They can't even get their icons right last I checked.
For some reason Apple and Google decided every icon has to be a uniform shape (which makes them all bland and harder to distinguish) but their own app icons are still custom shaped wrapped in squircles.
Yep. Google’s apps are the prime example of astonishingly bad UX and terribly nonsensical UI. What’s funnier is that they all somehow manage to feel like both a badly realised rip-off wannabe native iOS app all the while feeling like a complete alien to the entire system.
It’s just BIZARRE. Google apps and services are such a travesty; I detest that people have become so accustomed to them they’re basically the norm. Google sucks. Period.
As a user, I don't want to install an app if I can do it on the web. Most "apps" these days are just web sites wrapped in an app. What's more, they're usually 100% dependent on REST APIs so there's little advantage to having the app anyway.
As a developer and (web) app vendor, I understand that many users still want apps. I just had a user ask when we'd be releasing our app for iOS. I explained that we did have an app and that it would be identical to what we'd release for iOS. Then I explained the maze of submenus she'd have to click through to get the icon on her home screen.
Apple and Google hate the open web so they make it excessively difficult to "install" PWAs and then in some cases, they're less functional than the website itself. More blame lies at the feet of Apple and Google than on web-first vendors who release sub-optimal apps as a delivery workaround.
We're not releasing apps yet precisely because I want us to be focusing on features. Having to target two additional platforms increases the surface area for testing and takes time away from developing features with the potential cost of releasing a "sub-optimal" app.
What’s even worse is intentionally degrading performance for sign-in’s. This is still circumstantial but I’ve been looking into that over the past few weeks.
When switching between google accounts on a random app or game, no issue. Quick code, you’re in. When I switch between accounts on Claude on mobile, I have to sign in, enter the code, screen freezes, I sign in again, can’t verify it’s me, I sign again, wait 30 seconds, I’m in.
I have to sign in three separate times when signing into a single google account in Claude. For every single other app it’s very quick.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Anthropic and google are working together to degrade sign-in performance for multi-account users. I can’t fully prove it yet but I plan to be able to in the week or two.
It is possible that Anthropic (and OpenAI for that matter) actually put out some pretty low quality software.
If you’ve used Claude Code for any length of time you’re familiar with all of the strange rendering bugs, freezes, etc. OpenAI is even worse, their horrific software makes it difficult to _pay_ them, which should be top priority for a company.
It's weird to me how so many people just put up with crappy, low quality software. If you buy a physical good and its defective, you return it, stop buying that brand, maybe even leave a negative review or contact consumer reports, etc. If it does not live up to what was advertised, you go to the FTC.
But when it comes to software, we all just kind of accept that shitty software is the norm and totally fine? Let's start calling it what it is, its defective.
This is a constant argument i have with by business partner. He's always asking me "when are we making an app for our <SaaS>" and I always reply back: "We already have an app! It's just a PWA"
PWA's are freaking awesome for both users and developers. Users don't have to install a massive app and me as a developer can focus on making one platform better rather than 3.
And they are pretty freaking powerful in what you can do. Not to toot my own horn too much but I created an "app"[1] for viewing cities on the other side of the earth from where you're standing. It's got camera, gyro and GPS to determine what you're looking at to the folks I've shown it too, anyone non-technical has been completely fooled and thought it was a proper app.
Imo, you already lost the argument when you have to explain that PWA is the "app". For most users, app is something they install from App Store or Google Play. I get the point of view from developers point of view, but unless the majority of the users are technical people, there's no reason to use PWA these days.
Idk if its not in their best interest or something, but app stores should just allow installing an "app", which is really just a bookmark to website and hides all of the normal browser UI without having to bundle the entire browser with the app.
The point of app stores is that they somehow curate the experience. They can't do that if you just ship a bookmark.
Also I don't think web views in most app stores (namely mobile stores) ship an entire browser. As a matter of fact you're literally not allowed to ship browsers in iOS and that's a huge slice of the market on its own.
Though you’re limiting your growth potential here by letting your ideology get in the way. Mobile platform users when surveyed almost always overwhelmingly prefer native apps and it’s not even close.
I anticipate if you start getting public feature requests a native app will be at the top of the list.
I agree, presentation is a big issue with PWA's since you have to know how to add it vs just searching in the app store. I'm sure were going to get a native app eventually, though customers have not asked for one yet and seem to be pretty happy with the PWA.
It would be amazing if everyone would boycott the app stores as much as possible and normalize PWAs. People would learn if they got common enough. But alas, I doubt this will happen.
The author said it perself, "the greatest minds of our generation" working at Google, so those jagged edges are surely by design, and it's the rational most efficient solution in a economy of attention where the line between the product and the user is blurred.
In some cases it's just because the userbase using the web on their phone instead of the app is incredibly small and it's not worth funding feature parity. It can be difficult to distinguish this case from more hostile takes like reddit and Twitter.
Reddit has started putting up a paywall of sorts to block mobile web users, saying that instead, users should install the app. old.reddit.com remains as an ugly workaround.
The whole thing is nuts:
1. All of reddit's content is UGC. They write literally nothing themselves. There's a strong argument that everything there written by unpaid users should be considered a public good.
2. Tech companies are now, ostensibly, aware of value of having users who engage intentionally instead of compulsively. Mobile apps, with their notifications etc., encourage compulsion. Websites less so.
It will be an interesting reckoning when the polity wakes up to the idea that as social media companies don't pay for the content, they should have no right to restrict access to it. LLMs likewise wouldn't work at all without the petabytes of data they either got for free from users or purloined, and so the argument for their weights being public goods is similar.
old.reddit was the only tolerable interface but it is now login-walled too. God forbid you post any comments that deviate even slightly from the Reddit consensus or you will soon find yourself IP-blocked. That’s barely an exaggeration.
I recently decided to use my google calendar to track my mood, as part of my CBT therapy.
What baffles me is that, there's no way in the web app to assign a default calendar for new events. When I create a new event on the web, I have to scroll through all the calendars that I have and choose the one that I want every time. Meanwhile, in the mobile app, I can simply tap on a new block, the event window appears, and the selected calendar defaults to what I used for my last added event.
I think the bigger issue there is that you're trusting Google with your health data. Surely there's an offline calendar app that could help you track it just as well. Anyway, I hope you benefit from the therapy regardless of how you decide to track it.
It's not irrational if you know that the insurance company has mispriced your policy, and filing a claim won't be more trouble than it's worth.
Getting a contents policy in a safe neighborhood where you know that there's little risk is likely not a good deal. Getting a contents policy when you've learned that your neighbors are getting into hard drugs is probably a good deal.
Paying $19/mo for third-party full coverage + theft on your $1,000 mobile phone is probably not a good deal even if you know you are high risk, for the simple reason that at $19, they game must be that they will find any reason to refuse to pay, and will give you a poorly refurbished phone for your troubles if you make them honor the insurance.
I don't mind apps, even apps that are basically just browsers showing a web site.
The biggest reason is that apps, at least on iOS, just behaves better. It might be that the auth persists longer or that there are notifications or whatever.
It's not without issues obviously. Most of the time the first thing I have to do is update the damn app just to order a burger or park my car or whatever it is I'm using it for. And it's dumb that we need to have a 150 meg download (per update...) for what's basically a bookmark.
But still, the better integration with my phone's native stuff like keychain etc usually means I'm more satisfied after using an app to do something, than using the _exact same web page_ in my mobile browser.
> Most of the time the first thing I have to do is update the damn app just to order a burger or park my car or whatever it is I'm using it for
It's interesting how different things bother people in different ways. Because when this happens to me, I want to throw my phone into the sun. It's a viscerally irritating experience that sticks with me for the rest of the day.
I have my essentials (browser, email, Signal) of course. But besides that, nearly all my apps fit into one of the following 3 categories: transit (airlines, rideshare, city bikes), finance (banks, brokerage), and...
baseball. MLB has put a shocking amount of effort into their apps. The ticketing experience is genuinely really good, so much better than any ticketmaster trash. All apps are trash, unless you're a baseball fan, in which case all but 2 apps are trash. I guess.
Unfortunately it's the norm in large companies to never polish anything. Google has gotten worse and worse at this. But Microsoft is king. They bring a team together to build a new thing and then as soon as they can check that feature box on their sales deck they move that team off onto something else. Loop is a good example of this. Microsoft started building a Notion competitor and then just stopped. The Loop component model got pulled into Copilot and integrated everywhere. But you still cannot move a document between workspaces - one of the most basic pieces of user functionality ever.
I also look at Application Insights / Azure Monitor w/ their OTel SDK, Teams, SharePoint, Visio, <insert MS product here>. Basic functionality is missing and requests are left open for years or decades. Nothing is ever polished. Nothing is ever finished. Everything is good-enough.
Then you have other sites/companies that go the opposite way: having functionality that is App-only.
As an extreme example: my health insurance provider in Spain (Alan) is app-only. They don’t even have a website one can use. It is maddening for those of us who always prefer desktop over mobile.
When I got a new phone about a year ago, I decided that I wouldn't be installing any traditional social media apps (Tusky doesn't count) and that I'd use the web when "necessary". This has been a very successful experiment and resulted in me looking at Instagram _maybe_ once per week.
Most YouTubers still have sponsor sections on their videos so you probably do see some ads. Also why not pay for YouTube premium to remove the ads while still supporting the creators?
If you want to support the creators is through affiliate marketing by buying whatever they're selling, or by subscribing to them on Patreon – they earn next to nothing from YouTube.
They artificially lock it down, because the app will give them more data to collect than the web app plus a larger surface to annoy the user with notifications, widgets, and other advertisement.
When I rejoined X at the start of this year I consciously decided not to install the app on my phone. It's addicting enough in the web browser on my laptop.
So I have zero social media networks on my phone and, looking at everyone around me who does, I'm very pleased with this decision.
X won't even let me register an account without downloading the stupid app. Then I download it and it just says something isn't right and refuses to let me register the account anyway. Probably thinks I'm a bot.
It's probably better this way. Hopefully bots will kill off social media before even more countries decide to ban it.
I just finished making a social application (for skateboarding) with the express intent of making it fully featured/pleasant to use on mobile simply as web app, without login or installation.
Web is such a powerful platform and so many people still treat their web applications like they're just interactive documents. I think the most bothersome thing on mobile web is if an application has shifting framing ("chrome") when you pan around, like you're looking at a PDF.
Let me know, but I developed it almost entirely focused on iPhone SE as a target to give myself the most claustrophobic possible experience, and I think that helped guide a lot of the decisions.
I found that installing facebook dot com to my Home Screen on iOS works acceptably. Lets me check in on things every now and then and still be confident they’re very limited in what they can track.
Messenger doesn’t work but luckily I rarely if ever use it.
The thing is that mobile browsers fill fight you tooth and nail against providing a good experience to your users.
There is the obvious stuff like lots of API not being available, but the bigger issue to me is how many common convenient UI patterns that users accustomed to native apps expect are really painful if not impossible to provide, e.g. there is no reliable way to react to the keyboard opening, or how scrolling will expand and shrink the browser UI.
CSS Houdini being abandoned also makes it really hard to properly do really custom UI.
I really wish there was platform with the distribution and security model of the web that was designed for apps from the ground up.
I've had an issue where, when clicking a "locations" link on a web site, Google Maps "permanently" added a bunch of locations to my map. This was quite unexpected on my part.
(I think it was for a chain or churches or a similar civic organization)
IE, I think someone made a group of locations in Google Maps, and then for the "Locations" link on their website, just linked to the group of locations in Google Maps. In the browser, this works fine, but on mobile, Google Maps just imports the link to my account without asking.
I don't like paying $1K for a phone. My current one was CAD$140 at Costco three years ago. It has 32GB of built-in storage which is always 90% full regardless how diligent I am at moving stuff to the SD card, and it has 3GB RAM which was fine three years ago, but is now insufficient to run certain apps at all. Without anything else (that you have control over!) running, start the app, immediately killed due to out of memory. These are apps which were snappy and reliable a few (forced) updates ago. No new features, maybe some UI restyle, but now too bloated to use.
Time to upgrade to the latest cheapy? Well, thanks AI boom, there aren't really any cheapies any more. And even $600+ phones now come with... drum roll... 5GB of RAM. OK, which maybe covers me for another two years of bloat until I'm right back where I started.
Yes, it's possible to stay ahead of the bloat if you pay $1.5K+ for your phone and upgrade somewhat regularly. A colleague has hundreds of apps on his phone and they all work.
Me, I use a desktop browser. Except for certain things that are only available as an app. The xda-developers types say no problem, just unlock and root the d*mn thing and then you can run debloating tools and if you jump through all the right hoops the banking app will still work. Bleech.
I have moved out of the U.S. into South America and one of the nice side-effects of this is that apps from local companies are well optimized here. It's not that there's an extreme level of competency or an optimizing culture. It's simpler.
People have cheaper phones here, so devs are naturally more exposed to low end hardware.
It's been awesome for me! I have a fairphone 4 which isn't top of the line at all anymore but the apps work MUCH better here on average than when I was in the US. Websites also load quicker too for similar reasons.
I use LineageOS with MicroG and decided probably 5 years ago to just use PWAs instead of apps for any online service and grab whatever other utilities I might need from Obtanium or F-Droid. Also the experience on my Thinkphone is the exact same as it was on my Pixel XL 2.
I know not everyone can do this, and some PWAs are downright terrible if they work at all, but for my usecase it has been great.
The most painful part of this is that, at a certain point in mobile app development, many of them switched to using web frameworks instead of native. We're literally figuratively building web apps to replace native apps that replaced web apps, and hoping to performance optimize them back into near-native.
IDK to me this is the opposite of the usual problem, which is that some features are only available in the app. I will happily use the desktop browser.
On mobile, Googling 'radio 4 schedule' is the quickest way, and the only negative bit about the entire experience is the popup that tells me 'it's better in the app'.
It's not. Not by any metric.
My search and opening a webpage takes a second or two. Opening the app takes several seconds, then navigating to the Radio 4 page and scrolling down the schedule takes several more.
I submitted a bug report on the topic and they basically told me "we hear you but shush and use the app".
The anecdote in the article is at odds with the title.
* In the anecdote, the problem is that the web version works better and the app is missing functionality.
* The title pays reference to an annoying observation about many products where the web version lacks functionality the app has.
Both are frustrating. If a company is going to bother to have both an app and a website, users deserve an experience where both are fully featured. It should be an professional embarrassment for a company to have to route users from the app to the site or vice versa because one is half-baked.
Have some God-damned professional pride and do it right.
Ryan Air just introduced the super-annoying requirements of needing the app to download your boarding pass (which of course they could just provide from the website).
I think they do it to be able to send you notifications and sell you more flights, but I don't understand why they need to be so anti-user. I try to NOT fly Ryan Air unless there is no other airline available. I'd rather pay twice as much than support their poor and sometimes borderline-criminal business practices.
I sell stuff ocassionaly on a "local" platform called MercadoLibre (like, I could afford a new handlebar for my bicycle so I could sell there the old one). Mercadolibre kind of wants to be the argentinian Amazon, even lobbying in the argentinian government so they will ban similar platforms from other countries. With time, MercadoLibre has become incredibly hostile and greedy for us small sellers, while favoring corpos.
They charge you 25% for each sale you do via their platform, but the latest thing they did was to force you to "identify" you are you via a website where they track your face features and scan your ID "because of security". Yeah, that sounds good, so I did that in 2021.
They asked this again last year because of reasons. But this time they won't let you use a regular web browser: they forced you to do this via their app. No matter how much you try, it will always fail citing "compatibility issues" or "errors". I tried to complain but their customer support is incredibly shitty, if you even manage how to find to contact them.
But oh surprise, their "app" is just a web wrapper.
I bet they had to change identity verification providers so that's why you have to re-validate again.
It's a shame there's no alternative to Meli. I'm shopping around for a macbook and I would much rather have a marketplace with verified identities and profiles than the shady whatsapp groups and contacts I'm finding.
Most companies mostly want app access because you get a bunch of APIs with which to annoy users with marketing notifications, tracking, and url handling.
Google Dev are incompetent it seems.
Had "highlights" for June and July in photos. Guess what is disabled in my account?
I had to set two dates explicitly: one in the early past and one in the distant future -- now I seems to work.
And the new icons of their apps look like a kindergarden project.
Can't they just leave the design alone, or ask the user? Seems impossible.
On an iPad, the web version is almost always objectively better.
Since about 2018 or so, most apps have failed to properly support rotating the device. When you load the same service in a web browser, you gain that feature back. Facebook is a big example.
Other apps actually have MORE functionality in the browser than their app version. This is why PWAs are now much more preferable than before.
When I was job hunting earlier this year, LinkedIn on my phone told me to install the app. Sure, why not? So I did. It refused to authenticate and never worked. One good point is that at least the mobile web version didn't lock me out with an impassable overlay like some websites are starting to do.
If the barrier to entry is "own a smartphone", there will inevitably be people who will be excluded. Lots of fantastic reasons to unplug in 2026, year of our plague. Even if you don't go so far, conservative allowances for data collection are one of the few digital freedoms left.
I never know unless somebody thinks I was(n't) being sarcastic or glib or something. I try to be straight forward because fundamentally, I don't like the "obligation to be online" for how much I personally enjoy tech. C'est la vie!
These days, applications (whether they're web, mobile, or desktop) with absurd shortcomings in terms of UI/UX are a daily occurrence, yet most people seem to have become incapable of noticing, or at least of giving sensible feedback on the matter.
Obviously, the bulk of it is noticeable in notoriously crapware software like management systems, but it's increasingly emerging just about everywhere.
I wonder how long it will take to understand even just this small slice of the problem, without even getting into "anything apps" and the need to return to the OS as a single integrated application/framework with end-user programming—a trend of which we're only seeing a few hints.
The Google Calendar app has a long standing bug where the search view will not show the latest calendar entries unless you manually scroll to the bottom and hold the scroll view there. It’s been like this for years despite repeated bug reports!
If your app can be implemented in React Native with no developer pain, it should just be a website.
Native is a much better experience than mobile websites when you actually use the features and power of these fairly advanced computers we carry around in our pockets.
On the other hand, the existence of alternative implementations in the form of mobile apps can on occasion be a saving grace when web apps are halfassed the other way. It's so frustrating when a poorly made web app that e.g. eats way too much memory, keeps cores spinning for no reason, chokes its tab process, doesn't handle history correctly, etc is the only option available and you have no choice but to live with it.
It makes me wish it didn't become the norm to lock down site/service APIs are reserve them for private use only so crappy web apps would have to compete with superior third party alternatives.
