351–360 of 599 posts
We never went back to the restaurant in Cupertino where the table QR code tried to force downloading an app that onboarded you into a food delivery service. That restaurant was treating on-site customers as delivery orders with a very short delivery distance. The food wasn't very good, either.
Even some of the better ones don’t take themselves seriously. Buggy, hostile UIs , slow.
Honestly I don’t believe most of the producers are even using their own apps. I’m able to discover critical bugs within 2 minutes using nearly any app.
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Did they also struggle to understand that some people have the same name yet are not the same person?
By that logic, operating system developers struggle to understand that putting two files with the same name into the same folder(1) is very much possible in the physical world. (1) or referencing them from the same directory, which was the earlier metaphor.
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> I personally find the idea of doing homework on my phone horrifying but I suppose kids today are either used to it and comfortable with it, or they've simply never used a computer and don't know what they're missing. Though I'd wager they probably aren't comfortable typing on a keyboard. For college aged kids, most people are definitely not doing their homework on their phone. Many are still using paper and pencil.…
Kinda stretching the definition of kid there, a little past the breaking point imo.
Before I built the app, people were constantly asking me to build a mobile app. Yes, I had a PWA but people still wanted an app.
I thought it was kind of silly but I eventually built that wrapper app. It immediately got thousands of downloads, users upgrading to paid plans increased by 10x, and app users have way better metrics that website users.
It's pretty interesting, but as a website owner, having an app is valuable.
What most people dont get: Most of folks on HN here are much older than todays "first customers" of 16y/17/18 For them: The "Smartphone is the internet", while for most of us the "Smartphone is an extension of the internet from our desktops" that we were used to (remember the years before dot com bubble, saying: "I will be down in the basement at the computer to surf on the net little bit" ? :-) But today, the very f…
You’re confusing cause and effect here.
Companies are pushing apps very hard because it gives them a lot more ability to wield their various revenue enhancing dark patterns.
That kids see apps as the primary option is a corporate success metric, not an organic choice.
Anyway, the premise that “phone screen ==> native app not web app” is rather faulty, is it not?
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I met a business partner who is doing some work for SME retail investors last week for lunch: He showed me his WhatsApp: People are sending _ALL_ type of critical documents by WhatsApp to him. Everything. (and bank statements are among the class of "less critical" documents in his case) My theory here is: "If you have any function in your product, people will use it for anything appropriate to them in a given minute"
To be fair, what other simple way is there to send a document to a contact through an e2ee channel? Mail + PGP/GPG? Wormhole?? openssl??? Sending it via WhatsApp (which also has desktop clients, btw) strikes me as a perfectly reasonable solution. (Which is somewhat of an indictment of the current state of cryptographic software, but that's a different topic.)
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Almost never is it useful for an app to have my contacts or location. That said only on some platforms is it possible to stop a native app from getting them.
Android and iOS both require user permission for apps to access contacts or location. Are there other platforms that can't even manage this basic level of user protection?
Web browser is a sandbox by default. Worst a sketchy site does is eat a tab, less if you run an adblocker. Native app? Background processes, hardware ID shenanigans, your contacts, location. The whole buffet.
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> I personally find the idea of doing homework on my phone horrifying but I suppose kids today are either used to it and comfortable with it, or they've simply never used a computer and don't know what they're missing. Though I'd wager they probably aren't comfortable typing on a keyboard. For college aged kids, most people are definitely not doing their homework on their phone. Many are still using paper and pencil.…
I just asked my college aged kid. He said pretty much everyone does their written homework on their laptop, but many will use their phones to do the reading.