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Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

danq.me

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Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#101

Post by 1970-01-01 »

jorisw wrote: post #39
CuriouslyC wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's it. Apps took off because people felt comfortable yoloing stuff from the Apple app store, and for a short while before saturation, the app store reach was making small developers rich.

The App Store took off because of the distribution channel it offers for developers (including being able to charge for the work) and the place of discovery it offers to users.

There was and is more than one App Store. You mention other good reasons to develop, but the money from ads was the biggest reason for an app to exist. Otherwise, it could and should just be a website.

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#102

Post by al_borland »

smcg wrote: post #74

The fundamental problem with the internet is that hosting sucks and no one wants to do it. It's thankless and it's expensive to maintain, both time and money. Apps are a way to not worry about that. By the way, the link doesn't load for me, so I used the archive to read it. https://archive.ph/ByFBN

Not to mention dealing with authentication, securing user data, and opening yourself to being a target for hackers.

Shipping a local app eliminates a lot of those headaches.

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#104

Post by 1970-01-01 »

xingped wrote: post #95
billyp-rva wrote: post #18

> I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture”! The short version: ad blockers work on browsers but not apps[0]. [0] https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle

It's too bad not enough people know about using adguard dns on their phones. Dunno about iPhones but it works wonders on Android. Only downside is it sometimes interferes with signing into public wifi networks.

Does not have to be branded adguard to work. https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#105

Post by xtracto »

billyp-rva wrote: post #18

> I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture”! The short version: ad blockers work on browsers but not apps[0]. [0] https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle

> I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture"

Thie assertion is extremely funny to me. Historically we come from an "app culture". Back in the day, around 2000 or so, if you wanted some functionality, you ran an application. You ran software in your computer.

Then on the early 2000s people started migrating their software web" , inventing "SaaS" (software as a service" .

I remember my young self being strongly opposed to that, because I saw little sense in constraining what you could do with a scripting language, when you could easily get the "networking" capabilities adding tcp/ip to your software .

But the web and Javascript won, mostly due to control (there was advertising in software since the 90s, for example Opera or GetRight had ad banners) .

The feature and mobile phones came and people started to migrate to "apps" again. So we came full circle.

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#107

Post by r2_pilot »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #94
Grombobulous wrote: post #53

I recently decided to publish an app on the App Store just so I could say I accomplished that, and maybe even make a little bit of beer money on the side. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that my actual app is pretty much garbage. I don’t expect it to be popular. It’s basically a worse version of stuff that is already available. I expected this to be a learning exercise about the process of getting stuff published. Lo…

> I’ll be the first to admit that my actual app is pretty much garbage It’s working. Your low quality project you weren’t really committed to got filtered.

Aside from the low-effort snark and lack of empathy towards someone's project, this is also how you filter people out of caring about software development at at a young age, and then who's going to keep the computer systems running?

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#108

Post by kibwen »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #94
Grombobulous wrote: post #53

I recently decided to publish an app on the App Store just so I could say I accomplished that, and maybe even make a little bit of beer money on the side. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that my actual app is pretty much garbage. I don’t expect it to be popular. It’s basically a worse version of stuff that is already available. I expected this to be a learning exercise about the process of getting stuff published. Lo…

> I’ll be the first to admit that my actual app is pretty much garbage It’s working. Your low quality project you weren’t really committed to got filtered.

Both Google's and Apple's app stores are 99% slop by volume, so no, it's not working.

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#109

Post by inigyou »

Grombobulous wrote: post #53

I recently decided to publish an app on the App Store just so I could say I accomplished that, and maybe even make a little bit of beer money on the side. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that my actual app is pretty much garbage. I don’t expect it to be popular. It’s basically a worse version of stuff that is already available. I expected this to be a learning exercise about the process of getting stuff published. Lo…

It's like a lot of tech trajectories. At first it was fairly easy and people did it, and then both the producer, consumer, and platform evolved off in some direction in an endless feedback cycle, and now a newcomer sees the whole ecosystem is all the way over there in some weird place and doesn't join it because why would you want to be over there, but the existing actors don't see it as strange because they acclimatized to each step along the way.

Recently I tried out tiktok for a day and couldn't fathom why I would possibly want to ever use this app. Same with Instagram. But people who followed their trajectory since their earlier days find them normal.

Same with Facebook, actually. And Google.

On the other side of that equation, my very old YouTube account (which still has a subscription to "YouTube Red" that costs half of what a new subscription to YouTube Premium costs) has been trained to show me certain content, and if I joined with a new account or told someone else to join, I know the homepage would be filled with dumb slop.

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#110

Post by inigyou »

r2_pilot wrote: post #107
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ll be the first to admit that my actual app is pretty much garbage It’s working. Your low quality project you weren’t really committed to got filtered.

Aside from the low-effort snark and lack of empathy towards someone's project, this is also how you filter people out of caring about software development at at a young age, and then who's going to keep the computer systems running?

Nobody cares about the future, only the present. America forgot how to manufacture things, too, because it was momentarily uneconomical and there was no concern about how to keep the living knowledge going.
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