> To subscribe to a new calendar, you must use a computer web browser. You can't subscribe to a calendar in the Google Calendar app for Android, iPhone, or iPad.
Isn't this likely because Google Calendar was abused a lot in phishing? e.g. fake "CLICK TO PROCEED" links as ads -> redirected to Google Calendar named "CLICK [+] SIGN TO CONTINUE" -> "URGENT: re-enter your credit card number at https://scam.example/buy-us-bitcoin" fake schedules recurring every x minutes etc.
So I love good old fashioned desktop-oriented websites, and the most complex thing I do on my phone is Google Maps... but I also recognize this is not true of the general population.
Almost no one else except the PC gamers I know really like using desktop (or laptop) computers. Most people love being able to sit on the couch and use apps on their phone. Its not like massive portions of the population were loving their desktops until smartphones arrived and they transitioned, no - smartphones are what helped the internet revolution really inseminate into the general population.
Something I didn’t see in the comments is highlighting the actual, very real, fact that the user was incensed by the app.
This is one instance, with one vendor, but our day is made up of thousands of interactions across multiple vendors. And all big (major) vendors seem to have these kinds of issues.
That's a problem because these interactions add up. To the point where I’ve personally been accused of “[liking] being angry”
I’m not sure what the answer is. But for me, I’ve been trying to find and use tools that don’t piss me off, paid or otherwise. So for mail and calendar, for example, I tried out https://www.hey.com/ and it not only does it not piss me off, but I like it for how I use calendar and mail.
I don’t know if anyone here has read Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich, but the book comes to mind every time I run into these kinds of frustrating interactions.
It’s a shame the web was so slow to adapt to this new mobile world. When it all started things like offline capabilities were very difficult to do on the web and native development felt necessary. These days the web can actually do a lot… but it’s too late. People expect to find something in the App Store, pinning a web site to their Home Screen is just not something they know they can do. So a lot of people waste an enormous amount of money on three different implementations for, often, simple CRUD operations.
That's not it. It's Apple. They are crippling the web on purpose.
We can't even have haptic vibration on Safari. And when we did for a little while earlier this year, it was because of a "bug" that that they promptly fixed.
Apple is not interested in making with apps as seamless and integrated as native because: money.
I agree that Apple has been awful here. But there are countries deeply dominated by Android that still heavily use apps when they could be using PWAs. I don’t mean to let Apple off the hook but I also don’t think they’re the only ones to blame.
As an iPhone user: good. There is no good that can come from some dipshit website product manager being able to make my phone vibrate on a website. None at all.
Is there any good that can come from a dipshit mobile product manager being able to make your phone vibrate on an app? Is there actually a meaningful difference?
I believe it is more nefarious than that. The web strived for mobile native parity but web standards committees are mostly headed by delegates of companies like google and apple; the same companies that have an interest in crippling native web features to push users to their app stores, where they can extract money via fees. PWAs on iOS are a good example of how this kind of gate-keeping looks like
I miss the mobile-versions of websites for low-bandwidth connections (the ones that started with "m."). They were lightning fast, even on slow networks, and were laser-focused on top-of-funnel user activities. Facebook's implementation was extremely solid (when I used them). Messaging worked as well until they gated that behind full Facebook.
I’m not sure one can say Apple is intentionally making it difficult to install a web app to the Home Screen because they haven’t implemented a draft proposal to the w3c working group that proposes a spec only chrome has implemented and no other browser except chrome and its derivatives supports.
“Add to Home Screen” living on the share menu is as insane as “Find on Page” living there. Which both do. And I don’t think there’s a master plan behind “find on page” being tucked away bafflingly on the share button.
They only removed it completely in a jurisdiction where they were being told that they had to open all of their internal APIs around web applications to all comers if they were going to use those APIs in their own applications. They claimed (whether you believe them or not) that doing so would open risks they didn’t want to take and so they removed it in that jurisdiction.
If this was some grand plan to stop the few hundred PWAs out there entirely, one would think they would have removed the PWA functionality in other less hostile jurisdictions where no law makers were looking to force a change. I could absolutely believe that the security risks were overblown, but if the assertion is Apple is trying to suppress PWAs, they’re doing a pretty bad job of it given they could just turn it off in the US and no one would blink an eye.
Both of you are conflating conspiracy with incentives. They have no incentive to promote a distribution model outside of the confines of the app store where they make all their money.
Sure I agree they have no incentive to promote them. But your claim wasn’t that they don’t promote them. You claimed that they’re making them exceedingly difficult to install. Apparently because they put the command for that in a consistent menu position for decades and removing the functionality temporarily in a single jurisdiction.
If they wanted to make it “exceedingly difficult” they could be disabling it in all jurisdictions, or hide it behind layers of developer mode dialogs and warnings. They could remove the instructions for how to do so from the on device help. They could require you to re-pin it every 3 days like they do for self loaded apps. They could stop adding support for newer PWA APIs as new ones get standardized and they could deprecate and remove APIs that already exist. We all know Apple isn’t precious about backwards compatibility.
If the goal is to make using a PWA “exceedingly difficult” Apple is failing miserably despite being very successful at making side-loading apps “exceedingly difficult”
But sure call me crazy for thinking it's user hostile to put install / add to home 5 taps deep into the menu. That has nothing to do with supporting a 2015 web API. They would go on to add smart app banners to promote native app store apps instead.
I apologize, it does seem like I misread and added the qualifier, you just claimed they made it “difficult”. My mistake.
But I still disagree that it is “difficult” or “user hostile” to put the command to add a web app to your Home Screen 3 (not 5) taps away. Menu -> submenu -> command is not user hostile or difficult. The command is in the same place as all the other “do something with this page” commands. It’s not hidden behind toggles, it’s not buried in submenus away from other similar actions, it’s not in its own menu or an activity you have to leave safari for and initiate from the Home Screen instead. It takes just as many taps to change to a specific tab as it does to save a PWA
Have you ever tried communicating this to consumers of a web app? Our android customers get a nice little install popup or a push of a button.. it's pretty seamless. With TWA it's also trivial to put it on the play store.
It’s intuitive in as much as anything on smart phones is, because the share menu is the OS mechanism for sending data from any iOS app to somewhere else. You use the same menu to save a file to Dropbox, put a photo into a note, add a bookmark etc. Effectively if you want to take something that lives in an app and have it live somewhere else, you use the share menu.
Did your colleague even know that such a thing was possible at all, because it’s been in the share menu pretty much since day one. Sure it could be put somewhere else but it’s also been in a consistent spot for generations of iPhones, and the built in help app/manual will tell you how to do it if you don’t know how. If you want to argue the menu should be renamed, you won’t get any argument from me. But a poorly
named menu is bad for initial discovery, but it does nothing to make the actual process any more difficult.
The claim wasn’t that Apple put it in a poorly named menu, or that the share menu is bad UX in general. The claim was that iOS users can’t pin web apps because Apple made it “exceedingly difficult” to do so. A 3 click navigation through the standard menus that has been consistent for multiple generations and is documented in the on-device help doesn’t qualify as “exceedingly difficult”
I thought this was going to be about Yelp. Yelp.com from a phone-sized browser constantly screams "It's better on the app!". That's because the browser interface has been made very bad, with popups and other screen-obscuring junk using up much of the small screen.
(Yelp is mostly useless now, because they're not effectively purging dead businesses. About a third of listings in popular categories seem to be dead.)
And this is why I usually say, I will look at it when I am in front of my computer again for most things, side from a free does where I mainly am reading.
It made even sadder by the fact that often the "app" is more or less just webview.
More and more I'm giving up on apps, and online self-servicing as the structures and scope of what either one can do is increasing narrowing. It's much much easier to just call these days (fortunately AI answering the phone is still not prevalent). Customer service will obviously inform you that "You can just our self-service solutions in the future", even if you literately just called in because you can't due to inflexibility and options you don't understand.
Also "you can manage it from your phone" is not the sales pitch it once was, because it's no longer the entire truth. You can in fact ONLY manage it from your phone. If whatever you're selling requires an app, chances are that I'm not buying and if it's a service, I will seek out your store or staff and make them do it for me.
My ISP removed the ability to manage your network with a browser. Not over the cloud -- they stripped the admin panel from their firmware and require you to use the app. The app is filled with dark patterns that try to get you to use their firewall and their tracking and enable their public Wi-Fi hotspot and not do port forwarding or DNS configuration or separate SSIDs or etc. Also, every few weeks it decides it's outdated and blocks you from doing anything until you update from the app store. Also, every time you open it there's an annoying loading screen with an advertisement. And all throughout the app, everywhere you go there are advertisements for tertiary purchases and offers. Like, yeah, I get that the app needs to exist for these fancy special stupid animations of the router with the waves coming off of it, yeah I see the wifi coming off of the router with all the buttons around it, showing all the things I can do with it, and then I scroll right past that and have to go down to the equipment details and then go into the advanced settings to even configure any of the stuff I actually want to configure about my network ever. And yeah, I know it's the super duper app with all the special services, I know I can get superduper mobile phone line and also TV and cable and also free Peacock streaming service! with the purchase of whatever, and also, did I know that fiber speeds are now being offered but not in my area? Did I know that other areas benefit from up to 2 gigabit speeds?! I better check now to see if my area qualifies! (It doesn't, I made an FCC complaint about it and they responded to tell me it might happen eventually and it hasn't happened)
Literally bought new networking gear from Ubiquiti because of this crap, and could not be happier with it. Only problem is the ISP literally blocks any modem that's their stupid combo router modem Internet-of-Shit cloud-connected hardware-as-a-service garbage. Modem works for a few hours, then the line goes suddenly dead (even to their own router) until I've called them and gotten told that my modem is faulty even though it was working fine until they cut the line, etc. so I have to deal with still having their router in front of my own gear
Oh I'm so glad it works this way round too. Kinda sick of the web being ruined by http pages that tell you to download a binary. Is anyone bothering trying to narrow that gap between native and web on phones so we can resume the process we were undertaking back in 2010 before smartphones re-promoted binary applications for whatever reason?
Yes, the AllTrails app does this. You can't send a route to your Garmin watch or whatever in the app, you must do it in the browser version.
And since having the app installed at all sort of hijacks AllTrails links, you really don't even want it installed at all. Yet you constantly are told to install the app...drives me up the wall.
Reddit is the worst. Their app-transition code is 10+ years old and still full of recursive loops. 30% of the time i drop into the App Store even when i have the app installed. 75% of the time I lose navigation. And there’s no “remember this” button.
At least Google makes an attempt at usability. It’s not like the product team has a choice.
Gmail mobile app doesn't let me search in the "trash" or "spam" folder.
Opening Gmail in mobile browser does not work too.
I have to open it in the browser - then "request mobile website" - then try to search there - aaaahnd it still reset to the mobile version ever other request.
I don’t understand all the technical challenges, but I sure hope we can close the gap between what we can do in the browser versus an app. What apps do is gate communities and gate information and gate people and this is the opposite of an open Internet that should be a benefit to humanity.
To me the most common issue for apps is that they don't have tabs. Damn we solved this issue in IE7 and I'm still limited to "one window" on my supercomputer-level pocket PC. Inconceivable. I'll keep using the app in the browser.
What really gets me is when an app highjacks a link to the site, and then doesn't know what to do with it, when just opening the link in the browser would have been perfectly functional. Email unsubscribe links are a particularly annoying example of this.
A lot are saying that they prefer websites over apps but at least apps can't force you to upgrade to the latest version while a website will always serve you the latest version. Ofc that doesn't address all the downsides of an app
The simplest barrier to using an app for me is that most do not implement tabs. Tabs are extremely useful! Even when the app interface may be better than the web interface, I will usually find myself opting for web specifically for this reason.
Hah. I was trying to buy something on the BestBuy website. I’m not sure what kinda of bitcoin miner they’re running on that site, but it repeatedly manages to crash the tab as I was trying to browse. I had to eventually just download the app.
I take "It works better in the app" as confirmation that the app steals your data, tracks your location, etc. I wasn't going to run an 'app' in any case, but pushing confirms the decision.
My UK based bank ringfences some processes behind the app, and some behind the website. Setting up an automatic direct debit? Browser. Want to approve a one off payment? App. Absolute nonsense.
An app is a way to bypass the privacy protections that a browser might layer on top, and gather yet more data about you, show ads, etc, etc. That is the real motivation.
Calendar on Android already talks to the network...the same URL only subscribes from desktop.
So is that missing webcal/text/calendar handoff, or a Play-release hole?
The solution is for companies to stop half-assing multiple things, and instead whole ass one thing.
It's impossible though. There actually isn't a single company alive that's capable of doing something like that, because it would require a decision maker to say "instead of these two things I want just one thing" and the second that happens it will be the end of the world.
Hot take but I think the entire concept of a "web app" needs to die. My web browser does not need access to my GPU, OpenGL/Vulkan, USB, MIDI, HID, <insert whatever other weird invocation of Cthulhu that exists here>. All of those are things a native app needs, not a website. IMO if you need that kind of access and your instinct is to do it as a "web app" your doing it wrong. Same thing, I would argue, for things even like WebAudio or WebSpeech. At this point my web browser is so complicated that it might as well be a mini-OS of it's own.
Like, I think that the instinct to make everything a web app is what partially leads to things like what this article complains about. Well, besides laziness, of course.
For many of these things we're not talking about a web app though. It's frequently just a form, disguised as something more. I agree that the browser should be stripped back, but none of those things prevent my banks website from allowing me to do a payment.
E.g. your fitness tracking app or your parking app, they don't need any of those features. They can work perfectly fine as simply forms, they aren't "apps".
I know, but my point was that this should just not be a thing. Our web browsers have become way too complicated and then you get outcomes like what tfa talks about.
I largely disagree. The web, and the browser by extension, is a multimedia platform. Thats text, images, videos, animations, interactivity, video calls, etc.
At the very least, I disagree about GPUs, OpenGL/Vulcan, and various audio and video related things.
> The web, and the browser by extension, is a multimedia platform.
Says who exactly though? The big companies and web devs who think your browser needs raw access to HIDs? Why exactly does a web browser need this level of access when a native application is far superior (and doesn't need to deal with the limitations of a web browser)? All this does is require that browsers be more and more complicated and be more and more invasive so that we can pretend that the web browser is our operating system. That in turn makes it harder and harder for web browsers to even be implemented in the first place.
I charitably assume if something can't be been done on a mobile it is because someone was granted an "on a phone" patent or clicking that button on a phone somehow will entitle Apple to 30% of my revenue stream in perpetuity.
I usually don't attribute it to malice or incompetence from hypothetical devs, instead I blame malice or incompetence from hypothetical lawyers.
I recently got a Seattle ultrasonics knife, and it was mentioned in the email associated with my purchase it might need a software update
I rolled my eyes and braced for the inevitable pretty but buggy and slow app.
It didn't use an app. It used the Bluetooth functionality built into chrome and it's derivatives to talk to the knife, update it, and perform a calibration
I've only ever used the Bluetooth and serial for flashing esp32s and similar before. It was a wonderful experience
Yeah, we have one, and same thing. Bluetooth to a web URL on the phone and boom, new sharpening angle calibrator just works! Love not having to download a separate app.
a native app's job isn't to parallel the web app's feature set. a native app's job is to get you to accidentally opt in to all sorts of invasive surveillance and allow for a constant stream of attempts to grab your attention.
> and think you're too thick to use your browser's bookmarks feature
To be fair, bookmarking is easy but browsing and locating a bookmarked URL is far from easy. To bookmark in chrome on desktop requires pressing an obvious star button on the right of the address bar (it's always there, so easy to locate). But browsing/locating a bookmark requires clicking on the vertical ellipses on the right-most of the browser, finding 'Bookmarks and lists' amongst a lot of wordy options, then the fun starts: you can scroll bookmarks but cannot even see the full bookmark (only the first 40 characters and favicon) and they're not even in alphabetical order. If you have several hundred, like I do, that's a lot of work, and consequently, I approximately never do it. Easier to copy the url into an email and send it to yourself.
For folks like myself who use different browsers across operating systems, it's even more convoluted for obvious reasons (e.g. I use safari on iOS and chrome on macOS, so something bookmarked on iPhone doesn't make it to macbook and vice-versa).
tl;dr bookmarks are a mess, even for the tech-savvy
> This isn't the most complex software engineering task known to humanity. Add a + button. Pop open a text entry field. Validate. Save. Done. I'm sure even the shitty Gemini model can vibe code that in a couple of months, right?
Sick burn.
I tend to prefer using the browser, where possible, eschewing bespoke apps, but I would expect an app to have more functionality than the browser.
I have a weird personal theory that whittling down the number of app vendors on your phone is just a good thing to do.
As a Pixel user, I've gotten my phone to just having four (4) third-party app vendors.
- Duolingo (I've never seen an app be so annoying in a positive way, I appreciate it)
- Nintendo (obvs)
- Caffeine (quick setting tile that keeps the screen on--should really be a native feature, and I hope that day comes soon so I can ditch this)
- Super Productivity (saved my life)
Having a banking app installed seems way riskier than using a website. If someone had access to my phone, the banking app stands out like a spotlight. But if it's not installed, they have to open the browser, guess which bank I'm using, and enter the right URL (possibly aided by autocomplete, possibly not).
It just feels like a safer, additional step. My bank's mobile website is junk but I'm not spending all day on it.
The problem is that at big companies such as Google, it can take months to plan out features and put them on the roadmap. That is, if they even get prioritized above other things to begin with.
There's another class of problem, websites that pretend to work in the browser but refuse to support any reasonable type of login session.
Like, sure, there are login sessions that expire after five seconds of inactivity. Sometimes it even turns out that they don't support passkeys or TOTP, and you have to add a phone number for SMS authentication, which reduces account security by letting attackers prove your identity.
I want a browser extension that automatically clicks those "I'm still here" pop-ups on scummy websites like this...
But they have an app. And they don't even shove it in your face that the experience is better with the app or whatever. But it is for one and literally only ever one singular reason: it doesn't log you out every five seconds
The no-Google-calendar-sharing-on-mobile is an absolute classic. I have personally seen multiple clumps of people huddled around a phone trying to figure out how to share a calendar with each other - fruitlessly until I butted in, because normal people don't know about desktop mode and even if they did would have no reason to think it necessary.
(If you didn't read the post, it doesn't work in the app either. It only works on "desktop.")
This past weekend I was flying on Delta and my first flight was delayed such that I was going to miss my connecting flight, so I rebooked onto a later one. During my layover I visited the gate agent to get a boarding pass with a seat assignment.
"Do you have the Delta app?"
"Nope."
