I haven't gotten to it, but I've been meaning to update my personal site from wordpress to just be statically rendered markdown I publish. I realized that I don't want the security surface area, and the features it offers are more or less things I don't even want anymore (post comments, text editor, analytics, etc.) I pretty much just want a static thing I can put on a CDN and never worry about ever again until I have an update. I already designed my (unlaunched) business site that way and I'm very happy with it.
Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
371–380 of 571 posts
Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
> my justification for 'app' over website has been offline. Gosh, I wish more apps did some kind of progressive "enhancement" and let people read already cached messages and do deferred sends like the old days, instead of being completely useless without a data connection.
I used to run a company (2010-2018) where our customers were almost always using our product inside of grocery stores, which are almost always metal sheds with some finishings on the walls. Not so great for cell service, it became essential for us to support offline mode if we wanted to keep those customers happy and engaged. I spent many late nights trying to debug reachability bugs. It's frankly a nightmare trying…
Gosh, having tried to use the Home Depot app (to find products in store) while IN their stores... It's so bad. I can't even imagine what you dealt with in trying to handle those things.
(And so, so many little bugs in my map thing from upthread were these odd timing quirks when a user didn't have good service and one check would run and leave something else hanging resulting in a blank map. )
Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
#373Nobody here is talking about the fact that a significant number of users want apps, too. I'm responsible for an internal tool at the company I work for, hosted as a website, that handles a bunch of miscellaneous tasks that other employees need. Think reimbursements, documentation and reporting, gathering and presenting business data. That sort of thing. When I took it over, it was desktop only ( a lot of formatted pa…
If pinning website bookmarks was more prominently advertised in the UI, they would be fine with it I guess. Though it would need some more changes.
Why do people like apps? Because they can put it on their home screen, they can open the app list and pick from there, they are searchable in a canonical repository, which is kind of like googling for the website but still.
Login flows are simpler and persist better, with local storage etc.
Multiple apps can be switched between by just moving between the currently opened apps, while website tabs appear inside the browser only and are mixed with many other unrelated browsing tabs, making it harder to find.
I guess fundamentally all of these could be supported with browsers. But in the end, Google and Apple don't want to make bookmarks and independent persistent "browser windows" easier.
Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to run a company (2010-2018) where our customers were almost always using our product inside of grocery stores, which are almost always metal sheds with some finishings on the walls. Not so great for cell service, it became essential for us to support offline mode if we wanted to keep those customers happy and engaged. I spent many late nights trying to debug reachability bugs. It's frankly a nightmare trying…
Gosh, having tried to use the Home Depot app (to find products in store) while IN their stores... It's so bad. I can't even imagine what you dealt with in trying to handle those things. (And so, so many little bugs in my map thing from upthread were these odd timing quirks when a user didn't have good service and one check would run and leave something else hanging resulting in a blank map. )
Yeah, home depot is a tricky case. They have a huge array of products, and in my experience when you cant find something you need to search beyond the store you're in....so the database you need access to isn't exactly small. Makes a practical offline experience tricky.
Home depots website sucks anyway, slow, clunky, terrible touch space, and the search is awful.
Aside, they should ad cell repeaters inside to fix all this.
Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
#375Nobody here is talking about the fact that a significant number of users want apps, too. I'm responsible for an internal tool at the company I work for, hosted as a website, that handles a bunch of miscellaneous tasks that other employees need. Think reimbursements, documentation and reporting, gathering and presenting business data. That sort of thing. When I took it over, it was desktop only ( a lot of formatted pa…
I think you're right, but I think it's also because the industry trained everyone on this model. I remember ~ 2010-2012 there was a big push to make everything an app. As far as I can tell the only benefit to users is a nice icon on the home page, and the benefit for the company is.. exfiltrating data from the users phone?
Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
#376Articles like this stress me out because they make me feel wildly out of touch by proxy
Like on most other technical opinions this person has I probably agree, but they're so absolutely wrong (for the majority of modern consumers you will fail without an app) that it makes me wonder what other seemingly obvious things we're both completely wrong about.
Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
#377I once read that app users are seven times more profitable than web users. That easily answers the author's question about why a company would bother make an app when a web page is the natural fit for the use case. I don't remember the source or methodology for that number, but I have no trouble believing it. An app gives the developer a foothold on the user's device. It can more easily send notifications, track the…
And in fact, a significant subset of users will pester you to make an app, even if your website can and does do everything an app could do.
That's so opposite to my preferences that I'd be really interested in the results of someone studying that group of users.
I do like local native software, preferably using the native UI toolkit, filesystem and features of the device hardware not necessarily available to the browser. That doesn't describe most commercial mobile apps in 2026.
Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, Dell will not give you a refund for something purchased at a retailer. For general returns and refunds, the retailer is on the hook because they're the ones who actually took your money. What Dell will do is repair or replace a computer that is still under warranty. They won't refund.
> No, Dell will not give you a refund for something purchased at a retailer. They're legally required to.[1] [1] https://lovdata.no/dokument/NLE/lov/2002-06-21-34/KAPITTEL_5... Section 35 Edit: Forgot there's an English version.
I don't understand how this functions in practice: if business A sells a widget to reseller B who sells it to reseller C who sells it to the customer, there's multiple layers of markup. How can the original manufacturer be expected to refund the purchase price?
Reading the law, it does not say that the consumer is entitled to a refund.
Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
#379Nobody here is talking about the fact that a significant number of users want apps, too. I'm responsible for an internal tool at the company I work for, hosted as a website, that handles a bunch of miscellaneous tasks that other employees need. Think reimbursements, documentation and reporting, gathering and presenting business data. That sort of thing. When I took it over, it was desktop only ( a lot of formatted pa…
That sounds less like wanting apps, than simply having no idea what's going on.
Most of the users of phones seem to operate on the no idea what's going on model. It's on developers to meet them where they are at, and if that's the app store you better be there for them.
Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
#380Nobody here is talking about the fact that a significant number of users want apps, too. I'm responsible for an internal tool at the company I work for, hosted as a website, that handles a bunch of miscellaneous tasks that other employees need. Think reimbursements, documentation and reporting, gathering and presenting business data. That sort of thing. When I took it over, it was desktop only ( a lot of formatted pa…
When I say I want an app that implies a few things:
- this isn't a one-off use, I don't want an app to pay parking meter once and never use it again.
- it's an app and not a WebView pretending to be native
- it's native and not react-wanna-be-native
- you know how to make an app
I have to use this app to open a parcel locker and every time I launch it I have to wait for "downloading bundle". It's probably the easiest kind of app to make and yet somehow they made it worse then a website.