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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)

#241

Post by jcmontx »

Something the author doesn't mention as a pro for the web is my favorite type of tech: browser extensions. I love web because I can basically customize pretty much everything to my needs.

I have published a few of them in the last few years, and I have tens of them which I haven't published. I use them for tons of different things:

* allowing only text tweets on X

* blocking photos and videos on all Meta products

* blocking explicit content

* customizing exchange rates for online shopping (Argentine peso, you wouldn't get it™)

* having reddit hot as default for the home and subreddits (they been pushing the "best" for a couple years and it's actually trash)

browser extensions have allowed me to regain some of my cognitive sovereignty while being a heavy internet user.

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

#242

Post by cosmic_cheese »

bluebarbet wrote: post #235
ryandrake wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This highlights the differences between what developers want vs. what (some) end users want. Developers love the web because they can change things and deploy instantly, they can have a single version of their app "out there" and not have to worry about clients running old software, and they can take their software down when it becomes inconvenient to maintain. Users on the other hand, like apps: They don't want thei…

Interesting. Since we're talking about PWAs, which are essentially apps running in the sandbox of a web client (i.e. browser), the issue you raise could presumably be fixed in an instant with a client-side setting: "Do not update this app".

That improves the situation a little, but the user still doesn’t have an easy way to migrate the app to other browsers on the same machine or to new machines. With a self-contained binary you just copy the executable wherever and you’re done.

The other issue is that web browsers are dynamic environments (much more so than operating systems) and sometimes break/change things. Users who’ve frozen PWA updates don’t have any access to critical fixes. A lot of devs just wouldn’t support frozen versions.

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

#243

Post by titanomachy »

staticshock wrote: post #227

Low-tech users don't give a damn if something has the guts of an "app" or not, they care about having a thing on the home screen they can click . Businesses have the incentive to give their users that low friction experience (at the point of need) using already familiar rails (i.e. "install app from app store"). The makers of both iOS and Android treat the ability to "bookmark" a web URL onto your home screen as a po…

Yes, this is the answer. It’s easy to forget if you live in a tech bubble, but there are probably billions of smartphone users who don’t even know how to type a url into a browser and navigate to it.

I’ve worked on projects where we ran this experiment, and the success rate of “install this app and click on it” is several times higher than “navigate to this webpage every time you want to use our tool”.

One small correction though, android has made it easier to add a “progressive web app” to the home screen now. You can prompt the user with a dialog asking if they want to install it. I think there was at least some period where Google was really encouraging PWAs. iOS still sucks. I’ve had very poor success rates in getting users to install our PWA using the iOS workflow (and our tool is something they need for their jobs, so they are highly motivated to install it).

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

#244

Post by motoroco »

c0nsumer wrote: post #206
motoroco wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello fellow map maker! I feel like I’m in the same boat. PWAs work great, I wish Apple would treat them as first class apps. I tinkered with launching a TWA for my app on the Play Store and it works pretty well but I haven’t published it yet. Probably a harder market to monetize than iOS but it seems like good advertising just to have the listing up

Hello! And yeah... :\ The Android/Chrome/Edge support for it is great, and on iOS it's actually nice, but you have to do all the hoop-jumping of clicking Share, whatever, and getting the icon to actually appear. Also, apparently Apple really doesn't like approving apps that are basically wrapped PWAs (Google will, I guess?) so that is yet another check against bothering with an app.

Yeah, Apple has a rule against simple wrappers. Check out bubblewrap if you haven’t already. It’s made by Google specifically for wrapping PWAs for the Play Store. There’s a tiny bit of work to make a keystore and manifest file, otherwise it just pulls from your PWA config automatically

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

#245

Post by atourgates »

c0nsumer wrote: post #185
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 like making maps, and I wanted to do a certain bend on a very specific kind of online map, filling a gap I noticed in existing maps. The idea of an app really appealed to me (at first), but the more I thought about it the more I didn't want to deal with iOS and then Android and then maintaining parallel functionality on the web and all that mess just for a fairly-local hobby project that I make no money off of. So,…

That's a cool project. Sort of a more open Trailforks alternative?

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

#246

Post by titanomachy »

jcmontx wrote: post #241

Something the author doesn't mention as a pro for the web is my favorite type of tech: browser extensions. I love web because I can basically customize pretty much everything to my needs. I have published a few of them in the last few years, and I have tens of them which I haven't published. I use them for tons of different things: * allowing only text tweets on X * blocking photos and videos on all Meta products * b…

It’s a pro for you (the user), but I’m sure Disney (or whoever made this app) cares very very little about this, or treats it as a negative.

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

#247

Post by svachalek »

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 about tracking. Most of the money in the industry comes from knowing precisely when you were on the toilet every day and they can't get that from a web app.

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

#248

Post by bluebarbet »

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…

There's something to this but it's still a slightly dodgy generalization.

A random counter-example from France. If you have a one-person small business (i.e. with a registered business number and the right to invoice), all personal information beyond the name is private by default, it cannot be looked up. The Nordic countries are perhaps closer to the image you're painting. Personal tax information is famously public in Sweden, for example.

But IMO differences are easy to exaggerate. Let's not forget that private phone numbers used to be published in paper directories - with home addresses! - everywhere, including America.

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