Then he pressed a few keys on his keyboard and printed out a new boarding pass for me within five seconds. I couldn't believe he was trying to kick me over to the app if it was that easy.
Aer Lingus have introduced app-only self-service bag drops, which are invariably swamped with passengers trying to get them to work while a single staff runs around clearing on-screen errors and directing people to rescan, or reweigh their bags, or move closer to the window to get a 4G signal.
Meanwhile non-app users are directed to the otherwise idle staff at the check-in desk. It's bliss.
MLB is the exact opposite of this. You can't get tickets without the Ballpark app. No paper tickets at most stadiums. The app asks for all sorts of personal info too (which I usually spoof). They're even trying for biometric check-in now.
I have managed to print out a paper ticket (from some dark corner of the website) and scan it on the barcode scanner at an MLB stadium. The employees were surprised it worked.
In reality I see the anti-app sentiment as mostly a scheme to get more data into the cloud, more traffic that can be collected and spied on, less power and control for the user, and demonizing local computing and users having control over their data. A scheme to give companies and government more complete control over everything you do. Basically further enshitification of computing infrastructure.
One thing that annoys me to no end is when a mobile app can't even load without an internet connection. There's a plague of apps that are thin veneers over a web view. I get that this is easier to deploy and manage, but I find it a really poor experience compared to a well-designed mobile app.
This isn't about the app being unfinished, it's about Google deliberately half-assing support for open standards. They want you to be stuck in their calendar ecosystem so they make sure there's more friction adding a calendar from outside than adding someone else's Google calendar.
Another example, although this was from a year or two ago and I'm not sure if it's still the case: duolingo's website functions differently than the app and is just hands down better. turns out I could just export it as a PWA and so I could have my cake and eat it too.
Me and my wife share calanders both ways between Google cal and iCloud cal its an absolutely shit show to setup, and I also rember having to use the Web app for certain settings how can we not have solved this by now?
App vs website is purely taste. Some people will never install an app but will use your website. Some people love apps and will never use your website. Some people prefer apps to PWA when the app does thing, because what if it changes and enshittifies or just vanishes - an app doesn’t need to be updated. Some people prefer PWAs to apps because why would I bother with the endless updates just fix it on the website, in fact I don’t even want your shitty app at all why in Lord’s name is this an app?!
Sometimes… well sometimes there’s no dev resources available to make an app work in a way you’d expect. Google is just a tiny startup, be reasonable in your expectations.
Point is: if you actually want to reach a large audience — you want both. Also, don’t expect good experience if you use Google’s products.
Feels like this field has become a lot about doing the easy, visible parts, getting a month of attention, maybe a promotion, then moving on to the next "new project".
Meanwhile, the people who stay behind and actually make these half-finished apps work properly, maintain them and deal with all the boring problems rarely get the same credit or benefits.
At this point the barrier for me to install an app is pretty high. If you're going to needlessly gate certain functions behind an app that work on a desktop browser (or could work in-browser), then I just won't use those functions. If by extension that degrades the value I get from your site, then I just won't use the site, and I won't be contributing to ADU stats you promote to advertisers.
Every single company has turned this into a situation where I cannot trust your apps with privacy or security, and the risk and hassle isn't worth the install.
If your app is just a webpage that forces me to use an app just so you can spy on me I just won't use your product. I've switched brokers over it, I swapped banks, I stopped shopping at certain stores.
I'm done. The only say I have is in how I spend my money. Those companies won't get any of mine if I can help it.
I am the customer, not the product dammit.
Twitter is the worst. You go to a page and scroll down and it banners a beater in the app thing and you can’t dismiss it. You either get the app or close the tab. Close the tab.
Reddit might be worse, actually, given their app is mediocre at best and they killed 3rd-party apps.
In the last couple months if you go to their site in a mobile browser (e.g. from search results), after a short scroll down they have this popup demanding you install their app and it completely takes over the screen. I take it as a reminder never to install their app.
I thought I'd be clever and use iOS's "Hide Distracting Items" to get rid of elements like that. But reddit kills the scroll, too, so even after the dickover[0] is gone the page is still non-functional. Nothing says, "we don't want your business" like a non-functional web page, which seems like a bad move unless you're selling food or potable water. 'cuz I get along just fine w/o reddit.
[0] https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover
“Oh, you were busy reading this content created by the community? Please stop doing that and download our app instead.
Surely it wasn’t important and you’ll harbour no ill-feelings about this whatsoever, John in Marketing needs a promotion and his KPIs are down.”
I've been trying to figure out for years how to keep specific bits of Javascript like that from triggering. But so many modern webpages are procedurally generated messes born from frameworks that I can't reliably track down a way to do it. On Reddit for example there's reddit.com, redd.it, redditstatic.com, and cdn-apple.com that are all subdomains that load on the page, and each pull Javascript from dozens of different sources. If you disable Javascript entirely the page won't load and instead nags you to enable it. I don't want to go digging through the page inspector in my dev console just to track down which .js file is causing that, and then figure out how to only stop it from killing the scrollbar. If you can even do that. Some pages are so labyrinthine that you can't.
I'm sure there must be something on https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/wiki/Resources-Library but I've still not really been able to make sense/use of these rules much. At this point blocking certain things in js universally seems kind of impossible now that everything is webpack-chunked with random names or hidden in react context that seems inaccessible.
But I think this css rule covers many simple cases
Many websites might be broken, but I’d like a toggle to disable listening for scroll events. And no overflow overrides on major and screen-wide elements.
I use various bookmarklets to address this issue. The javascript is easy enough that you can modify it even if you're not a programmer. For example see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43488943
> 'cuz I get along just fine w/o reddit.
Killing xcancel and nitter was an awesome callout that I was again spending too much time on social media, even if logged out. Back to my cave.
Reddit does have great communities, and can be useful even when you’re logged out.
Making their website really crappy does mean I use it, like, 15 minutes a week, as opposed to 1h/day on Apollo. It’s indeed a positive.
It's the worst on iPhone, because it won't even let me scroll back up to show the button to open the tabs view, I have to switch out of the browser and re-open it to be able to scroll to show.
I think you can just tap the tab bar to bring the controls back. Works for me on whatever iOS this is before “Lucas would be proud with this numbering” 26.
Maybe you can two-finger pinch to shrink the web page to the grid view, then close the page from there?
Yikes, that shouldn't be possible.
Also they disabled old.reddit without login pretty recently. Which sucks, so I guess no more reddit boards for my debugging.
Ublock origin on Firefox has an option to disable this which is nice.
Safari on iOS 27 lets you design custom personal browser extensions and customizations just by writing out what you want.
This sounds cool at first but I think I really want vetted, up-to-date, edge-case-covered community extensions. You know, like we already have without arTiFicIAl ‘inteligence’.
LinkedIn too. The first time they show a bottom sheet dialog thing on the website, and if you dismiss it, it scrolls you all the way to the top. The second time it appears, it messes with the page and sometimes automatically closes the tab.
It's a real face palm how LinkedIn squandered the opportunity to be a relatively benign social media product. School kids would have zero interest in it except for that guy who wears a bowtie to high school. And yet they have made it such a swamp full of dark patterns. What's the marginal gain on that? They're the only game in town for the kinds of people who advertise on LinkedIn.
I think the only answer is that all dating sites are full of dark-patterns, and promise to promote your profile if you pay more money.
Linkedin isn't a dating site? Sure it is. I've seen the messages friends receive, and the way people try to sell themselves in the fakest possible ways - it's the only way to judge it these days.
I love it how a normal social network makes a "ding" sound when somebody likes your post but LinkedIn gives you a "ding" for just posting anything at all! Overall it is a place that sends the message that "standards are low here"; don't know how to write? Microsoft Copilot will do it for you, etc.
And on Hacker News, if you post something really controversial, you get a “dang”!
Perhaps these dark patterns were necessary to ensure that they stay the only game in town?
I used to have some trouble with linkedin, but currently it works for me reasonably well in Firefox on Android with ublock origin.
Idk Google Maps is pretty bad. Clicking on the search bar force opens the App Store, and trying to load photos does the same and straight up lies to you saying it’s only available in the app. But if you scroll down to the second carousel of images it loads fine in web.
Google Maps has a better excuse for wanting to be an app than most since a primary use case on mobile is turn-by-turn navigation. That's possible to do in a web page now, but several features that improve the experience are not available in browsers.
I’m not sure how that’s a justification. If you want to app-wall the turn by turn directions, that would be one thing. The fact that turn-by-turn directions is better on mobile doesn’t rationalize lying about being unable to show photos, and auto opening the App Store three times every time you want to search for an address somewhere
I'm annoyed by a different thing ... It used to be when you searched for something, maps would always be a tab for results. Now it doesn't seem to be anymore...
What you need to do, in the modern Web, is to flip that around.
Anytime I need to search an entity with physical presence, I use Google Maps first. Maps is very good about getting the first result as intended and not showing superfluous non-matches. Maps will not chirp up with AI-generated responses. Maps will take me right to the place I want, and I can see a lot of profile info at-a-glance, and if I wanted their website, then Maps will give me their main website, and nothing else.
Whether it's a corporate HQ, a clinic, a local restaurant, or a geographic area, Maps can come up with a lot of relevant info and I don't waste my time in an enshittified Search. So I'm thankful for the Maps app and its mobile integrations.
yeah, but in practice it used to be easier to type in the search bar and then click the maps tab...
The web browser experience in the browser is dramatically superior to that in the app, which doesn't even let you copy and paste media, for instance to text to others. X wants to force you to do that through a link back to them. Nope.
Most Apps are just emasculated and spyware-infested WebApps version of the website, anyway. Why not just use the Browser and get the real experience?
I do not want you app of crap.
>The web browser experience in the browser is dramatically superior to that in the app, which doesn't even let you copy and paste media, for instance to text to others. X wants to force you to do that through a link back to them. Nope.
An eye-opener like this is the reddit /s/ share links, which I assume come from copying in the app. They're everywhere, and they never open correctly for me unless maybe ironically I open them up in tor to get the actual thread
It's worse than that. 90% of the time I click on a tweet I just get the fucking login page. It seems to happen unless the tweet is from a very popular twitter account, ie one with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers.
Who on earth is still using Xitter, and what for?
Sorry to go off-topic, but you started it... Disagreeing with Musk politically is OK, but it might be advisable to not let your hatred warp the reality...Easily searchable _facts_:
X remains a large, influential real-time news and conversation platform (~half a billion combined MAUs)
- About 550 million monthly active users across X + Grok combined as of March 2026
- Up from about 520 million in December 2025
- ~ 350 million daily posts; 1.3 billion accounts active in the prior 12 months
They claim to have that number of MAUs.
He was complaining a lot about bots when he tried to back out of the sale. He's now built a bot into it. I find myself unable to trust his statistics, not only because of his history, but also due to what I hear from people who run advertising campaigns.
Are there any 3rd party estimates of twitter's user base/MAUs?
> X remains a large, influential real-time news and conversation platform (~half a billion combined MAUs)
Not news from anyone I want to hear about, not people I want to have a conversation with.
Considering the number of users, even official government departments, it still has, you would have to be very myopic and have very few interests for this to be true. The fact you're posting on Hacker News at all invalidates it; a huge portion of the type of people who hit the front page here are on Twitter.
> a huge portion of the type of people who hit the front page here are on Twitter.
Yes, but I can ignore them.
I ignore Nazis because people get really upset these days if you punch them.
The overwhelming majority of folks on twitter (>99.9999999%) are non-nazis. Oh, I don't use Twitter myself but that's because its also overwhelmingly social media spam on steroids.
If someone sits down for dinner with ten Nazis there are 11 nazis at the table.
I'm pretty sure there are some here on this forum as well. Fell free to log out and never come back.
On desktop web it's mostly fine, as long as you stick to the "Following" view rather than "For you".
Who are you following that's so important?
A small assortment of people that I found interesting/insightful/amusing at some point, plus a few local orgs occasionally announcing things. Why does anything need to be "so important"?
Without wishing to sound trite, what interesting/insightful/amusing people are still on that platform?
Ditto local organisations announcing things: are there any respectable originations (such as local government and sports groups) that still wish to be associated with the cesspool Xitter has become?
I know a guy (not quite close enough to call him a friend, but I know him from non-tech activities) who's member of the w3c, tech researcher, great and interesting speaker, and has tons of interesting insights to share. He talks a lot about open standards and what's wrong with all sorts of tech hypes, and yet the only way to follow him is on Facebook and LinkedIn. Why aren't you on the Fediverse!? Can't I just RSS your blog? Aren't you undermining your message by the way you share it?
> are there any respectable originations that still wish to be associated with the cesspool Xitter has become?
Yes, that was the biggest topic under discussion in the threads about the Nitter C&D. And most of sports is apparently still on there, to the point I hear people talking about how they only use it for sports news.
Honestly, the belief that Twitter has suddenly become a cesspool and everyone left is a (vocal) minority view, and it's only the liberal tech/terminally online left echo chamber chamber that thinks that.
People saying that "The MechaHitler App" is a cesspool are the out of touch ones?
The vast majority of users rely on the algorithm that suppressed posts that Musk doesn't like and promotes insane white supremacist propaganda.
You say that you can avoid that, and I agree. You can use other apps. There are other ways to get the information you're interested in, there are other ways to disseminate information. You don't need to participate in that insanity while pretending not to.
> People saying that "The MechaHitler App" is a cesspool are the out of touch ones?
No, I chose my words carefully. Thinking it suddenly became a cesspool makes you out of touch. Twitter, like all big social media, was a cesspool before Musk bought it, and that hasn't meaningfully changed since. And also like all big social media, it's basically fine and not a cesspool if you put a little effort into curating it. Twitter is actually better than some of the others, even, in my experience (though maybe I've just been more diligent in my curation of it).
There was a minor inflection point where a lot of very politically vocal people left, but for the majority, especially institutions, not much changed.
(And yeah, I'm not denying that Elon puts his hand on the scales of the algorithm. Some of what it pushes is disgusting and obnoxious. But I see disgusting/obnoxious stuff on other platforms too -- and that includes bluesky/mastodon)
Aside from the stupid rename, I haven't noticed it become any more of a cesspool than it was before the takeover, and in some ways it's arguably healthier (less echo-chamber-ey, and community notes can be useful). Again, this is purely talking about desktop web and avoiding the algorithmic feed.
I think you're taking a very particular partisan US view and projecting it onto the rest of the world.
The problem now is everything you see if paid for ad. Even the people you follow if they have paid (blue checkmark) to have their posts raise higher in the feed (which is the same as an ad). It is all ads.
I feel like suing every blue checkmark person for deceptive advertising.
As I said, I don't use the algorithmic feed at all, so I don't see how "paid (blue checkmark) to have their posts raise higher" applies.
> I think you're taking a very particular partisan US view
Spare us the US defaultism.
I'm not American.
because, basically, why paint Elmo's fence?
Lots of local LLM people with cool setups and ideas, conspiracy stuff, politics beyond Politico/Atlantic/etc. So mostly stuff that gets one banned on Bluesky and Mastodon that's not on nostr.
Local LLM people aren't getting banned on those platforms unless they're being hostile to other users. Even then, it's unlikely.
The people they want to follow. What's your point?
So... Who?
There's plenty of funny people on Twitter, folks like Mr. Chau, Brooks Otterlake, Will Sennet to name a few. For news, Joe Weisenthal and David Weigel are two guys that are pretty hip to current goings-on in economics and politics respectively.
If they were mirrored to another platform, would you follow them there, or do you only follow them to populate specifically your X feed?
For whatever reason, I can't reply to your comment further down. I'd be perfectly happy to follow them on another platform if their tweets were piped elsewhere.
> For whatever reason, I can't reply to your comment further down.
In case you happen to read this, that is (presumably) due to an anti-flamewar feature on HN, which hides the reply button for the first few minutes of posts in deep comment threads. You can either wait to comment, or comment by clicking the "X minutes ago" text next to the commenter's username.
Can't buy a tesla without the app.
Worse, to sell a tesla, you are the person saying "ok, install the app, then I can transfer ownership to you, conveniently!"
and this is getting normalized with other car manufacturers.
(and it ALL goes back to apple... who started the whole app nonsense, and promoted a look-and-feel that gave tesla a terrible tap and swipe iphone/ipad type ui in a moving car)
> Can't buy a tesla without the app.
Works for me. No Tesla it is, then.
Not the only reason, but one of several.
You can absolutely buy a Tesla and operate it for the life of the vehicle without an app or even a smartphone. They have key fobs and keycards for this purpose. Go into the store or order online. Everything can be handled by the Tesla store if you are selling the car and need to transfer it to another person.
Of course, having to go to the original store to sell a product second-hand ain't exactly the best user experience either.
(It's fine by me, if that's their design and I don't think they are hiding it or tricking anyone. People should be allowed to buy products that I don't like.)
This was not my experience. I had an older one one with keyfob, and only needed a website login.
But a newer car, everything had to go through the app and complete milestones and other nonsense.
Excuse me? Why does Tesla need to be involved at all? Take the title to the DMV and transfer it.
Because the easiest way to boost profitability is to ignore laws and user rights via technologically constructed workarounds.
The nearest Tesla store is 150 miles away. No.
There’s an easier solution: don’t buy Tesla.
> that gave tesla a terrible tap and swipe iphone/ipad type ui in a moving car
Not sure why you’re blaming Apple for Tesla’s mistake of thinking a phone UI is appropriate for a car system UI.
Besides, you can “trace it back” to anyone you want really. The problem is not Apple. The problem is people accepting this nonsense from bullshit companies and apps in the first place.
apple sets an example
> The only say I have is in how I spend my money.
This. I get Frame.work and install Fedora. Use Firefox for everything possible. Once my current phone dies, I'll get a Fair phone, Motorola, or whatever gives me control.
Can't complain if I keep choosing hostile products for some convenience
> Can't complain if I keep choosing hostile products for some convenience
Uh, yeah you can.
Especially if they're actively engaged in making it more and more difficult to escape their platforms: Google force-doxxing developers soon, banks & other charlatans not working on GrapheneOS because sEcUrItY, the list goes on.
Most people using this sort of rhetoric probably don't like black kids working in mines and yet they still use devices or cars built off of that produce.
Who are the hall of shame brokers?
Well said. Are there any mainstream apps "website as app" that do not come with the spying/telemetry/doxing (given on a plate by our two choices, ios/android) that almost always comes with them?
> I am the customer, not the product dammit.
That’s an illusion that died a long time ago, unfortunately.
Just because you’re using their service on a browser doesn’t stop them from harvesting data from your usage, especially if you’re logging in (and if you’re using their services, chances are that you are).
