Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

danq.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 571 posts

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

#121

Post by afavour »

criddell wrote: post #87
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…

As someone who uses apps, the hoops you have to jump through are one of the reasons I prefer apps. I'm glad Apple knows who you are and have scrutinized (to some degree) your app. I have no interest in installing a web app that could look innocuous today and be entirely different every time I hit F5.

> I have no interest in installing a web app that could look innocuous today and be entirely different every time I hit F5.

That's been the case with native apps for a long time now too.

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

#123

Post by inigyou »

master-lincoln wrote: post #118
xtracto wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 be…

It's because apple pushed towards apps and didn't want web apps on their phone. Likely due to the profits they can gain from appstore sales Native apps would be the better platform in my eyes if the Operating Systems would be better in terms of letting a user manage what a native app have access to and can do. But currently they are preferred by companies despite more dev effort because they can get more user data wi…

There's nothing technical stopping us from investigating and modifying the apps we install - at least on operating systems that allow you to install unapproved apps. YouTube Vanced only got in legal trouble for distributing a copyrighted work (the YouTube app) which led to ReVanced which is a patcher that doesn't include a copy of the original app.

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

#124

Post by gwbas1c »

> But at least I (and the rest of our group, whom I’ve shared it with) now get the choice about how we access this content.

What I want to know is: How many people actually used the website? How many people prefer the website?

It's easy to forget that many people use their computers (and phones) differently than the typical HNer.

Also: I wonder how easy/hard it is to do this with an LLM / vibecoding? Seems like there could be a Napster moment for bad apps where the LLM installs the app in a sandbox and makes educated guesses about how to turn it into a simple website.

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

#125

Post by Izkata »

xtracto wrote: post #105
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 be…

Keep going further back, we had thin client terminals (not sure of the terminology, this was just before my time - I remember using them to look for books at our town library when I was a kid, green or orange text on a black screen, no mouse).

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

#126

Post by essentia0 »

benoau wrote: post #115
criddell wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who uses apps, the hoops you have to jump through are one of the reasons I prefer apps. I'm glad Apple knows who you are and have scrutinized (to some degree) your app. I have no interest in installing a web app that could look innocuous today and be entirely different every time I hit F5.

If they were actually doing a good job this would make sense. Just weeks ago they published a sanctioned Russian bank's app masquerading as a pomedoro timer lmao.

And it's a long running practice, they've been at it for years now

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

#127

Post by DrammBA »

Dan-Q wrote: post #44
catapart wrote: post #11

Fantastic work! It's always nice to see the method, in case anything is out there making this stuff easier. But the result is the real prize. There's way too much nonsense out there that is an app when it should be a webpage. I'm so tired of all of these apps. One criticism, though: I wish you would have made a simple form-based alternative to the app's population mechanism, rather than just make the one-off consumer…

I'm the original author (but not the poster here on HN). Yeah, I considered that. I even wrote the code in such a way that it supports that. But I'm concerned about the legality of distributing it. Given that it hits API endpoints that were expected to be private to the developers' app, giving away a "tool" that bypasses the app (which hosts ads, albeit for their other products, and so serves as a money-maker for the…

I wanted to ask, why did you go with reverse-engineering using network traffic instead of decompiling the app locally and looking for endpoint definitions?

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

#128

Post by inigyou »

anonzzzies wrote: post #80
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

I love hosting and I will never stop doing it. I keep buying servers (second hand; almost no one actually needs the latest) and hosting 1000s of companies.

How did you get companies to sign up to your website business?

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

#129

Post by maxgashkov »

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

Two more things:

- well-designed apps retain enough state to be useful offline or in places with spotty coverage; PWAs can kinda be made to work like this but IIRC iOS will happily evict them under disk pressure;

- notifications. I've read that Apple have implemented them for home screen installed web apps but for reasons unknown I have not seen this in action even once.

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

#130

Post by inigyou »

reddalo wrote: post #38
Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #21

> There only seem to be two things that this “app” does, that a webpage might not have, and they’re both anti-features: > It reports tracking data associated with your Google Account back to the developers. Fortunately webpages never do any tracking whatsoever, let alone “Gobshite LLC and its 1131 partners need your permission for (contd. p94)”

Luckily tools such as uBlock Origin let you block all those nasty scripts, _including_ the cookie banner themselves.

I have uBO and I still see cookie banners.
Post reply on HN