Most of the time, I want neither. No I don't want the ticketmaster app (or DICE). I may need to visit a website to buy a ticket, but after that just email me a QR code or something. Even worse, I found myself at Royale in Boston and they wanted me to install yet another app to check my coat. I hid my coat under a chair instead and have not returned to the venue since then. The example from the article: > This summer,…
Yeah I was considering buying tickets for something recently, then discovered the only option is to install an app just to buy the damn ticket.
End users don't care about if it's an app or not. What they care about: - Does it do what I need it to - Can I access it easily - Is it easy to navigate - Does it work or is it buggy - Is it slow - Does it abuse notifications - Is it prompting me to log in all the time - Are there too many ads - Can I use it on any device I have - Does it complain about updating constantly I don't think any of those actually has to d…
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading these comments. Apps are clearly better for end users. HTML and css is SUPER slow. It doesn't feel native, it doesn't feel good to use. You also get so many weird glitches with state refreshing, sessions being cleared, log in not persisting. Has anyone here actually used a PWA? You can feel that it's slow and clunky. Apps feel SO much better with the native UI, pre-downloade…
I've found the most consistent indicator of overall app quality to be whether it is extremely small in size. An Android app under a megabyte in size is going to use the familiar, high-performance platform-native UI because it doesn't have room to do anything else. It is gonna do what it says on the tin and nothing else. It won't have ads. It won't phone home. Since it doesn't show ads and doesn't phone home, it's quite likely open source, meaning it quite likely has a GitHub project that I can look into if something goes wrong -- and because it's so tiny, I won't need to spend days trying to figure out how it works.
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.
There are actually apps which will "appify" webpages/websites for Android, or were the last time I needed one. They've been aroubd a long time. I assume they still exist.
The functionality is literally built into both Android and iOS. For example, I've got some of my self-hosted services linked on my home screen. On Firefox for Android you just browse to the site, click the 3 dots, and then under more its "Add to Home screen", Chrome works similarly.
Nobody 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…
the benefit of apps is they don't break. websites update out from under you and the web expects browsers to always be evergreen
> the benefit of apps is they don't break
What world do you live in? Apps are either enshittified with updates, or the content source the app was using is broken in similar ways to a normal website.
The only way you avoid this are sideloaded non-networked apps - which are not the usual.
> We take tech literacy for granted, because it's like a dozen levels down fundamental to our entire field. But the tech illiterati exist, and they love apps. They "love apps" because apple and android have spent billions to break their mental models and convince them that "you use apps to do things on your phone". Literally. That's the extent of most people's understanding. So, sure, they "want" apps in the same sen…
This doesn’t really make sense. Apps were pretty popular immediately after decades of web usage. There are many reasons to prefer an app. Even on desktop; if I’m using a service enough throughout the day, I want a native app, not a website.
At this point, most of those "native" apps are actually just web apps packaged in Electron. The fact that you generally can't tell the difference is proof that there aren't any real reasons to prefer a native app. All the reasons have to do with either OS vendors trying to hobble PWAs, or web developers creating React monsters for no good reason. Web apps can actually be very performant.
Nobody 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…
The "uhm, ackshually" responses to this comment are insane.
End users don't care about if it's an app or not. What they care about: - Does it do what I need it to - Can I access it easily - Is it easy to navigate - Does it work or is it buggy - Is it slow - Does it abuse notifications - Is it prompting me to log in all the time - Are there too many ads - Can I use it on any device I have - Does it complain about updating constantly I don't think any of those actually has to d…
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading these comments. Apps are clearly better for end users. HTML and css is SUPER slow. It doesn't feel native, it doesn't feel good to use. You also get so many weird glitches with state refreshing, sessions being cleared, log in not persisting. Has anyone here actually used a PWA? You can feel that it's slow and clunky. Apps feel SO much better with the native UI, pre-downloade…
You might be taking crazy pills or you've yet to come across an app that's just a webpage inside a web view (a lot of apps these days unfortunately)
This doesn’t really make sense. Apps were pretty popular immediately after decades of web usage. There are many reasons to prefer an app. Even on desktop; if I’m using a service enough throughout the day, I want a native app, not a website.
Web sites optimized for mobile weren't really a thing when the iPhone launched. That's why apps shined on smart phones. Web designers did eventually catch up with the hack but the trend towards apps was already too established at that point and people thought that you need an app to use a service.
Funnily enough, when the iPhone launched, it didn't have a native SDK. With iPhone OS 1, developers were supposed to create web apps. That only got changed with iPhone OS 2.
Nobody 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…
> We take tech literacy for granted, because it's like a dozen levels down fundamental to our entire field. But the tech illiterati exist, and they love apps. They "love apps" because apple and android have spent billions to break their mental models and convince them that "you use apps to do things on your phone". Literally. That's the extent of most people's understanding. So, sure, they "want" apps in the same sen…
No, because I used a computer before web apps took over and native software is a better experience.
Nobody 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…
> We take tech literacy for granted, because it's like a dozen levels down fundamental to our entire field. But the tech illiterati exist, and they love apps.
LOL. Kindly do this prompt to any LLM :
"critize this statement, or any logical fallacy inside"
Try applying the same level of skepticism to your own statements before posting them on HN.