Using browser over app can help, but it doesn’t eliminate it.
Like it or not, we’re the product, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
They're not able to spy on all the other websites I visit or apps I use via the browsers in the way they are by forcing me to install spyware on the spyware machines from Apple and Google.
I’m pretty sure they actually can actually. On an iPhone with a “ask for no tracking” configuration (no IDFA), I’d wager it’s probably even easier on the web than it is in an app.
Chrome supports invasive APIs like WebUSB for a reason.
Using umatrix or a monkey script and selectively editing what their website does, however, certainly help with privacy.
Yeah, Doctorow articulated that pretty well back in 2022: https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/
tl;dr Any company that likes money and has power over their customers, will happily treat them as products to the extent it can get away with.
I agree with you. But some time the social aspect in our life force us to to make compromise.
100% same. So many apps are just a WebView vessel for Crashlytics and Sentry and Dog knows how much more tracking. (My phone is always VPNed into my home network which has DNS-level ad and tracker blocking. This doesn't cover all the bases though.)
Some, like Home Depot, have websites that are terrible and battery-draining enough to make the app nominally useful by comparison.
>Some, like Home Depot, have websites that are terrible and battery-draining enough to make the app nominally useful by comparison.
I don't take this as a signal to install the app. It is a signal to avoid the store. They clearly don't feel like they need to work to gain your business, and instead take it for granted. You can see this indicated by their actions - they clearly feel that it is more profitable to inconvenience you for a token amount of tracking data than to serve your needs. Why continue to use them?
There are a lot of businesses that have a semi-captive hold on a market. Like a recent example was I drove my daughter and I to a stage play, and to pay for street parking I had to install an app, make an account, and add a credit card. A thing that should have been scan the QR code and click one button to mobile pay became a five minute ordeal.
In theory we could have gotten back in the car and looked for parking elsewhere but the curtain was in 30 minutes and who's to say they didn't have a contract with the city that covered all the parking?
Overall a very hostile experience and I was annoyed about how little I felt I had a choice in it.
Just don’t pay. I stopped paying for street parking a long time ago (around the time they started insisting on apps). You get a ticket once and awhile but it all works out.
Mail in a check a few times a year and park whenever you want.
Valid, though I expect this being down the block from the festival theatre, it probably was being actively patrolled. I was a bit shaken by a prominent sign threatening a $400 fine for illegal parking, though having just checked the website for the City of Stratford, it looks like the standard municipal parking ticket is $40 if paid promptly, so the $400 fine was probably specific to parking in the theatre's dropoff zone or fire access or something.
All that say, I think you're probably right... next time instead of using my phone to install and sign up for a parking app, I'll just use it to check what the fine is and wipe hands on pants.
Yeah usually that’s for fire parking etc. loading zones don’t usually get the super high fine treatment.
It's all fun and games until your ride gets towed.
I have like 5 parking apps. It's exhausting.
The worst part is not that, but.. _which is the app for this area?_
It's definitely a case where I see the value of the Asia-style super apps, where you just attach transactions like this to LINE or Grab or whatever, and everyone knows what to do with it.
The only thing remotely comparable in Toronto might be if Presto (payment app for multiple transit agencies in GTHA) took on parking payment, but the Presto network now supports just tapping a credit card so I don't know how many people would be getting cards or using the app for that either.
SpotHero and Parkmobile tried to solve this. Parking is a weird industry.
It should have been put coins in a slot.
Or use your card on the machine. We had that for a while, but then these stupid parking companies started to get traction.
Yes, just a plain tap-to-pay on the meter itself (or a nearby kiosk) is the obvious solution. I think doing it on the meter is awkward because then they all need to be online, so you're either dealing with individual M2M cards or some kind of local mesh network, not to mention powering them all. The kiosk is another thing to have to install and maintain and power. And doing a plain tap would have no way of inputting how long you wanted to pay for.
All that to say, I can fully understand how we ended up with "here's a sticker with a number on it, pay on your phone"; it's just, the pay on your phone option should be a one step apple/google pay webpage where you at most have to enter your license plate, and it certainly should not be collecting credit card details within the app.
And what if I don't use Apple Pay or Google Pay?
Enter a credit/debit card number then. They are under zero obligation to allow you a cash payment method.
Well they should be. The government should be obligated to support the use of government services without any third-party megacorp dependencies.
Ehh maybe. I mean, it was a three hour show and I don't carry coins any more. So that would have been ATM -> go to a store and break a twenty -> put in a few bucks -> remember to go out at intermission and put in more money.
Paying by phone is a step up from that old world; I just want it to be one tap, not a whole sequence that tries to upsell me on a monthly pass or establishing an in-app "parking wallet" or whatever.
Not carrying coins is your own fault, not the system's. You can't refuse the analog solutions and then complain the digital ones are too digital.
Digital solutions don't have to be abusive.
Where I live the city commissioned its own mobile app for parking, and all numbered parking spots in the city use that app.
There are private lots that use Honk or Robbins or whatever, but the municipal lots and all parallel parking spaces downtown all use the same single app and the revenue goes to the city.
The city parking app works reasonably well, no ads, it just does one thing. If you leave early you open the app and hit "stop parking" and it only charges you the 37 cents or whatever that you actually consumed. It sends you a push notification when your parking is about to expire. And if you don't like the app for whatever reason, you can still pay with a card at the pay machines on every block. It's unglamorous, but it's fantastic technology.
That seems reasonable. The kiosk is still there to pay with cards or cash directly, but the app/website lets you skip that, avoid printing a slip, maybe buy a pass or something.
The risk is mainly that down the road someone looks at the usage numbers and goes hmm, well the kiosk is only getting used 5% of the time, let's just discontinue supporting it.
The other risk is that they make it cheaper via the app/website, maybe by offering a pass or something. Then that's effectively discrimination against people who don't have a big tech phone.
That's still one more app, that's not any better if the problem is needing an app.
See my edits. You don't need the app but the experience is strictly better with it. One of the rare cases where the app is value add.
I guess, but no one carries coins, and the machine doesn't accept them. Me not having coins changed nothing about this situation.
You not having coins is one half of the problem. We can't pretend we don't tolerate the abuses of the digital money system, while not carrying analog money - it's completely hypocritical.
Avoiding HD is basically impossible here in the US if you own a home. It's either them, Lowe's or, if you're lucky, some third party mom and pop that will have an even shittier website and probably not what youre looking for.
But generally you're right.
I didn't want to write in this thread. Complaining is just not good for the person complaining.
But this: >My phone is always VPNed into my home network which has DNS-level ad and tracker blocking. This doesn't cover all the bases though.
Is a great idea for a fun weekend project. Any tips, good practices or things to watch out for when setting it up?
Not OP, but with DNS ad blocking like pi-hole you need to be aware that any "normies" living with you will hate it. DNS blockers silently break any kind of "sponsored links" in search results and a lot of the links in email marketing, and most people use those frequently. They don't take kindly to being told they're doing it wrong and have to change their browsing habits for benefits they don't perceive.
Pi-hole let's you define different groups with different ad blocking policies. Then you can define which dhcp ips go in each group. Works very well. The "normies" won't even notice
I have a Firewalla. They run a WireGuard proxy (sort of like a DERP in Tailscale), so I use that. It actually works more often than Tailscale somehow, and since it's just WG, it works perfectly with my GL.iNet travel hotspots. Firewalla also has ad blocking baked in with less restrictive blacklists, so that's what I use.
Before I got the FW, I used Tailscale and AdGuard Home.
Tailscale can do this very easily
Or you can just throw a couple bucks at something like nextdns and not have to use the VPN bit for mobile DNS ad block
I use both
> My phone is always VPNed into my home network which has DNS-level ad and tracker blocking.
I've been looking to do this setup. Would you share a few details of which tools you've used?
RethinkDNS does everything for me. You're tied to their DNS server if you want to use the in-app interface to make changes to the blocklists in use, but that's not a hard requirement. As a bonus, it also supports actual VPNs (wireguard, http connect, and socks proxy). If you don't care to micro-manage it, trackercontrol is also pretty good. There's other apps as well, like personalDNSfilter.
In this setup you're explaining, the phone is doing all the work though right? Filtering DNS and sending traffic to a wireguard VPN, is all done on the phone.
But it's not tunnelling traffic to a desktop station which then processes that traffic like its own (filters DNS as set up on the desktop, and forwards traffic through the same VPN that is set up on the desktop). Am I getting this right?
My setup is similar: A server at home runs Unbound for recursive DNS, filtered by Hagezi's blacklists. The phone (running GrapheneOS) consumes the DNS service through a Wireguard tunnel. This is 100% self-hosted and does not rely on Tailscale or a third-party DNS service. All the mobile carrier or WiFi hotspot used sees is a single encrypted connection to the server.
I absolutely love this. I thought Tailscale was necessary to establish that kind of wireguard tunnel. Would you have a link to a tutorial or write-up on how you got this set up?
I'm also interested. I use tailscale and there is supposed to be a way to configure it to use my pihole DNS, but there is something in Android that prevents that. I think I have to set a custom DNS on the phone.
What really grinds my gears is when the app is a _broken_ version of the website. I find the app really expects you to be on the happy path in a way the website does not.
Uhaul is a great example of this. The app looks a little better on mobile, but if you don’t make an account and search by reservation ID, all features related to things like extending a reservation time are nonfunctional. I have to go to the mobile site which looks bad and has poor navigation, trying to hijack my session and redirect me to the app, but at least it works.
UHaul is the only app I've ever encountered that is less efficient than talking to a human being behind a counter. I have tried multiple times to pick up a reservation via the app and it has taken so long or failed at some point that I had to walk into the store anyway.
And it wants a photo of my license EVERY GODDAMN TIME. And no I can't store a photo of my license on my phone and just upload it - it has to take a photo directly. And boy does it not like to take photos in bright sunlight. You know, when I'm outside in a parking lot beside a white truck.
That's funny, I've NEVER, not even once, encountered ANY app from any company, in any business, that is easier or more efficient than talking to a human being behind a counter. (So long as the human behind the counter is not also hamstrung by dreadful Indian crapware...)
Seriously, like most people, I have dozens of apps on my phone, forced on me by various needs. The ONLY one that makes anything easier or better is my password manager, which I have to have to safely keep and lookup the logins and passwords for all the damn apps...
I dunno. It's so hard to get a plain ordinary brewed coffee at Dunkin these days, the kind of coffee I used to get there back in the 1980s. On the app I could actually pick one out, in person I'm likely to have a teenager give me something else and then have a nervous breakdown when I point out the one thing I care about on their digital signs: "If we get your order wrong we'll re-do it"
I pretty much exclusively drink black coffee or plain espresso and I’ve yet to encounter any issues getting it.
I have seen lots of complaints and memes to this effect, but never has it been my lived experience. I’ve also never had an issue with politely saying “excuse me, I actually ordered X and I got Y by mistake.” No nervous breakdown at all
Dunkin' was taken over by the cheese mafia. Over half of their products now have cheese in them.
(Starbucks, too. They just discontinued the little protein box with hard-boiled eggs in favor of yet another one with cheese.)
I drifted away slowly.
I grew up in New Hampshire where it is almost as much as a religion as it in Massachusetts. We had one in Ithaca for a short time when I was in grad school which didn't last very long, I remember sitting there while a schizophrenic woman told me that the mob ran absolutely everything in New York, it was closed a long time, then a Thai restaurant moved in and then, decades later, a Dunkin moved in next door.
Early on I learned that the P&C supermarket made better donuts so when a dunkin opened across the street I wasn't so interested. And of course Dunkin used to be known for good coffee but now you can find good coffee anyhwhere except for a Starbucks and Collegetown Bagels.
Does that include waiting in line at an airport?
Yes! Airport gate workers can (and have, for me) frequently pull all kinds of strings and make all kinds of adjustments if you just ask (kindly).
The car rental desk at airports is one of the worst customer experiences I've ever seen. It's sometimes worse than what seems possible. It's sometimes bad in ways that don't even make sense.
Their scheduling software is also blatantly broken. I understand the difficulty in monitoring a large distributed fleet, but their software loves to say trucks are unavailable where a quick phone call reveals they can accommodate the exact request.
> What really grinds my gears is when the app is a _broken_ version of the website. I find the app really expects you to be on the happy path in a way the website does not.
That's what the linked article is all about.
I wish everyone thought like this. Unfortunately the average user demands an app and thinks they have nothing to hide.
I think the average user doesn't know the app is there to circumvent tracking protections in browsers and doesn't realise the app is most likely just a web page in a wrapper.
I was at a car park in UK and you didn't have to install an app, just scan the QR to go to the web page, simple payment. Sadly they then messed it all up by not offering payment through normal services.
> just scan the QR
Lord no!
Scanning a random QR code.... where is the worst it will take you?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crrpknqpgzlo
Yea a QR code is only marginally better than requiring an app. I shouldn't need a goddamn smartphone to conduct business and live in society!
The actual reality is that it's impossible to have people go to a web site from a physical ad/offer/thing without using a QR (or paying Google). Google (and friends) managed to hide the URL almost totally, people don't even know that you can go somewhere without searching on google. So the options are: paying google to have your name point to you (an expensive choice depending on the actual name) or use a QR. Weirdly enough people uses QRs this way. I think the restaurants/bars menus after the pandemic only digital via QR opened this way (again, it was trendy also many years ago).
Did domain names stop functioning all of the sudden? Going to somedipshitsbar.com/menu is about as complicated as entering a wifi password at a coffee shop.
Its like two taps on my phone to scan a QR code where as typing that is probably going to take me 26+ taps.
And I usually prefer to just scan a QR code to get the wifi details. Once again, its far fewer taps.
If you could do something with just two clicks or do something with 26 clicks, which path would you normally take?
You scan and trust random QR codes?
To paraphrase George Bush: Goatse me once, shame on...shame on you. Goatse me — you can't get Goatse'd again
How does typing a url stop that?
type out: https://thisislegitparkingpaymentwebsite.com
Is this goatse or is it the real payment website for your parking? You won’t know unless you go there
You type in and trust random URLs? You just click on random URLs?
No, I don't just go around and scan every random QR code sticker on every single lamp post without any kind of context. But a QR code on the back of a business card with their contact information already nicely digitally formatted? Sure. A friend's QR code of their WiFi credentials on a little plaque in the den? Sure. A QR code at the bar showing the live tap list menu? Sure. A presenter giving the presentation slides by QR code? Sure.
And I pay attention to the URL that QR code is sending me to before I actually decide to go there. The QR code is just so I don't have to type in reallylongannoyingurl.ninja/some-horrific%20path/and?with=junkinit. It shows me the URL and asks "Do you want to go to obviousgoatse.com?" after it scans the code. That's the tap 2 of the two taps.
Consumers don't care. QR is easier for them and owners get analytics plus built in table identified ordering. I brought up the attack vector to a table full of developers back when this was taking off, just shrugs.
> owners get analytics
They'll get analytics from digital menus regardless of if a QR code is scanned or not. The QR code isn't really making a difference here, other than maybe adding in a specific table ID.
> built in table identified ordering...attack vector
Oh no, they're going to know table 36 ordered the appetizer sampler and a few beers. The horror. They couldn't have possibly known that before.
They're going to get a lot more verifiable information about me when they run my payment card than what they'll glean from a fresh browser tab.
The analytics are very different when you have locality built in. You know exactly how many times your menu was scanned in house.. how long they spent on the page etc has much more meaning. An open website mixes traffic.
I'm not promoting QR codes here. When I can avoid them I do. It's just that the incentives for owners and consumers are better with them and that's the challenge.
> Oh no, they're going to know table 36 ordered the appetizer sampler and a few beers. The horror. They couldn't have possibly known that before
I have no idea what you're on about here. I'm clearly referring to quishing to collect payment info. It's very easy to copy a website and plop a QR code onto a picnic table over the old one.
Do people actually pay through a QR code through a sticker on the table though? I've never seen that nor would I ever do such a thing, because yeah that's obvious.
I will scan a QR code on a check the waiter printed for me and pay through that.
> You know exactly how many times your menu was scanned in house
The vast majority of the time I've seen a QR code stuck to a table its just goosejuicerestaurant.com/menu or https://taplist.io/demo-brewery on the QR code. About the only real time I've seen otherwise has been McDonalds, but they have raised metallic emblems glued to the table, it would be pretty obvious if it was messed with. And I'm not sure if they're even useful outside of the app.
> Do people actually pay through a QR code through a sticker on the table though? I've never seen that nor would I ever do such a thing, because yeah that's obvious.
Yes, that's what I'm referring to.
https://pos.toasttab.com/products/mobile-order-and-pay
https://get.chownow.com/blog/restaurant-qr-code/
Wifi passwords at cafes are often now given as QR codes, precisely because customers find that easier than typing the string in.
the average user demands an app
No, the average middle manager demands an app.
The average user has gotten over the novelty of having seven million apps on their phone.
Do you run a consumer to web app? What do your users say? What's the predominant device and OS?
I do. With over 200,000 paying users.
The Customer Service department (we're a real business, so we have one of those) forwards all email, social media, and phone contacts about it to me.
Number of middle managers who have brought up having an app since 2019: Around five.
Number of actual users who asked for an app since 2019: One. Maybe two.
Your turn.
If you offered an app, do you think new customers would choose the app over a browser interface?
Do you think most existing users would switch?
Do you think there are many people who don't use your service because there's no app?
No.
No.
No, because that's not how our industry works.
> Number of actual users who asked for an app since 2019: One. Maybe two
Have you ever asked them?
Surprisingly, yes.
My company requires everyone in the company to meet our customers in person once a year. Everyone from the CEO on down to tech nerd button pushers like myself.
Our method of telemetry is called "talking to people."
I'm not sure why you find the snark necessary.
I wouldn't find it productive to talk to 200,000 users in person to determine if it's worth building a native app. I suspect most startups talk to some of their customers in person but I don't know anyone making sweeping product decisions based on that.
I wouldn't find it productive to talk to 200,000 users in person
Fortunately, our company has more than one employee, so one person does not need to talk to all 200,000 users.
The average user does not demand an app.
If they did they would not need to be pushed to apps by "it works better on the app" or offered discounts for using the app.
Unfortunately consumer preference surveys are all over the place. Most I've seen show they do prefer an app but data isn't exactly open. If you have this data feel free to share.
I'm sure every industry is different. For my current work, our users overwhelmingly want a native app. The majority of traffic is mobile and iOS. Everytime I tell someone about what I do they open up the app store and I have to tell them it's not on there and they ask why.
Anyway, apps have higher monetary conversion. The desire to push users to the app needs no other reason.
