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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)

#131

Post by afavour »

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

Nah. When the App Store started getting truly popular you couldn't even run an ad blocker on mobile Safari. That came many years later.

IMO the reason we got to this place is twofold:

- apps give companies a spot on your Home Screen and allow you to develop a habit of opening it. I suspect Apple are very aware of this, which is why they continue to make it very difficult to install a web app to your home screen.

- notifications. Which, again, draw a returning audience

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

#132

Post by stavros »

mcdonje wrote: post #56

I wish PWAs took off, or a "desktop" environment for phones and tablets that allows me to save a simple website shortcut as an app. I want my phone to be the portal to the places I want to go to and the things I want to see. I want to have the same experience going to a web app or website I regularly visit as with a normal app. Like, I want to click on an icon and be there. I don't want to click on the browser and th…

You can already do this, browser allow you to add a website as an icon and it acts completely like an app. Even iOS allows this, try adding HN to your home screen.

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

#133

Post by catapart »

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…

Hey, thanks for the follow up! That makes perfect sense to me. Personally, though, I was thinking more of a "competing service" than a "steal your content" kind of offering.

I know hosting an entire sign up process and user content is not something you can just build and forget about, so my thought was that a sufficiently decent website could bundle a package that could be hosted on existing organization infrastructure. A zip file of the user's content that they could upload to dropbox/drive/sharepoint/etc. Then the consumer page would match a url slug to a package file and serve the content that way.

It's... a lot of stuff for a quick workaround project. And it's a pathology of an engineer to make solutions where solutions aren't needed. So grain of salt on any of that. But I did want to clarify since you were willing to engage with the concept, as understood. Hopefully this proposition strikes you as less concerning/illegal! I never want to steal anyone's work or infrastructure. I just believe that better alternatives - even ones borne of seeing how badly other people are doing it - can and should win out, if people ever provide them.

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

#134

Post by hbn »

inigyou wrote: post #120
hbn wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it seems like you really need an LLC with a mail forwarding service and a cheap second phone line just to avoid the App Store sending the whole internet to your personal phone and address That's an EU thing. If you don't publish in the EU you don't need to dox yourself.

It's also a very general European mindset thing. They have a very different approach to privacy there - they basically expect everyone's identity to be public, and then protect those identities from abuse, rather than the more US approach of letting you hide your identity so it can't be abused. You see supermarkets with the owner's full name plastered across the storefront underneath the franchise logo. "This store i…

A store is more reasonable to put your name on because generally if you want to meet the person running it you could just walk into it regardless of whether you know their name.

The internet has created a culture of deranged harassment that makes posting your identity online alongside anything you publish more insane than ever. And your market is more or less the entire world rather than your local community.

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

#135

Post by benoau »

ftchd wrote: post #116
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.

Well... Search right now in the App Store for "Morpho" and you'll find a "Morpho: Network" app. That app says it's some sort of TODO/Note taking app. It uses very broad language in the screenshots and assets from morpho.org (a decentralized protocol). Once you open the app, it immediately downloads another bundle using OTA updates and shows an entirely different app where you "connect your wallet". You can imagine wh…

> You can imagine what happens next.

Section 230 immunity baby!

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

#136

Post by ndriscoll »

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…

OP is about information, not functionality. In the early 2000s you would put things like that on a web page, and you'd put e.g. chat in its own application like Gaim.

In the 2010s the model inverted: now you need to keep an entire browser open to use google chat, and people try to get you to install an app to read a web page.

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

#137

Post by carlosjobim »

The question is: Why would anybody prefer a web-app over a native app in any kind of system or on any kind of device?

I think the answer is "only when there is no native app for the system I use", ie Linux.

So FOSS people want for apps to become much worse for everybody else, so that they can have the apps also through a web browser. Remembering that everybody else is who pays for the apps and all development, while FOSS people will never pay a dime to software developers.

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

#138

Post by close04 »

jorisw wrote: post #76
NiloCK wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What access? Push notifications. > Integration with OS features is what made the app ecosystem, because of utility. This is true of some apps, like the beer-drinking one that uses the accelerometer / other orientation sensors. It's not true of a large number of other apps, hence the "your app could have been a webpage" charge. This is distinct from "every app could be a webpage".

> Push notifications https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API > hence the "your app could have been a webpage" charge No debate there. I was responding to the ever vague and broad "they want" comments.

> I was responding to

Responding but never answering to anything. You were asking a bunch of questions with obvious answers that you should have known or could have discovered yourself, but expected others to dig out and chew them for you. You even went to ridiculous lengths to pretend that apps only do things "because of utility" and everything else like data collection, tracking, ads, etc. is "conspiracy". That's negative value in a conversation.

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

#139

Post by Telaneo »

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 might be misremembering or misinterpreting, but it seems like you really need an LLC with a mail forwarding service and a cheap second phone line just to avoid the App Store sending the whole internet to your personal phone and address.

For something free I can get why this would seem unreasonable (modulo scams, for which this is a hoop I would rather have than not), but if money's involved, a consumer should be able to contact a human and be made whole, and having the money be handled by a company (even if that company is just a one-man-show) honestly does not seem unreasonable.

If you want to bypass that, you just shouldn't publish to the App Store, which does (or at least is supposed to) have protections suitable for most people. You should still be able to make apps and use them without the App Store involved, then the individual human who wants that app can make decisions based in the specific app in question and the people behind it, but that's a separate conversation.

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

#140

Post by abanana »

llm_nerd wrote: post #114
deadbabe wrote: post #84

The reason people want an 'App' instead of a website is purely marketing related. Apps are sexy and native, and have better distribution. Websites are old, crappy things where you can't always control exactly what the user is going to see very well, and sharing a slick URL isn't always easy.

By "marketing" do you mean "experience"? Because absolutely no one is marketing apps as being superior, but instead this is just the experience of users. There's a weird conspiratorial thing that people do about this whole topic that is so easily debunked. For instance "Apple wanted apps more than PWAs!". Android powers about 73% of the world's smartphones, yet PWAs are irrelevant on the platform. Web apps can be inc…

Yes, "marketing". Ability to market your business, not marketing the concept of an app.

Businesses have an app developed because they feel the market demands it. Their marketing departments feel they have to be able to tell prospective customers "we have an app!" and if they can't, they feel they'll be seen as inferior, not with the times, thereby losing customers.

I totally agree with the article that apps shouldn't be the automatic first choice, but that's the way it is. We've reached the stage where it's seen by users as the default. App icons on the homescreen can be seen, for many, as the modern alternative to bookmarks in the browser. And regarding "sharing a slick URL isn't always easy", perhaps the App Store is, for many users, the modern alternative to Google Search?

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