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Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

atrium.co

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Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#431

Post by EduardoBautista »

chaostheory wrote: post #212
EduardoBautista wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typescript is just a huge bandage. It doesn't change that JavaScript has horrible tooling that changes every full moon. Not to mention it still keeps many of JavaScript's horrible warts.

When you can't avoid Javascript (which is extremely likely now), Typescript is a huge boon. Not everyone has the luxury of working solely on the backend. Which "warts" does Typescript keep from Javascript?

Lack of a decent stdlib is a huge one. I would rather opt for Clojurescript or Elm.

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#432

Post by freedomben »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #389
rixrax wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is especially frustrating that many sites don’t allow Mailinator and other similar ‘one-time’ email systems to be used for registering an account. No way I am going to give you my email address up front before seeing the product. Now the solution is of course to have a separate gmail account to register. Most sites still allow user+site@gmail.com address syntax so that I can sometimes see who are leaking where.…

Yup. It's frustrating. One benefit of switching to mail on my own domain (powered by FastMail at the moment) is that instead of username@mydomain, I can also use antispamlabel@username.mydomain. Which is hopefully less common and too dangerous to automatically filter out in "data cleaning".

Man I so want to do that, but the pricing just seems outrageous at minimum $3/user/month, standard $5/user/month.

I've been wanting to hack together some scripts to use a serverless cloud provider like SES. Since I rarely check my email and almost never send any, it's crazy to pay such a high monthly fee.

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#433

Post by newsbinator »

airstrike wrote: post #250
ecp9 wrote: post #137

I don't even bother installing apps anymore, I don't have time to research whether or not they are going to abuse my privacy or have some horrendous TOS. I got my core 10 apps and haven't bought a new one in a year.

> I don't even bother installing apps anymore, I don't have time to research whether or not they are going to abuse my privacy or have some horrendous TOS. I'm going out on a limb but I'd wager you're not exactly representative of the general userbase for which apps are developed.

Most people don't know how to unsubscribe from mailing lists... that have mandatory unsubscribe footers.

HN users are far from representative.

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#434

Post by t0astbread »

I'm gonna play devils advocate here and say web apps aren't as pleasant to use on mobile phones as mobile apps and that's why mobile apps are still a thing.

I'm especially looking at things like touch gestures and native integrations (launcher icons, notifications, "share with" providers, maybe even a home screen widget). I know PWAs are a thing but afaik they don't solve all of the above problems or don't solve them well (for example there are still inconsistencies as to what is a PWA and how PWAs are handled across Firefox and Chrome).

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#435

Post by t0astbread »

obventio56 wrote: post #418

Antidotal (likely an outlier) but I’ve slowly deleted social apps (Facebook, Twitter, insta) in favor of using their mobile sites. My reasoning is three fold: mobile sites are pretty good, it’s harder for companies to mine my data in a browser, and honestly storage on my 16gig iPhone is far too valuable for a 300mb app!! I’m 18 (aka young and woke) btw. Side point: I still need Snap’s app but I’ve considered quitting…

> it’s harder for companies to mine my data in a browser

I agree with this but I'm curious: What protection measures do you take to prevent companies from mining your data in browsers?

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#437

Post by Retric »

rock_hard wrote: post #345
sslayer wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with the 99% estimate, I too take the same approach, and recommend the same to those who will listen. I would venture that number to be at least 80%

So you are saying that out of the 3B smart phone users in the world 600M will never install a app ever because they fear the abuse of their privacy or some horrendous TOS? Yeah, no! I think your intuitive judgement failed you here

A non trivial number of people don’t realize you can install apps. I know several non tech 65+ iPhone users the vast majority don’t use any app not installed on the phone.

Young kids seem to install apps all the time, but parents quickly learn not to let them spend any money on in app purchasing.

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#438

Post by ryanwaggoner »

clintonb wrote: post #108
clarky07 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how so? click a button and download to device? now you have an icon that the user sees every day. How is the web better than that?

Challenges with apps: 1. Creating a good experience on Android and iOS 2. Getting approval to publish to the major app stores 3. Advertising to users so they actually download the app 4. Reminding users to use the app. > now you have an icon that the user sees every day. My home screen only has room for 24 items. Those items haven't changed much in a few years. I may have traded one app for another (e.g. Pocket Casts…

You have those same challenges or worse with a website, except number 2. And for the vast majority of apps, that’s no problem. I’ve submitted 100+ apps to the App Store and never had an app that didn’t pretty easily get approved.

And I think most users have more than one screen of apps at this point. And are more likely to see those icons than a given browser bookmark.

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#439

Post by dang »

da_chicken wrote: post #340
geezerjay wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Think of it like this: If Hacker News required a fat client to function on your desktop, would you actually be here at all? HN essentially is a service that provides only a couple of text views to list and read submittions and their discussions, and requires zero processing or interaction. That's hardly a challenging problem that requires a fat client. If however we were discussing an application that required sign…

> That's hardly a challenging problem that requires a fat client. That's irrelevant. It doesn't matter that making a fat client for HN isn't necessary; that's completely beside the point. You're looking for reasons to ignore the stated premise of an analogy rather than accepting that the premise would be true. It's like this. Say you were beginning to explain how network services work with an anecdote: "Say you need…

Can you please not post flamewar-style comments to HN, regardless of how wrong or provocative you find another comment? We're trying for better than this here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#440

Post by ryanwaggoner »

wolco wrote: post #349

Using a separate phone for apps and using another phone for calls/texts can help privacy if you still love to install games/apps

Or just use iOS, because unless you’ve heard about an exploit that I haven’t, it’s impossible for any app to read (or write) your texts or calls. Or anything at all outside its sandbox unless you explicitly give it permission. This includes location, photos, contacts, microphone, etc.

In fact, were I a malicious developer instead of the benevolent one that I am, I don’t think I’d touch iOS unless I could find a security hole or I was going to trick users into giving me permissions, because I don’t think there’s much attack surface otherwise. Open to correction though!

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