Please provide your proof of this statement
Data from your own users is the most useful, but here's some published data. There's plenty more to be found and of course methodology, quality and intention varies.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK616185
https://www.aba.com/news-research/analysis-guides/preferred-...
https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-IAB-Glob...
Very interesting links thank you
Indeed, I've no interest in native apps to do something that can be done in a web app and if you don't let me do it in a web app I'll bounce and either find someone who can or do without unless there is a seriously compelling use case (I'm not that dogmatic).
As a result the only native apps I use on my phone are Kindle, Authy and Firefox because I trust Firefox to prevent apps doing a lot of the sketchy shit locally a lot more than I trust an app/the host OS to do so.
A real native app practically always has better performance than web apps. And your data is on your machine. And it can integrate with the operating system. And you can do work offline. And performance saves battery.
A web app is almost never better.
True for genuine native apps, but most apps these days are just wrappers around web apps so you get none of the benefits of a true native app while also losing some of the benefits of a web app.
> And your data is on your machine.
Not really true anymore, especially on mobile. Plus the privacy invading abilities of native are much higher
With a native app your data can be on your machine (or not, or both). With a web app it can't be on your machine.
> Plus the privacy invading abilities of native are much higher
Your privacy is already completely invaded if your data is in the cloud, as it has to be with web apps.
> "do something that can be done in a web app"
I'll bite. What important features can only be done in an "app" but not a web app nowadays?
NFC reading is one. That's why lots of Governments publish apps - it's a reliable way to check your passport if you need a visa etc.
It might be coming to the web - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_NFC_API
Do they require it though? I've used a few, but it's always been a convenience thing to use the NFC-scanning app; the alternative is just typing in the details manually.
Yes. It offers cryptographic proof that you physically have the passport with you. It also gets a digital copy of the photo and other biometrics held on the NFC chip. From a user point of view it reduces the number of typos entered.
Kazakhstan has an app (QazETA) for its electronic travel authorization, which is required for many passport holders who want to enter under the visa-free regime. (Perhaps it is not strictly required as one could apply for a visa instead.)
Somewhat confusingly, the iOS App Store description [0] of the app says that it is not a government app, while the rest of the internet and Kazakh government sites say that it is the official government app for the purpose of applying for the ETA.
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6748705452
Realtime stuff. Audio, video etc, games. Apps with a large user library (like the Photos app) that should work offline.
Right. Of course there is some overhead for using WebGL vs native OpenGL calls, but I think that's only noticeable for AAA games. Web audio's extra latency does make it undesirable only for things that require quick response, like realtime synths and maybe DAWs.
Regarding libraries, I wonder if maybe there could be a cacheable package manager system for distributing wasm libraries to webapps.
A ton of features work only or better on app:
It's a shrinking area: You can get GPS, accelerometer, etc inputs from a web app nowadays. From my own experience the main areas that are tricky are related to automatically finding and connecting to devices: you can do bluetooth at least, but there's things an app can do with wifi and local connection protocols you can't easily do with a web app.
I sign in to video calls using my browser every day. Saying video/audio requires an app beggars belief.
Privacy is the opposite of what you get with an app. Privacy? Really?
Local storage is available to browsers. Office 365 literally functions in a browser with full access to local storage.
Anything processor intensive can be compiled to WASM. This isn't 2005 anymore.
So... widgets?
I can see an argument for games, where you want to pre-install a large amount of resources, and maybe have a better i/o story. Even that is a function of convenience over necessity.
> anything privacy sensitive
I'd actually prefer that stuff stay in a browser and far away from my local storage on a device I take everywhere. Seems far riskier having it locally.
> anything processing intense
I can play Half-Life 2 in a browser window these days. I can do photo editing and CAD in the browser. I can have entire IDEs in the browser, compilers, non-linear video editors, and more. We're also kind of scoping this to phone apps, they're usually not very processing intense as you quickly hit heat and battery limits.
> camera and audio based features can work, but are more finicky (or outright broken on ios)
Sounds more like an overly restricted OS than anything else.
> local storage (exists in web app, short lifetimes on web site)
Once again, sounds like an overly restricted OS than a browser issue.
> (I'm less familiar, but probably local sensors, like gps and acceleration)
https://sensor-js.xyz/demo.html < works fine
https://openstreetmap.org < works fine
anything privacy sensitive
You've got that backwards. Web is more private than an app.
Every regulated healthcare company has a web site. None require an "app."
It depends. Truly working offline, which is as private as it gets in many scenarios, isn’t really feasible with web apps.
You could also work in a windowless steel box inside a cave at the top of a mountain, if you really want to move the goalposts.
Why is this moving the goalposts?
Native apps can work reasonably well offline and online. Web apps can’t, currently.
"Progressive web apps" can be installed to be used offline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_app
Nope... What you're talking about is not privacy sensitivity, but trust.
For you, you don't trust the provider of the software, so you mean being able to put a barrier around your life, and the delivered software... you think that by running in a browser, you're preventing that code from being connected to anything else... However, anything that happens in that code is directly connected to the provider, whom you don't trust.
I'm referring to the opposite... having something connected to your life, but having a barrier disconnecting it from the outside world... It involves trusting the provider of the software (maybe it's open source), but even if you don't, you can install an app, cut the network, use it locally, then delete it before restoring the network, and you have a guarantee that what you did with it was private... It's possible to build that into a web app, but most websites don't work offline, where most apps (though not all), do work offline... even if it requires an initial network session to establish authorization
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It’s also about friction.
No one wants to troubleshoot a card decline by logging into their mobile browser bank account in checkout at the grocery store.
My credit card doesn't need me to lock/unlock it, doesn't require I have a phone with me, and certainly doesn't require an app. The last thing I ever would want is for the people in charge of "apps" to have access to my finances. All you are doing is creating another layer where something is allowed to tell you "No". Why would you choose this?
Right, and I can't remember the last time the battery in my credit card died or needed recharging. Phone has died plenty of times when I needed it
> “Just log into your bank account on the mobile web browser” is a pretty clunky way to see why your card declined.
But that's because the user experience as designed is more hostile or not otherwise accounting for mobile use--right? Or are you saying there is a limit to the web platform's ability to reduce friction?
No one wants to troubleshoot a card decline by having to download and install a 700MB bank app in checkout at the grocery store either. Personally I'll take the browser login every time in that situation!
You mean some kind of perceived personal convenience through the uneven-handed profit of others and at the expense of everyone else.
Trying to check why your card was declined at a checkout—while still standing at said checkout? Troubleshooting "PIN issues" (meaning your bad)? Is everyone still standing behind you at this point? LOL. Exactly.
Theres a gym I work out at, and that I have been going to for nearly a year now, and they have an app you can use to check in, schedule classes, whatever. I don't actually know because I never downloaded the app, I just use my phone number to check in every time I go. I don't want more apps on my phone, not for the gym, not for fast food, maybe my bank and the apps I need to communicate with friends and family, but the majority of it is pointless bloat they push on you for no good reason.
I took a picture of my keychain tag, set the date of it to my membership expiration date, and then scan that picture my phone when I go in
I’m living in peak appification at my gym. It’s one of those 24x7 places and an app is required to unlock the door. I find it amusing that part of the installation process requires me to deny always-on location sharing - why would I need the app to know my location when I’m not at the door?
> amusing
You should find it insulting that they are likely selling that location data, not even to the highest bidder, but to a data broker that resells that data to anyone that will buy it for any price they'll pay.
Yes, this is standard practice in the app industry. I guarantee every app outside of f-droid that has location access is tracking you 24/7 and selling the log.
If you're going to needlessly gate certain functions behind an app that work on a desktop browser (or could work in-browser), then I just won't use those functions.
Amusingly, I know of a very large hospital chain that has it the other way around.
The app version is the most limited. Mobile web has some more options. But if you want everything, that's desktop only.
Except for scheduled ordering from the coffee shops or placing in-patient meal orders. Those require an app. Except with the meal app, you get more menu choices from the web version.
Modern tech is a mess.
A particularly worrying trend that keeps spreading is the one of restricting significant amounts of (often non-financial) functionality to the apps only, gated behind your phone passing device integrity checks, in what seems to be a poorly thought out attempt at blocking all forms of scraping and automation (AI or not). The worst offender right now is probably Twitter, which alongside the recent Nitter cease-and-desist now appears to require client integrity on all logged out access.
You can just make an account on a phone and give the login info to Nitter (your own instance), it still works.
The flip side is: I have an Audioguide app with reams of fancy of AI features. Even a basic non-AI one is we use GPS in the background to auto-trigger when you approach certain checkpoints on your tour, and we don't want you staring or constantly manually fiddling with the phone when you're on a tour in a neighborhood. This is all stuff just not possible with the web app
I get it, "I'm just traveling, why do I need to download an app which will be useless when I'm done traveling". Just delete it then, takes two steps!
Our reviews between our Web App and iOS app are like 2 sigma apart. Un-intuitively, our web app users are out fiddling with the app 2-3x more than our iOS app.
Sounds like gratuitous over-use of technology.
Please just put placards on your exhibits, then I can take as long ( or as quickly ) as I need to digest the info.
People can then use their phone to translate into other languages, if needed.
No need to litigate this again, digital audioguides are now 20-25 year old technology and very popular.
> gratuitous over-use of technology.
That describes silicon valley tech culture to a tee.
The issue is that people often forget to uninstall these apps almost all the time. Apps like Delta, Southwest etc. are the perfect candidate for this. We require something similar to ephemeral apps that exist only for a limited period and automatically get deleted later. If the OS could provide such a feature by default, it would be a blessing. However, this again contradicts the commercial interests of many companies and services, so Android and iOS will likely never implement it.
Appclips in iOS are a decent shot at that. But require it to be under 15MB, which is really hard to hit, especially if you use RN, but we'll be dumping RN to make this happen as a next step.
>>The issue is that people often forget to uninstall these apps almost all the time
Fundamentally though, iOS will auto-offload the unused apps for you (you won't get any notifications). For all intents and purposes, it is an ephemeral app already.
When it comes to airline tickets I've been able to check in to a flight through a web page and then add the boarding pass to my Google Wallet without having to install that airline's app before. I'm pretty sure Apple has had some similar kind of a workflow but I wouldn't know for sure.
My android phone will put apps into "deep sleep" and remove all their permissions if I haven't opened it in a month or so. I just toss travel apps into a folder in my launcher and they are there if I need them but become just a consumer of drive space on their own.
Deep sleep is a great option. Archive is a couple steps beyond that, it essentially makes it equal to the app being uninstalled, at the cost of a bit of a disk space.
location services are available to web browsers on pretty much all consumer platforms
Not persistently, the user has to constantly bring the phone up and re-enable, which as you can imagine gets really annoying really quickly.
I am the same way but sadly I think average people seem to be the opposite. I’ve seen people asked to do something on some site and their instinct is to go straight to the App Store and search the site there vs using their web browser.
I also have the assumption that apps are shoddily coded. Whenever I go to the App Store I am looking for a specific app because my assumption is that a random app I find is going to be useless and this goes 10x if the app is promoted with paid advertisement. Personally I wish the app store was like the way Google's home page was in 1999 -- the search functionality is the only thing I care about and they hide it in the middle of a lot of not-so-distracting fluff because I don't have the slightest interest in it.
I used to feel similarly but recently i started defaulting to installing apps more, and it's been way better for my quality of life lol. They just tend to work way better. There are some exceptions though, usually for apps that have ads that make them too annoying to use or that require you to have an account that I don't want to create / don't want to sign in with. E.g. youtube, reddit
Interesting. I limit myself to apps from zapstore.dev and I enjoy playing with new apps. The issue with most commercial / mainstream apps for me is that they're riddled with ads, engagement nonsense, lack quality, often use ugly per default frameworks, force sign-up before use, request all sorts of permissions or come bundled with SDKs I don't trust.
Many HN users probably share this distaste for apps that should be websites, but I don't think this is true for the general population.
In addition to choosing not to use needless apps, some HN users here might have the opportunity for a stronger vote: refuse to (or at very least push back on) develop an app that could be a website.
Spotify comes to mind immediately. Of all things, they wall off your saved music - premium doesn't matter. There is literally no reason to prevent web app users from accessing what is essentially just another playlist, other than to coerce the native app adoption.
Yeah, so many sites bug me to install their app just to read their web page. I'm not going to install every app, so just make the website usable. LinkedIn, Instagram, too many others to list them all. I'd rather not use them at all than install their app.
> At this point the barrier for me to install an app is pretty high.
For me, the bar hasn't moved: I will not install any app that isn't a general purpose, open source utility. If something cannot be done in the browser, I will do without it.
I am the same, the sad reality is that companies don't (really) aim to change our (old folk tech peoples) behavior, they are aiming to make a new normal for the next generation of consumers.
If you intend to have a broad userbase, you must prioritize mobile apps. The general public prefers them. I don't like it, but that's the current landscape.
The problem is that my bank is starting to do this, and for things I actually use. I am considering changing banks because of this, but it's a big step.
In the case of Reddit, Instagram, X, etc. Often those 'certain functions' are the whole site/app itself.
Which is pushing me to not use them at all.
If you use Android, honestly try Fdroid. It's great. I mean there are obviously huge gaps, you're not going to find banking apps, and there's going to be less polish in a lot of cases. BUT NONE OF THE APPS ARE EVIL.
Fdroid harbors the paradise we imagined in the early days where we just had these little computers in our pockets and didn't have to worry that everything on them was drowning in ads, scams and surveillance.
So if I do think I might want or need an app I immediately go and check on Fdroid. I can install apps from there without fear. If Fdroid doesn't have what I need, most likely I'm just tapping out. I won't use my phone. I barely use it these days when I'm not on the go anyway.
On Android, especially the most recent versions, the archive functionality for apps has been a lifesaver. It basically packs apps into a specific format, keeps their entire state, and stores it on the disk. This also completely stops the app from running in the background and any other functionality that we don't need.
When we need to access the app again, we just have to restore it, which actually downloads the app and puts the app data back into it. It brings us back to exactly where we were before.
I do this to a lot of my apps these days, and it works very well. When we look at it, apps are nothing but a logged-in state for services that makes it easy to access them. On a typical web browser, you would have to keep logging in every now and then. Apps have a more persistent logged-in session that sometimes lasts forever as well.
we need better apps to bypass apps and user hostile websites. more newpipes and noras.
When an app asks you to login again almost every day, it's infuriating; an app should remember you indefinitely!
I try to never use apps anyway, because adblocking on them is hard or impossible (which is the reason they exist in the first place).
Then prepare to pay 150% for that enshitified Big Mac!
In Google's defense, they weren't the ones that championed the "everything must be an app" movement. My memory of the 2010s is that Google (and while they were relevant, Palm) pushed cross-platform web apps, but Apple ran a successful marketing campaign to convince everyone that everything on mobile must be a native app for reasons[1]. So we end up with a walled garden of native apps that must be approved by and pay a tax to the company that makes the OS.
The result is that instead of building one app that works on all platforms, software companies need to build three apps: Web, iOS, and Android. I'm sympathetic to why most software companies (including my own) choose to just build a web app wrapped in a native wrapper. If a company does decide to build a totally separate iOS app, I dunno, it seems reasonable not to build support for every single niche feature that the web app has. I'm not sure I get the outrage here, especially since Google has a long track record of preferring web apps to native.
[1]The "reasons" primarily are that Apple refused to support PWAs, hamstrung mobile Safari, and refused to allow third-party browsers. So while it's true that native apps can offer a better experience than mobile web apps, that's mostly just because Apple artificially restricts web apps.
Oh don't, I remember being at a Google PWA Conference where they showed a world where you walked up to a coffee machine which served you a website over some local Bluetooth beacons, you asked for a coffee and it made it. It was such a hopeful concept looking back.
They even called it "Physical Web". It was a lovely concept - even if it did abuse Bluetooth beacons somewhat.
I'm still off and on trying to do this. Would be so helpful for IoT things. Can't figure out with all the PAN stuff what technology to use in what way
I can see why it didn't catch on. The phone user would prefer to use the on-machine UI needed for regular users and bigger.
Even Apple, before caving in, didn't want apps. On the original iPhone there was no SDK, Jobs' "sweet solution" to expanding functionality was web apps pinned to the home screen.
Everyone complained, loudly, and they caved in and launched the app store.
The complaints at the time were entirely valid. The state of web development for mobile was pretty dire. HTML 5 wasn't released until 22 January 2008. People wanted to build apps for iOS in XCode. Nothing else would have been acceptable.
IMHO the web community dug their own grave here. WAP/WML and whatever it was the Japanese phones used was a better starting point than HTML etc as they'd already solved a lot the big problems around mobile developement. They were not perfect and support was terrible but they were much more focused on the problem of mobile app development than the "everything is the same nail" approach of HTML.
Even to this day the UX experience of web apps in HTML/Javascript/CSS is subpar to native apps and I say that as someone who spends their day developing such web apps. You can only put so much lipstick on the pig.
What complaint?
People complained there was no SDK or way to install software on the iPhone outside of web apps.
They did more than complain. They made their own hacker SDK. It was a pretty awesome time. For the first few years the black market software world on iOS could do a ton of fun things that official apps couldn’t at all.
Well I wanted a way to write native software for the iPhone at the time.
In fairness though, I think its pretty clear that mobile is the future. Something like 40% of Gen Z only access things by mobile.
(Source: https://www.emarketer.com/content/search-behavior-being-rede...)
So in the future, when you have those three versions you need to build, its starting to make sense to have the mobile version be the full functionality version. Although, I guess it would be crazy to go to a link on your computer and be told it only works on mobile.
The article you linked is about social media as the proxy for information discovery as opposed to search.
> …clear that mobile is the future…
And also, "mobile" is tangential to "app" vs "website".
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> [1]The "reasons" primarily are that Apple refused to support PWAs, hamstrung mobile Safari, and refused to allow third-party browsers. So while it's true that native apps can offer a better experience than mobile web apps, that's mostly just because Apple artificially restricts web apps.
This is disingenuous. Quoting Steve Jobs himself:
> We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
> This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.
Originally about Adobe's Flash, but can apply with no editing (!) to Google Chrome :)
But all of those problems with 3rd party libraries also do exist in native iOS development?
Hence Jobs’ rationale for providing native SDKs for iOS development. It wasn’t about any third-party libraries per se, it was about wanting the native SDKs to be the principal way to deliver experiences on the platform. I’m not entirely sure it was borne out by history, but that was his reasoning at least.
> My memory of the 2010s is that Google (and while they were relevant, Palm)
Interestingly, Palm (webOS) & Microsoft (Sidekick / WebTV) folks ended up creating/shaping Android.
I remember the “There’s an app for that” commercials well. I remember screaming at my tv that we already had a name for that- a program.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=szrsfeyLzyg&pp=0gcJCYsCo7VqN5tD&...
Google Earth is a fantastic computer program (which is being retired June 2027; stupid IMHO); Alphabet, Inc., wants you to instead "use the in-browser version of earth.google.com for a better experience."
When I attempt to load earth.google.com it is total dogshit, just a terrible all-around experience (with glitches and an additional layer of obfuscation between map and browsing: a 3rd-party web browser).
My RTX5070Ti renders everything so beautifully within the Google Earth program – smooth and fully-3D everything.
The only reasoning I can muster is that it's harder to embed advertisements/tracking within the program (compared to the website interface); but when I cannot use the application anymore, I will no longer use Google Earth (entirely) – which is unfortunate because it is a fantastic resource (I have a computer dedicated almost-entirely to Google Earth tasks; it is the only machine in my office that can contact Google servers).
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Yep. The pro-"web" faction's dominance inside Google died a long time ago.
When I started working there (2012) L&S were already openly pushing "mobile first" and then later even "mobile only" because they saw it (mobile adoption) as existential threat to advertising revenue and worried that us engineers had a desktop bias that was going to set them back. I worked on several products where the PMs saw the web as a hindrance not a goal. e.g. I worked on Google WiFi and there was never an out-of-box experience or administration story for it for browser. Us SWEs asked for it, said we'd build it even, and the PMs and leadership level said no.
Google makes a browser, but a large part of the company is openly hostile to the open web at this point.
"Never let an abuser take you to a secondary location": It's OK to offer an app, but if a site is pushing, pressuring or forcing you to get one, it's almost certainly because they want to do something abusive that they currently can't.
Installing an app is a matter of trust; trying to push me to install one against my will is the best way to demonstrate that you should not be trusted.
(Interestingly, I've heard a stance from technically well-informed iPhone users that don't see an app install as a large trust decision, because they assume that iOS is actually decent at protecting their privacy and rights in general. I don't know if that's true; on Android it certainly isn't.)
I'm a mobile dev and know the iOS ecosystem quite well, i can assure you that iOS APIs are locked and developers can access very little user data without user consent. What an iOS user is vulnerable to is fingerprinting (not too different than what happens on web tbh) and 0days. But given how valuable iOS 0days are it's unlikely they are used inside large scale generic apps and not for targeted attacks. Also it's unlikely that a random company sits on a 0days and uses it against its users.
So ultimately yes, installing an app on iOS is not a trust decision because the dev are very limited in what they can do. The biggest trust decision is toward Apple that might have private secret APIs allowing them to do things developers cannot. That's a possibility, but overall Apple business has never been around ads, big data and users profiling so the chances are not this high.
Actually there are a lot of information that an app can do by default without asking for any permissions. You can check this opensource iOS app: https://github.com/mysk-research/loupe
For instance: check if some apps are installed or not, and a lot of small informations about your device that can fingerprint your phone with 100% accuracy (like the exact time where the phone was setup).
I know Loupe, very cool project. Yes, as I said fingerprinting is the biggest risk, but personal data, photos, location, microphones, camera access are locked (which is what concerns most people).
Fingerprinting I would argue it's a problem on all platforms though, web included.
> It's OK to offer an app, but if a site is pushing, pressuring or forcing you to get one, it's almost certainly because they want to do something abusive that they currently can't.
Every UK bank is, IME.
With banks I kind of understand it (for key storage/strong biometric authentication), even though the inability to move it to a new phone is a major pain especially on Android (not sure if some banking apps transfer on iOS, on Android, none do and enrolling an extra fingerprint wipes the keys from most/all existing ones...)
It isn't.
That would be my intuition, but can you elaborate what specifically the app (if not given extra permissions) can do? Assuming the user doesn't change settings, web sites (at least if used semi regularly) can store a persistent cookie, so keeping the user identified is possible with both.
The only thing I can think of is regular background pings to track the user through IP geolocation.
Unpermissioned access to all sensors like battery, acceleration. Hardware IDs. Background pings (as you said). Push notifications. Seeing which other apps are installed (maybe, I think that one got locked down). All kinds of fingerprinting.
Push notifications are the most likely abuse vector but are gated behind a separate permission. I think they locked down installed apps, and fingerprinting isn't really relevant if they can just set a cookie. Acceleration is also available on the web. Not sure about battery, but most apps (aside from Uber that increases the price if they think you're desperate) can't really do anything bad with that. So I don't see much left tbh.
> Android
I mean if you use Google products it can be assumed you don’t care about privacy anyway.
The binary decision into which walled garden you allow yourself to be locked in depends on more than one factor, and you don't really have a choice of "neither" nowadays.
I recently had a perfect storm of non-friendly technology.
I made one purchase on Amazon while connected to a VPN.
Amazon froze my account and demanded proof of identity.
Amazon don't accept an existing photo of primary ID for their preferred ID verification check, it must be a photo taken by a camera on-device, and I don't have a webcam on my desktop PC. Once you select the secondary method, it seems you can't go back to the primary.
My bank can't issue a statement on the mobile app.
My bank, even through the website, can't issue a statement that has the required details (name, credit card details - blanked except for last four digits, and transactions) that includes pending transactions.
I had to manually request a statement from my bank (via a phone call) that included the pending transaction, edit it in an image editing app, submit it to Amazon via their web-site.
None of the apps (bank, Amazon, government ID, camera) had the flexibility to solve the problem.
The root cause was using a VPN to make an online purchase of a $12 piece of hobby electronics.
Not only are apps broken, the current state of the internet (and the random ways companies try to enforce "security") is also broken.
>”Amazon don't accept an existing photo of primary ID for their preferred ID verification check, it must be a photo taken by a camera on-device, and I don't have a webcam on my desktop PC”
In my experience, it was not possible to complete the verification via computer, even with a webcam. The verification site assumes and seems to require that you use a cellphone.
Now I'm glad I didn't have a webcam. It would have just added a few more steps to my tale of woe ;-)
Yes, I spent about an hour trying to figure out how to make the webcam work, but I'm sure you would have figured out the limitation more quickly.
Just make a new account at that point, right?
Not OP
Unfortunately for me, a lot of my books are tied to them.
They come into your house and take your books back if you stop using your account?
Kindle / Audible.
so, not books.
If you think a book is made by the physical medium, you must think everything in paper is a book. The prose in a book has certain content structure, intent, and writing.
So unless a napkin and a receipt are books, what actually makes something a book is its content structure, intent, and writing. Not the paper it's printed on.
Number of pages is relevant. If it has five, it's only a booklet.
My Amazon account is, unfortunately, tied to AWS, Prime, Kindle as well as online shopping. I hate this, and I'm in the process of removing all of my stuff from all of these services.
I noticed a long time ago that Google apps are designed by people who never actually use them. Here's one example. I'm a big fan of reading, and it happened that I stack dozens and dozens of books on my GDrive, so naturally I use mobile Google Drive to download and send those books to the reader app on my iDevices. Finished books are renamed to have an exclamation mark at the beginning of the file name - that puts those books at the start of the list, so it is easier to visually tell apart once I've read them and have not. Obviously, the unstarted books fell off the bottom of the list. And here's the crazy thing - Google has put a big-ass plus button and a "scan document" button right in the bottom-right corner of the app screen, which effectively prevents me from opening the file menu for the last 2 books in the list. Very nice!
I think this is much less about Google developers not using their apps. My experience as a Googler is that people are actually quite good about working on apps they themselves use frequently. "Dogfooding" is a common term around the office.
What I think is going on here is:
* You have some app developers working on an app and caring about its particular user experience.
* Then you have framework UX designers/developers working on new design systems and rolling them out across hundreds of apps.
Those two have limited coordination with each other. So when a new design system like Material drops into every app, unconsidered interactions between the design system and the app's specific UI go sideways and no one is in a good position to notice or address it.
Google certainly takes the blame in this case, but I don't think it's a problem unique to Google either. There is always a tension between wanting a consistent user experience across many products and features and wanting a user experience that makes the most sense for one particular product or feature.
Yes, it's annoying that you can't get to stuff under the plus button. But users really do learn that "oh, the plus button will always be on the bottom right" and that provides real value to them for that to be consistently true across many apps. It makes each app easier to be productive in.
User experience design is hard and I don't think there's a silver bullet, though obviously this case is particularly annoying.
The silver bullet is caring.
There must be someone working on that app who notices those pain points.
"The turtoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over but it can't, not without your help. But you're not helping."
Why is that?
Perhaps they're incentivised not to care. Perhaps the job is just a paycheque. Perhaps they mirror those around them.
Either way, the end result is the same. They don't care and their users suffer.
Caring is a necessary but not sufficient condition. The people who care must also be in positions to do something about it, which can be difficult in very large organizations that are also trying to make large coordinated systemic changes like moving to a new design system.
In general, Google hates having customers at an institutional level.
They can't even get their icons right last I checked. For some reason Apple and Google decided every icon has to be a uniform shape (which makes them all bland and harder to distinguish) but their own app icons are still custom shaped wrapped in squircles.
Yep. Google’s apps are the prime example of astonishingly bad UX and terribly nonsensical UI. What’s funnier is that they all somehow manage to feel like both a badly realised rip-off wannabe native iOS app all the while feeling like a complete alien to the entire system.
It’s just BIZARRE. Google apps and services are such a travesty; I detest that people have become so accustomed to them they’re basically the norm. Google sucks. Period.
As a user, I don't want to install an app if I can do it on the web. Most "apps" these days are just web sites wrapped in an app. What's more, they're usually 100% dependent on REST APIs so there's little advantage to having the app anyway.
As a developer and (web) app vendor, I understand that many users still want apps. I just had a user ask when we'd be releasing our app for iOS. I explained that we did have an app and that it would be identical to what we'd release for iOS. Then I explained the maze of submenus she'd have to click through to get the icon on her home screen.
Apple and Google hate the open web so they make it excessively difficult to "install" PWAs and then in some cases, they're less functional than the website itself. More blame lies at the feet of Apple and Google than on web-first vendors who release sub-optimal apps as a delivery workaround.
We're not releasing apps yet precisely because I want us to be focusing on features. Having to target two additional platforms increases the surface area for testing and takes time away from developing features with the potential cost of releasing a "sub-optimal" app.
> Apple and Google hate the open web so they make it excessively difficult to "install" PWAs
On iOS, is it not just a matter of tapping the "send" button and tapping [+] Add to Home Screen?
What’s even worse is intentionally degrading performance for sign-in’s. This is still circumstantial but I’ve been looking into that over the past few weeks.
When switching between google accounts on a random app or game, no issue. Quick code, you’re in. When I switch between accounts on Claude on mobile, I have to sign in, enter the code, screen freezes, I sign in again, can’t verify it’s me, I sign again, wait 30 seconds, I’m in.
I have to sign in three separate times when signing into a single google account in Claude. For every single other app it’s very quick.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Anthropic and google are working together to degrade sign-in performance for multi-account users. I can’t fully prove it yet but I plan to be able to in the week or two.
It is possible that Anthropic (and OpenAI for that matter) actually put out some pretty low quality software.
If you’ve used Claude Code for any length of time you’re familiar with all of the strange rendering bugs, freezes, etc. OpenAI is even worse, their horrific software makes it difficult to _pay_ them, which should be top priority for a company.
It's weird to me how so many people just put up with crappy, low quality software. If you buy a physical good and its defective, you return it, stop buying that brand, maybe even leave a negative review or contact consumer reports, etc. If it does not live up to what was advertised, you go to the FTC.
But when it comes to software, we all just kind of accept that shitty software is the norm and totally fine? Let's start calling it what it is, its defective.
What's your alternative to these examples?
In my case, I use both, for different reasons, and continuously test other.
Anthropic finally added the ability to sort by spend.
I have thousands of people on an org. I had to go through every page to extract the top spenders.
Openai... you captured the sentiment.
Why wouldn't they just link your accounts together on the back end? It's more likely to be because Claude is fully vibecoded.
This is a constant argument i have with by business partner. He's always asking me "when are we making an app for our <SaaS>" and I always reply back: "We already have an app! It's just a PWA"
PWA's are freaking awesome for both users and developers. Users don't have to install a massive app and me as a developer can focus on making one platform better rather than 3.
And they are pretty freaking powerful in what you can do. Not to toot my own horn too much but I created an "app"[1] for viewing cities on the other side of the earth from where you're standing. It's got camera, gyro and GPS to determine what you're looking at to the folks I've shown it too, anyone non-technical has been completely fooled and thought it was a proper app.
[1]: https://earthview.sunny.gg
Imo, you already lost the argument when you have to explain that PWA is the "app". For most users, app is something they install from App Store or Google Play. I get the point of view from developers point of view, but unless the majority of the users are technical people, there's no reason to use PWA these days.
Idk if its not in their best interest or something, but app stores should just allow installing an "app", which is really just a bookmark to website and hides all of the normal browser UI without having to bundle the entire browser with the app.
The point of app stores is that they somehow curate the experience. They can't do that if you just ship a bookmark.
Also I don't think web views in most app stores (namely mobile stores) ship an entire browser. As a matter of fact you're literally not allowed to ship browsers in iOS and that's a huge slice of the market on its own.
The problem is if we dont have it available, we can't get the users to use it even if we wanted to. <
Though you’re limiting your growth potential here by letting your ideology get in the way. Mobile platform users when surveyed almost always overwhelmingly prefer native apps and it’s not even close.
I anticipate if you start getting public feature requests a native app will be at the top of the list.
I agree, presentation is a big issue with PWA's since you have to know how to add it vs just searching in the app store. I'm sure were going to get a native app eventually, though customers have not asked for one yet and seem to be pretty happy with the PWA.
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It would be amazing if everyone would boycott the app stores as much as possible and normalize PWAs. People would learn if they got common enough. But alas, I doubt this will happen.
PWAs suck and when I have to use one I immediately go find something else.
The author said it perself, "the greatest minds of our generation" working at Google, so those jagged edges are surely by design, and it's the rational most efficient solution in a economy of attention where the line between the product and the user is blurred.
In some cases it's just because the userbase using the web on their phone instead of the app is incredibly small and it's not worth funding feature parity. It can be difficult to distinguish this case from more hostile takes like reddit and Twitter.
Reddit has started putting up a paywall of sorts to block mobile web users, saying that instead, users should install the app. old.reddit.com remains as an ugly workaround.
The whole thing is nuts:
1. All of reddit's content is UGC. They write literally nothing themselves. There's a strong argument that everything there written by unpaid users should be considered a public good.
2. Tech companies are now, ostensibly, aware of value of having users who engage intentionally instead of compulsively. Mobile apps, with their notifications etc., encourage compulsion. Websites less so.
It will be an interesting reckoning when the polity wakes up to the idea that as social media companies don't pay for the content, they should have no right to restrict access to it. LLMs likewise wouldn't work at all without the petabytes of data they either got for free from users or purloined, and so the argument for their weights being public goods is similar.
old.reddit was the only tolerable interface but it is now login-walled too. God forbid you post any comments that deviate even slightly from the Reddit consensus or you will soon find yourself IP-blocked. That’s barely an exaggeration.
In this case the feature wasn't available on the mobile app, either.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness
I recently decided to use my google calendar to track my mood, as part of my CBT therapy.
What baffles me is that, there's no way in the web app to assign a default calendar for new events. When I create a new event on the web, I have to scroll through all the calendars that I have and choose the one that I want every time. Meanwhile, in the mobile app, I can simply tap on a new block, the event window appears, and the selected calendar defaults to what I used for my last added event.
I think the bigger issue there is that you're trusting Google with your health data. Surely there's an offline calendar app that could help you track it just as well. Anyway, I hope you benefit from the therapy regardless of how you decide to track it.
everyone is allowed to take their own risks. I don't pay for contents insurance. I'm up around a $1000 on that bet so far.
If the lose isn't going to dramatically impact your financial wellbeing then insurance is always an irrational bet.
It's not irrational if you know that the insurance company has mispriced your policy, and filing a claim won't be more trouble than it's worth.
Getting a contents policy in a safe neighborhood where you know that there's little risk is likely not a good deal. Getting a contents policy when you've learned that your neighbors are getting into hard drugs is probably a good deal.
Paying $19/mo for third-party full coverage + theft on your $1,000 mobile phone is probably not a good deal even if you know you are high risk, for the simple reason that at $19, they game must be that they will find any reason to refuse to pay, and will give you a poorly refurbished phone for your troubles if you make them honor the insurance.
ye the sums would be different if I had dependents, but I'm fortunate that I don't.
You might like Daylio. It's free, local-first (with optional backups to your own cloud or device), and has a good UX.
I don't mind apps, even apps that are basically just browsers showing a web site. The biggest reason is that apps, at least on iOS, just behaves better. It might be that the auth persists longer or that there are notifications or whatever.
It's not without issues obviously. Most of the time the first thing I have to do is update the damn app just to order a burger or park my car or whatever it is I'm using it for. And it's dumb that we need to have a 150 meg download (per update...) for what's basically a bookmark.
But still, the better integration with my phone's native stuff like keychain etc usually means I'm more satisfied after using an app to do something, than using the _exact same web page_ in my mobile browser.
> Most of the time the first thing I have to do is update the damn app just to order a burger or park my car or whatever it is I'm using it for
It's interesting how different things bother people in different ways. Because when this happens to me, I want to throw my phone into the sun. It's a viscerally irritating experience that sticks with me for the rest of the day.
I have my essentials (browser, email, Signal) of course. But besides that, nearly all my apps fit into one of the following 3 categories: transit (airlines, rideshare, city bikes), finance (banks, brokerage), and...
baseball. MLB has put a shocking amount of effort into their apps. The ticketing experience is genuinely really good, so much better than any ticketmaster trash. All apps are trash, unless you're a baseball fan, in which case all but 2 apps are trash. I guess.
Unfortunately it's the norm in large companies to never polish anything. Google has gotten worse and worse at this. But Microsoft is king. They bring a team together to build a new thing and then as soon as they can check that feature box on their sales deck they move that team off onto something else. Loop is a good example of this. Microsoft started building a Notion competitor and then just stopped. The Loop component model got pulled into Copilot and integrated everywhere. But you still cannot move a document between workspaces - one of the most basic pieces of user functionality ever.
I also look at Application Insights / Azure Monitor w/ their OTel SDK, Teams, SharePoint, Visio, <insert MS product here>. Basic functionality is missing and requests are left open for years or decades. Nothing is ever polished. Nothing is ever finished. Everything is good-enough.
Then you have other sites/companies that go the opposite way: having functionality that is App-only. As an extreme example: my health insurance provider in Spain (Alan) is app-only. They don’t even have a website one can use. It is maddening for those of us who always prefer desktop over mobile.
What's even more maddening is that I bet their "app" is actually a WebView and provides no native functionality.
It's almost impossible to use social networks on mobile without installing their apps
When I got a new phone about a year ago, I decided that I wouldn't be installing any traditional social media apps (Tusky doesn't count) and that I'd use the web when "necessary". This has been a very successful experiment and resulted in me looking at Instagram _maybe_ once per week.
It's impossible for me to use YouTube with the app. Safari + uBlock origin lite and I never see an ad.
DuckDuckGo app and "Duck Player" deletes the ads.
Yes we're solving an app problem with another app, but just highlighting that is a solution for the ads.
Most YouTubers still have sponsor sections on their videos so you probably do see some ads. Also why not pay for YouTube premium to remove the ads while still supporting the creators?
If you want to support the creators is through affiliate marketing by buying whatever they're selling, or by subscribing to them on Patreon – they earn next to nothing from YouTube.
SponsorBlock is the answer to that.
They artificially lock it down, because the app will give them more data to collect than the web app plus a larger surface to annoy the user with notifications, widgets, and other advertisement.
When I rejoined X at the start of this year I consciously decided not to install the app on my phone. It's addicting enough in the web browser on my laptop.
So I have zero social media networks on my phone and, looking at everyone around me who does, I'm very pleased with this decision.
X won't even let me register an account without downloading the stupid app. Then I download it and it just says something isn't right and refuses to let me register the account anyway. Probably thinks I'm a bot.
It's probably better this way. Hopefully bots will kill off social media before even more countries decide to ban it.
The X PWA is very good on both desktop and mobile. I prefer it to the Android app.
I just finished making a social application (for skateboarding) with the express intent of making it fully featured/pleasant to use on mobile simply as web app, without login or installation.
Web is such a powerful platform and so many people still treat their web applications like they're just interactive documents. I think the most bothersome thing on mobile web is if an application has shifting framing ("chrome") when you pan around, like you're looking at a PDF.
https://skatanica.com
Let me know, but I developed it almost entirely focused on iPhone SE as a target to give myself the most claustrophobic possible experience, and I think that helped guide a lot of the decisions.
Didn't use to be. I stopped using facebook shortly after they blocked messenger on their webpage, so jokes on them I guess.
I wish Messenger had an auto-reply feature: "I probably won't see your message for a while because I don't install Meta apps on my phone"
That function is called the delete account button. When someone can't message you with Facebook Messenger, they use something else.
I found that installing facebook dot com to my Home Screen on iOS works acceptably. Lets me check in on things every now and then and still be confident they’re very limited in what they can track.
Messenger doesn’t work but luckily I rarely if ever use it.
Even more of a reason to get off them
They're digital drugs
If you don't install it they keep you from spending time on them. It's a feature, not a bug.
Not to mention the battery savings when nothing pulls those "engagement" posts in the background...
you can with liberedirect or ublock origin and firefox for android.
So there's 2 reasons to not install apps
Bug or feature?
The thing is that mobile browsers fill fight you tooth and nail against providing a good experience to your users. There is the obvious stuff like lots of API not being available, but the bigger issue to me is how many common convenient UI patterns that users accustomed to native apps expect are really painful if not impossible to provide, e.g. there is no reliable way to react to the keyboard opening, or how scrolling will expand and shrink the browser UI. CSS Houdini being abandoned also makes it really hard to properly do really custom UI. I really wish there was platform with the distribution and security model of the web that was designed for apps from the ground up.
I've had an issue where, when clicking a "locations" link on a web site, Google Maps "permanently" added a bunch of locations to my map. This was quite unexpected on my part.
(I think it was for a chain or churches or a similar civic organization)
IE, I think someone made a group of locations in Google Maps, and then for the "Locations" link on their website, just linked to the group of locations in Google Maps. In the browser, this works fine, but on mobile, Google Maps just imports the link to my account without asking.
I don't like paying $1K for a phone. My current one was CAD$140 at Costco three years ago. It has 32GB of built-in storage which is always 90% full regardless how diligent I am at moving stuff to the SD card, and it has 3GB RAM which was fine three years ago, but is now insufficient to run certain apps at all. Without anything else (that you have control over!) running, start the app, immediately killed due to out of memory. These are apps which were snappy and reliable a few (forced) updates ago. No new features, maybe some UI restyle, but now too bloated to use.
Time to upgrade to the latest cheapy? Well, thanks AI boom, there aren't really any cheapies any more. And even $600+ phones now come with... drum roll... 5GB of RAM. OK, which maybe covers me for another two years of bloat until I'm right back where I started.
Yes, it's possible to stay ahead of the bloat if you pay $1.5K+ for your phone and upgrade somewhat regularly. A colleague has hundreds of apps on his phone and they all work.
Me, I use a desktop browser. Except for certain things that are only available as an app. The xda-developers types say no problem, just unlock and root the d*mn thing and then you can run debloating tools and if you jump through all the right hoops the banking app will still work. Bleech.
I have moved out of the U.S. into South America and one of the nice side-effects of this is that apps from local companies are well optimized here. It's not that there's an extreme level of competency or an optimizing culture. It's simpler.
People have cheaper phones here, so devs are naturally more exposed to low end hardware.
It's been awesome for me! I have a fairphone 4 which isn't top of the line at all anymore but the apps work MUCH better here on average than when I was in the US. Websites also load quicker too for similar reasons.
I use LineageOS with MicroG and decided probably 5 years ago to just use PWAs instead of apps for any online service and grab whatever other utilities I might need from Obtanium or F-Droid. Also the experience on my Thinkphone is the exact same as it was on my Pixel XL 2.
I know not everyone can do this, and some PWAs are downright terrible if they work at all, but for my usecase it has been great.
The most painful part of this is that, at a certain point in mobile app development, many of them switched to using web frameworks instead of native. We're literally figuratively building web apps to replace native apps that replaced web apps, and hoping to performance optimize them back into near-native.
IDK to me this is the opposite of the usual problem, which is that some features are only available in the app. I will happily use the desktop browser.
I listen to Radio 4 quite a bit and occasionally want to check the schedule (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/schedules/bbc_radio_fourfm)
On mobile, Googling 'radio 4 schedule' is the quickest way, and the only negative bit about the entire experience is the popup that tells me 'it's better in the app'.
It's not. Not by any metric.
My search and opening a webpage takes a second or two. Opening the app takes several seconds, then navigating to the Radio 4 page and scrolling down the schedule takes several more.
I submitted a bug report on the topic and they basically told me "we hear you but shush and use the app".
If you use brave or Firefox and ublock origin. You can just block the elements. I do this on so many sites now.
While ads are blocked I still remove tonnes of needless elements on websites I frequent. Hide little banners or app reminders.
If only Google had a UI framework that would let them build apps and target all platforms.
Yeah. The problem is, they have 7 cross platform UI frameworks...
The anecdote in the article is at odds with the title.
* In the anecdote, the problem is that the web version works better and the app is missing functionality.
* The title pays reference to an annoying observation about many products where the web version lacks functionality the app has.
Both are frustrating. If a company is going to bother to have both an app and a website, users deserve an experience where both are fully featured. It should be an professional embarrassment for a company to have to route users from the app to the site or vice versa because one is half-baked.
Have some God-damned professional pride and do it right.
The post is pointing out the irony. Corpos will tell you that "it works better in the app", and that is dubious at best.
Ryan Air just introduced the super-annoying requirements of needing the app to download your boarding pass (which of course they could just provide from the website).
I think they do it to be able to send you notifications and sell you more flights, but I don't understand why they need to be so anti-user. I try to NOT fly Ryan Air unless there is no other airline available. I'd rather pay twice as much than support their poor and sometimes borderline-criminal business practices.
That's why I made https://github.com/Cabbache/ryanair-cli
The Aztec-to-half-Blocks renderer is neat! :-)
Very nice
# Me too
I recently chose to fly with a MUCH more expensive airline than deal with this (and yes, I was spending my own money).
Ryan Air is the pits.
I sell stuff ocassionaly on a "local" platform called MercadoLibre (like, I could afford a new handlebar for my bicycle so I could sell there the old one). Mercadolibre kind of wants to be the argentinian Amazon, even lobbying in the argentinian government so they will ban similar platforms from other countries. With time, MercadoLibre has become incredibly hostile and greedy for us small sellers, while favoring corpos.
They charge you 25% for each sale you do via their platform, but the latest thing they did was to force you to "identify" you are you via a website where they track your face features and scan your ID "because of security". Yeah, that sounds good, so I did that in 2021.
They asked this again last year because of reasons. But this time they won't let you use a regular web browser: they forced you to do this via their app. No matter how much you try, it will always fail citing "compatibility issues" or "errors". I tried to complain but their customer support is incredibly shitty, if you even manage how to find to contact them.
But oh surprise, their "app" is just a web wrapper.
I bet they had to change identity verification providers so that's why you have to re-validate again.
It's a shame there's no alternative to Meli. I'm shopping around for a macbook and I would much rather have a marketplace with verified identities and profiles than the shady whatsapp groups and contacts I'm finding.
Most companies mostly want app access because you get a bunch of APIs with which to annoy users with marketing notifications, tracking, and url handling.
Google Dev are incompetent it seems. Had "highlights" for June and July in photos. Guess what is disabled in my account? I had to set two dates explicitly: one in the early past and one in the distant future -- now I seems to work.
And the new icons of their apps look like a kindergarden project. Can't they just leave the design alone, or ask the user? Seems impossible.
On an iPad, the web version is almost always objectively better.
Since about 2018 or so, most apps have failed to properly support rotating the device. When you load the same service in a web browser, you gain that feature back. Facebook is a big example.
Other apps actually have MORE functionality in the browser than their app version. This is why PWAs are now much more preferable than before.
When I was job hunting earlier this year, LinkedIn on my phone told me to install the app. Sure, why not? So I did. It refused to authenticate and never worked. One good point is that at least the mobile web version didn't lock me out with an impassable overlay like some websites are starting to do.
The "use desktop site" button bypasses at least half of those popups.
If the barrier to entry is "own a smartphone", there will inevitably be people who will be excluded. Lots of fantastic reasons to unplug in 2026, year of our plague. Even if you don't go so far, conservative allowances for data collection are one of the few digital freedoms left.
Puzzling to see your factual comment downvoted.
I myself do not have a personal smartphone (and my work smartphone is powered off the moment the clock says 5pm).
Frankly, my life is better for it.
I never know unless somebody thinks I was(n't) being sarcastic or glib or something. I try to be straight forward because fundamentally, I don't like the "obligation to be online" for how much I personally enjoy tech. C'est la vie!
These days, applications (whether they're web, mobile, or desktop) with absurd shortcomings in terms of UI/UX are a daily occurrence, yet most people seem to have become incapable of noticing, or at least of giving sensible feedback on the matter.
Obviously, the bulk of it is noticeable in notoriously crapware software like management systems, but it's increasingly emerging just about everywhere.
I wonder how long it will take to understand even just this small slice of the problem, without even getting into "anything apps" and the need to return to the OS as a single integrated application/framework with end-user programming—a trend of which we're only seeing a few hints.
The Google Calendar app has a long standing bug where the search view will not show the latest calendar entries unless you manually scroll to the bottom and hold the scroll view there. It’s been like this for years despite repeated bug reports!
If your app can be implemented in React Native with no developer pain, it should just be a website.
Native is a much better experience than mobile websites when you actually use the features and power of these fairly advanced computers we carry around in our pockets.
On the other hand, the existence of alternative implementations in the form of mobile apps can on occasion be a saving grace when web apps are halfassed the other way. It's so frustrating when a poorly made web app that e.g. eats way too much memory, keeps cores spinning for no reason, chokes its tab process, doesn't handle history correctly, etc is the only option available and you have no choice but to live with it.
It makes me wish it didn't become the norm to lock down site/service APIs are reserve them for private use only so crappy web apps would have to compete with superior third party alternatives.
But it DOES work better in the app.
Binding the user in endless loops. Tracking his exact behavior. Avoiding pesky thinks like uBlock.
All of that works way better in an app than on a website.
> To subscribe to a new calendar, you must use a computer web browser. You can't subscribe to a calendar in the Google Calendar app for Android, iPhone, or iPad.
Isn't this likely because Google Calendar was abused a lot in phishing? e.g. fake "CLICK TO PROCEED" links as ads -> redirected to Google Calendar named "CLICK [+] SIGN TO CONTINUE" -> "URGENT: re-enter your credit card number at https://scam.example/buy-us-bitcoin" fake schedules recurring every x minutes etc.
So I love good old fashioned desktop-oriented websites, and the most complex thing I do on my phone is Google Maps... but I also recognize this is not true of the general population.
Almost no one else except the PC gamers I know really like using desktop (or laptop) computers. Most people love being able to sit on the couch and use apps on their phone. Its not like massive portions of the population were loving their desktops until smartphones arrived and they transitioned, no - smartphones are what helped the internet revolution really inseminate into the general population.
Something I didn’t see in the comments is highlighting the actual, very real, fact that the user was incensed by the app.
This is one instance, with one vendor, but our day is made up of thousands of interactions across multiple vendors. And all big (major) vendors seem to have these kinds of issues.
That's a problem because these interactions add up. To the point where I’ve personally been accused of “[liking] being angry”
I’m not sure what the answer is. But for me, I’ve been trying to find and use tools that don’t piss me off, paid or otherwise. So for mail and calendar, for example, I tried out https://www.hey.com/ and it not only does it not piss me off, but I like it for how I use calendar and mail.
I don’t know if anyone here has read Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich, but the book comes to mind every time I run into these kinds of frustrating interactions.
It’s a shame the web was so slow to adapt to this new mobile world. When it all started things like offline capabilities were very difficult to do on the web and native development felt necessary. These days the web can actually do a lot… but it’s too late. People expect to find something in the App Store, pinning a web site to their Home Screen is just not something they know they can do. So a lot of people waste an enormous amount of money on three different implementations for, often, simple CRUD operations.
That's not it. It's Apple. They are crippling the web on purpose.
We can't even have haptic vibration on Safari. And when we did for a little while earlier this year, it was because of a "bug" that that they promptly fixed.
Apple is not interested in making with apps as seamless and integrated as native because: money.
I agree that Apple has been awful here. But there are countries deeply dominated by Android that still heavily use apps when they could be using PWAs. I don’t mean to let Apple off the hook but I also don’t think they’re the only ones to blame.
Again, this is Apple's work. Developers don't make good web apps when they cant work on iOS.
https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/
[dead]
As an iPhone user: good. There is no good that can come from some dipshit website product manager being able to make my phone vibrate on a website. None at all.
An installed PWA should be able to do all the same things an installed app should do. The general web should not, and no one is arguing for that.
Parent comment is talking about PWA APIs that only show up when the PWA is added to the Home Screen, not via safari.
Is there any good that can come from a dipshit mobile product manager being able to make your phone vibrate on an app? Is there actually a meaningful difference?
Games are the usual reason in an app. Being able to do it as a “drive by” on a website though: absolutely hell no.
Sounds like it would be ideal to add it to Home Screen webapps only, just like web notifications. And yet…
Yes, because visiting a website is much easier to do even unintentionally. The last thing I want is my phone to vibrate as I scroll past an ad
Which is why things like permission prompts exist.
I believe it is more nefarious than that. The web strived for mobile native parity but web standards committees are mostly headed by delegates of companies like google and apple; the same companies that have an interest in crippling native web features to push users to their app stores, where they can extract money via fees. PWAs on iOS are a good example of how this kind of gate-keeping looks like
I miss the mobile-versions of websites for low-bandwidth connections (the ones that started with "m."). They were lightning fast, even on slow networks, and were laser-focused on top-of-funnel user activities. Facebook's implementation was extremely solid (when I used them). Messaging worked as well until they gated that behind full Facebook.
I think the web did fine. People can't pin a web app because Apple made it difficult for them to do exactly that.
Burger menu -> share -> add to home screen is difficult? How do you pin a web app in Android then?
There’s a whole API that the browser provides to prompt users to install:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/befo...
I’m not sure one can say Apple is intentionally making it difficult to install a web app to the Home Screen because they haven’t implemented a draft proposal to the w3c working group that proposes a spec only chrome has implemented and no other browser except chrome and its derivatives supports.
https://mashable.com/article/apple-reverses-decision-home-sc...
Yes one can. They got greedy.
https://williamkennedy.ninja/apple/2024/01/30/steve-jobs-int...
Yes and no.
“Add to Home Screen” living on the share menu is as insane as “Find on Page” living there. Which both do. And I don’t think there’s a master plan behind “find on page” being tucked away bafflingly on the share button.
It’s just bad UX. No conspiracy here.
It's not a conspiracy that they once promoted PWAs as being the future and then reversed course so far as to removing the ability completely.
They only removed it completely in a jurisdiction where they were being told that they had to open all of their internal APIs around web applications to all comers if they were going to use those APIs in their own applications. They claimed (whether you believe them or not) that doing so would open risks they didn’t want to take and so they removed it in that jurisdiction.
If this was some grand plan to stop the few hundred PWAs out there entirely, one would think they would have removed the PWA functionality in other less hostile jurisdictions where no law makers were looking to force a change. I could absolutely believe that the security risks were overblown, but if the assertion is Apple is trying to suppress PWAs, they’re doing a pretty bad job of it given they could just turn it off in the US and no one would blink an eye.
Both of you are conflating conspiracy with incentives. They have no incentive to promote a distribution model outside of the confines of the app store where they make all their money.
Sure I agree they have no incentive to promote them. But your claim wasn’t that they don’t promote them. You claimed that they’re making them exceedingly difficult to install. Apparently because they put the command for that in a consistent menu position for decades and removing the functionality temporarily in a single jurisdiction.
If they wanted to make it “exceedingly difficult” they could be disabling it in all jurisdictions, or hide it behind layers of developer mode dialogs and warnings. They could remove the instructions for how to do so from the on device help. They could require you to re-pin it every 3 days like they do for self loaded apps. They could stop adding support for newer PWA APIs as new ones get standardized and they could deprecate and remove APIs that already exist. We all know Apple isn’t precious about backwards compatibility.
If the goal is to make using a PWA “exceedingly difficult” Apple is failing miserably despite being very successful at making side-loading apps “exceedingly difficult”
> “exceedingly difficult”
Who are you quoting?
But sure call me crazy for thinking it's user hostile to put install / add to home 5 taps deep into the menu. That has nothing to do with supporting a 2015 web API. They would go on to add smart app banners to promote native app store apps instead.
Edit: didn't realize smart app banner was 2012
I apologize, it does seem like I misread and added the qualifier, you just claimed they made it “difficult”. My mistake.
But I still disagree that it is “difficult” or “user hostile” to put the command to add a web app to your Home Screen 3 (not 5) taps away. Menu -> submenu -> command is not user hostile or difficult. The command is in the same place as all the other “do something with this page” commands. It’s not hidden behind toggles, it’s not buried in submenus away from other similar actions, it’s not in its own menu or an activity you have to leave safari for and initiate from the Home Screen instead. It takes just as many taps to change to a specific tab as it does to save a PWA
Have you ever tried communicating this to consumers of a web app? Our android customers get a nice little install popup or a push of a button.. it's pretty seamless. With TWA it's also trivial to put it on the play store.
How is "share" intuitive here?
I want to pin the app, not share.
That seems purposefully misplaced. As usual with malicious compliance.
In Android: Menu > Install and create shortcut. Much cleaner, intentional, and visible with a single click for me.
It’s intuitive in as much as anything on smart phones is, because the share menu is the OS mechanism for sending data from any iOS app to somewhere else. You use the same menu to save a file to Dropbox, put a photo into a note, add a bookmark etc. Effectively if you want to take something that lives in an app and have it live somewhere else, you use the share menu.
You're not sending any "data" though, much less sharing anything.
I just asked my colleague and they had no clue how to do it in their iPhone. I guess a win for Apple.
Did your colleague even know that such a thing was possible at all, because it’s been in the share menu pretty much since day one. Sure it could be put somewhere else but it’s also been in a consistent spot for generations of iPhones, and the built in help app/manual will tell you how to do it if you don’t know how. If you want to argue the menu should be renamed, you won’t get any argument from me. But a poorly named menu is bad for initial discovery, but it does nothing to make the actual process any more difficult.
The claim wasn’t that Apple put it in a poorly named menu, or that the share menu is bad UX in general. The claim was that iOS users can’t pin web apps because Apple made it “exceedingly difficult” to do so. A 3 click navigation through the standard menus that has been consistent for multiple generations and is documented in the on-device help doesn’t qualify as “exceedingly difficult”
It’s been under “Share” since before the term “Progressive Web App” was coined.
Apple is almost completely to blame for all of this.
https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/
The feature shipped in the app. That's the only reason i have it.
I thought this was going to be about Yelp. Yelp.com from a phone-sized browser constantly screams "It's better on the app!". That's because the browser interface has been made very bad, with popups and other screen-obscuring junk using up much of the small screen.
(Yelp is mostly useless now, because they're not effectively purging dead businesses. About a third of listings in popular categories seem to be dead.)
And this is why I usually say, I will look at it when I am in front of my computer again for most things, side from a free does where I mainly am reading.
It made even sadder by the fact that often the "app" is more or less just webview.
More and more I'm giving up on apps, and online self-servicing as the structures and scope of what either one can do is increasing narrowing. It's much much easier to just call these days (fortunately AI answering the phone is still not prevalent). Customer service will obviously inform you that "You can just our self-service solutions in the future", even if you literately just called in because you can't due to inflexibility and options you don't understand.
Also "you can manage it from your phone" is not the sales pitch it once was, because it's no longer the entire truth. You can in fact ONLY manage it from your phone. If whatever you're selling requires an app, chances are that I'm not buying and if it's a service, I will seek out your store or staff and make them do it for me.
My ISP removed the ability to manage your network with a browser. Not over the cloud -- they stripped the admin panel from their firmware and require you to use the app. The app is filled with dark patterns that try to get you to use their firewall and their tracking and enable their public Wi-Fi hotspot and not do port forwarding or DNS configuration or separate SSIDs or etc. Also, every few weeks it decides it's outdated and blocks you from doing anything until you update from the app store. Also, every time you open it there's an annoying loading screen with an advertisement. And all throughout the app, everywhere you go there are advertisements for tertiary purchases and offers. Like, yeah, I get that the app needs to exist for these fancy special stupid animations of the router with the waves coming off of it, yeah I see the wifi coming off of the router with all the buttons around it, showing all the things I can do with it, and then I scroll right past that and have to go down to the equipment details and then go into the advanced settings to even configure any of the stuff I actually want to configure about my network ever. And yeah, I know it's the super duper app with all the special services, I know I can get superduper mobile phone line and also TV and cable and also free Peacock streaming service! with the purchase of whatever, and also, did I know that fiber speeds are now being offered but not in my area? Did I know that other areas benefit from up to 2 gigabit speeds?! I better check now to see if my area qualifies! (It doesn't, I made an FCC complaint about it and they responded to tell me it might happen eventually and it hasn't happened)
Literally bought new networking gear from Ubiquiti because of this crap, and could not be happier with it. Only problem is the ISP literally blocks any modem that's their stupid combo router modem Internet-of-Shit cloud-connected hardware-as-a-service garbage. Modem works for a few hours, then the line goes suddenly dead (even to their own router) until I've called them and gotten told that my modem is faulty even though it was working fine until they cut the line, etc. so I have to deal with still having their router in front of my own gear
Oh I'm so glad it works this way round too. Kinda sick of the web being ruined by http pages that tell you to download a binary. Is anyone bothering trying to narrow that gap between native and web on phones so we can resume the process we were undertaking back in 2010 before smartphones re-promoted binary applications for whatever reason?
Yes, the AllTrails app does this. You can't send a route to your Garmin watch or whatever in the app, you must do it in the browser version.
And since having the app installed at all sort of hijacks AllTrails links, you really don't even want it installed at all. Yet you constantly are told to install the app...drives me up the wall.
Reddit is the worst. Their app-transition code is 10+ years old and still full of recursive loops. 30% of the time i drop into the App Store even when i have the app installed. 75% of the time I lose navigation. And there’s no “remember this” button.
At least Google makes an attempt at usability. It’s not like the product team has a choice.
Gmail mobile app doesn't let me search in the "trash" or "spam" folder.
Opening Gmail in mobile browser does not work too.
I have to open it in the browser - then "request mobile website" - then try to search there - aaaahnd it still reset to the mobile version ever other request.
I don’t understand all the technical challenges, but I sure hope we can close the gap between what we can do in the browser versus an app. What apps do is gate communities and gate information and gate people and this is the opposite of an open Internet that should be a benefit to humanity.
To me the most common issue for apps is that they don't have tabs. Damn we solved this issue in IE7 and I'm still limited to "one window" on my supercomputer-level pocket PC. Inconceivable. I'll keep using the app in the browser.
For me, to install an app it must be very very important. Like banking. Otherwise… Gone, gone gone.
What really gets me is when an app highjacks a link to the site, and then doesn't know what to do with it, when just opening the link in the browser would have been perfectly functional. Email unsubscribe links are a particularly annoying example of this.
Google has a lot of these inconveniences, super easy to fix but for some reason the don't.
A lot are saying that they prefer websites over apps but at least apps can't force you to upgrade to the latest version while a website will always serve you the latest version. Ofc that doesn't address all the downsides of an app
The simplest barrier to using an app for me is that most do not implement tabs. Tabs are extremely useful! Even when the app interface may be better than the web interface, I will usually find myself opting for web specifically for this reason.
Hah. I was trying to buy something on the BestBuy website. I’m not sure what kinda of bitcoin miner they’re running on that site, but it repeatedly manages to crash the tab as I was trying to browse. I had to eventually just download the app.
I take "It works better in the app" as confirmation that the app steals your data, tracks your location, etc. I wasn't going to run an 'app' in any case, but pushing confirms the decision.
Humanity would progress leaps and bounds if every app was deleted, and people just made websites that worked for phones instead.
Yes, I know some apps wouldn't make it in the browser. These are sacrifices I am willing to make.
My UK based bank ringfences some processes behind the app, and some behind the website. Setting up an automatic direct debit? Browser. Want to approve a one off payment? App. Absolute nonsense.
"you must use a computer web browser".
Yeah, and I have one on my Android phone!
> Many companies want a permanent presence on your homescreen and think you're too thick to use your browser's bookmarks feature.
I thought that they just want to collect more data about you.
An app is a way to bypass the privacy protections that a browser might layer on top, and gather yet more data about you, show ads, etc, etc. That is the real motivation.
Calendar on Android already talks to the network...the same URL only subscribes from desktop. So is that missing webcal/text/calendar handoff, or a Play-release hole?
So what's the solution again? Everything as a web app?
The solution is for companies to stop half-assing multiple things, and instead whole ass one thing.
It's impossible though. There actually isn't a single company alive that's capable of doing something like that, because it would require a decision maker to say "instead of these two things I want just one thing" and the second that happens it will be the end of the world.
Just let the app that’s clearly a web app pretending to be an app be accessible from the web
I just tried to make an Instagram post at www.instagram.com. It was possible a year ago, but they removed this option recently :(
I don't want yet another app on my phone.
My rule for apps these days is that if it is not available through F-Droid, I won't be using it.
Hot take but I think the entire concept of a "web app" needs to die. My web browser does not need access to my GPU, OpenGL/Vulkan, USB, MIDI, HID, <insert whatever other weird invocation of Cthulhu that exists here>. All of those are things a native app needs, not a website. IMO if you need that kind of access and your instinct is to do it as a "web app" your doing it wrong. Same thing, I would argue, for things even like WebAudio or WebSpeech. At this point my web browser is so complicated that it might as well be a mini-OS of it's own.
Like, I think that the instinct to make everything a web app is what partially leads to things like what this article complains about. Well, besides laziness, of course.
For many of these things we're not talking about a web app though. It's frequently just a form, disguised as something more. I agree that the browser should be stripped back, but none of those things prevent my banks website from allowing me to do a payment.
E.g. your fitness tracking app or your parking app, they don't need any of those features. They can work perfectly fine as simply forms, they aren't "apps".
I know, but my point was that this should just not be a thing. Our web browsers have become way too complicated and then you get outcomes like what tfa talks about.
I largely disagree. The web, and the browser by extension, is a multimedia platform. Thats text, images, videos, animations, interactivity, video calls, etc.
At the very least, I disagree about GPUs, OpenGL/Vulcan, and various audio and video related things.
> The web, and the browser by extension, is a multimedia platform.
Says who exactly though? The big companies and web devs who think your browser needs raw access to HIDs? Why exactly does a web browser need this level of access when a native application is far superior (and doesn't need to deal with the limitations of a web browser)? All this does is require that browsers be more and more complicated and be more and more invasive so that we can pretend that the web browser is our operating system. That in turn makes it harder and harder for web browsers to even be implemented in the first place.
It's better to break the app than to break the web.
I charitably assume if something can't be been done on a mobile it is because someone was granted an "on a phone" patent or clicking that button on a phone somehow will entitle Apple to 30% of my revenue stream in perpetuity.
I usually don't attribute it to malice or incompetence from hypothetical devs, instead I blame malice or incompetence from hypothetical lawyers.
ClassDojo.com, a platform for students/parents/teachers, is a major offender of this.
I recently got a Seattle ultrasonics knife, and it was mentioned in the email associated with my purchase it might need a software update
I rolled my eyes and braced for the inevitable pretty but buggy and slow app.
It didn't use an app. It used the Bluetooth functionality built into chrome and it's derivatives to talk to the knife, update it, and perform a calibration
I've only ever used the Bluetooth and serial for flashing esp32s and similar before. It was a wonderful experience
Yeah, we have one, and same thing. Bluetooth to a web URL on the phone and boom, new sharpening angle calibrator just works! Love not having to download a separate app.
a native app's job isn't to parallel the web app's feature set. a native app's job is to get you to accidentally opt in to all sorts of invasive surveillance and allow for a constant stream of attempts to grab your attention.
No, a native app’s job is to provide a cohesive, speedy and MUCH better interface to users; something that is quite impossible with a website.
> and think you're too thick to use your browser's bookmarks feature
To be fair, bookmarking is easy but browsing and locating a bookmarked URL is far from easy. To bookmark in chrome on desktop requires pressing an obvious star button on the right of the address bar (it's always there, so easy to locate). But browsing/locating a bookmark requires clicking on the vertical ellipses on the right-most of the browser, finding 'Bookmarks and lists' amongst a lot of wordy options, then the fun starts: you can scroll bookmarks but cannot even see the full bookmark (only the first 40 characters and favicon) and they're not even in alphabetical order. If you have several hundred, like I do, that's a lot of work, and consequently, I approximately never do it. Easier to copy the url into an email and send it to yourself.
For folks like myself who use different browsers across operating systems, it's even more convoluted for obvious reasons (e.g. I use safari on iOS and chrome on macOS, so something bookmarked on iPhone doesn't make it to macbook and vice-versa).
tl;dr bookmarks are a mess, even for the tech-savvy
I have 200+ apps installed on my phone.
I deleted 150ish.
I have no issues.
I will delete another 30 to see how it will go.
> This isn't the most complex software engineering task known to humanity. Add a + button. Pop open a text entry field. Validate. Save. Done. I'm sure even the shitty Gemini model can vibe code that in a couple of months, right?
Sick burn.
I tend to prefer using the browser, where possible, eschewing bespoke apps, but I would expect an app to have more functionality than the browser.
It's sad, when it doesn't.
I have a weird personal theory that whittling down the number of app vendors on your phone is just a good thing to do.
As a Pixel user, I've gotten my phone to just having four (4) third-party app vendors.
- Duolingo (I've never seen an app be so annoying in a positive way, I appreciate it)
- Nintendo (obvs)
- Caffeine (quick setting tile that keeps the screen on--should really be a native feature, and I hope that day comes soon so I can ditch this)
- Super Productivity (saved my life)
Having a banking app installed seems way riskier than using a website. If someone had access to my phone, the banking app stands out like a spotlight. But if it's not installed, they have to open the browser, guess which bank I'm using, and enter the right URL (possibly aided by autocomplete, possibly not).
It just feels like a safer, additional step. My bank's mobile website is junk but I'm not spending all day on it.
In summation, fuck your app, give me a website.
The problem is that at big companies such as Google, it can take months to plan out features and put them on the roadmap. That is, if they even get prioritized above other things to begin with.
There's another class of problem, websites that pretend to work in the browser but refuse to support any reasonable type of login session.
Like, sure, there are login sessions that expire after five seconds of inactivity. Sometimes it even turns out that they don't support passkeys or TOTP, and you have to add a phone number for SMS authentication, which reduces account security by letting attackers prove your identity.
I want a browser extension that automatically clicks those "I'm still here" pop-ups on scummy websites like this...
But they have an app. And they don't even shove it in your face that the experience is better with the app or whatever. But it is for one and literally only ever one singular reason: it doesn't log you out every five seconds
Why isn't AI filling all those gaps?
You still need the organizational conditions (the will, structure, processes) for someone to care, do, approve, and land the solution.
The no-Google-calendar-sharing-on-mobile is an absolute classic. I have personally seen multiple clumps of people huddled around a phone trying to figure out how to share a calendar with each other - fruitlessly until I butted in, because normal people don't know about desktop mode and even if they did would have no reason to think it necessary.
(If you didn't read the post, it doesn't work in the app either. It only works on "desktop.")
This past weekend I was flying on Delta and my first flight was delayed such that I was going to miss my connecting flight, so I rebooked onto a later one. During my layover I visited the gate agent to get a boarding pass with a seat assignment.
"Do you have the Delta app?"
"Nope."
Then he pressed a few keys on his keyboard and printed out a new boarding pass for me within five seconds. I couldn't believe he was trying to kick me over to the app if it was that easy.
Aer Lingus have introduced app-only self-service bag drops, which are invariably swamped with passengers trying to get them to work while a single staff runs around clearing on-screen errors and directing people to rescan, or reweigh their bags, or move closer to the window to get a 4G signal.
Meanwhile non-app users are directed to the otherwise idle staff at the check-in desk. It's bliss.
MLB is the exact opposite of this. You can't get tickets without the Ballpark app. No paper tickets at most stadiums. The app asks for all sorts of personal info too (which I usually spoof). They're even trying for biometric check-in now.
I have managed to print out a paper ticket (from some dark corner of the website) and scan it on the barcode scanner at an MLB stadium. The employees were surprised it worked.
WAIT WHAT
I'm going to try harder now!
Thanks, genuinely helpful
In reality I see the anti-app sentiment as mostly a scheme to get more data into the cloud, more traffic that can be collected and spied on, less power and control for the user, and demonizing local computing and users having control over their data. A scheme to give companies and government more complete control over everything you do. Basically further enshitification of computing infrastructure.
Looking at you Reddit.
One thing that annoys me to no end is when a mobile app can't even load without an internet connection. There's a plague of apps that are thin veneers over a web view. I get that this is easier to deploy and manage, but I find it a really poor experience compared to a well-designed mobile app.
This isn't about the app being unfinished, it's about Google deliberately half-assing support for open standards. They want you to be stuck in their calendar ecosystem so they make sure there's more friction adding a calendar from outside than adding someone else's Google calendar.
Another example, although this was from a year or two ago and I'm not sure if it's still the case: duolingo's website functions differently than the app and is just hands down better. turns out I could just export it as a PWA and so I could have my cake and eat it too.
Me and my wife share calanders both ways between Google cal and iCloud cal its an absolutely shit show to setup, and I also rember having to use the Web app for certain settings how can we not have solved this by now?
App vs website is purely taste. Some people will never install an app but will use your website. Some people love apps and will never use your website. Some people prefer apps to PWA when the app does thing, because what if it changes and enshittifies or just vanishes - an app doesn’t need to be updated. Some people prefer PWAs to apps because why would I bother with the endless updates just fix it on the website, in fact I don’t even want your shitty app at all why in Lord’s name is this an app?!
Sometimes… well sometimes there’s no dev resources available to make an app work in a way you’d expect. Google is just a tiny startup, be reasonable in your expectations.
Point is: if you actually want to reach a large audience — you want both. Also, don’t expect good experience if you use Google’s products.
the problem is that HTML is so bloated nowadays, that medium phones cannot deal with it, so apps always have better performance
Reminded me of this https://xkcd.com/1367
google cloud
Feels like this field has become a lot about doing the easy, visible parts, getting a month of attention, maybe a promotion, then moving on to the next "new project".
Meanwhile, the people who stay behind and actually make these half-finished apps work properly, maintain them and deal with all the boring problems rarely get the same credit or benefits.
Then let the app die on the vine for a while and ultimately abandon it a couple years later.
Google is notorious for prioritizing new features and new apps for promotion, so yes.
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