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

451–460 of 571 posts

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

#451

Post by wlesieutre »

j1elo wrote: post #401
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #312

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…

As not a web dev, out of curiosity: What would be the drawback or problem with showing a header or pop-up on mobile browsers, offering to install them as (web)app? Then using the PWA functionality of the browser to do it. I'm not a heavy user of those but the result of PWAs has always been an icon that's handled by the OS like if it was any other native app, and when opened it just behaves like the web browser in kio…

Would be great, but at least on iOS the only way to add a PWA to your home screen is via the share menu. Apple would need to support that header pop-up to install the PWA and they won’t unless someone makes them.

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

#452

Post by Grombobulous »

Izkata wrote: post #117
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 in the US. A consumer protection law in California started it around a decade ago and Google applied it to everyone instead of letting us opt out of the state (it's why I let my Android app die), and since then they've also disallowed PO boxes.

The solution I figured out is to use a forwarding service (e.g., Anytime Mailbox) and then you fill out a form with USPS that basically declares that the business is the using that address as a proxy.

Technically the government knows where you are and all that, but the public doesn't easily know where I literally sleep at night.

And, really, if someone was to mail me a letter as a customer, I would get it. The forwarding service will scan mail for me or let me pick it up in person for a trivial fee

This ends up costing about $10/month depending where you live.

Just one more little way that this is a bit of a hassle to just sell a little $5 app as a side gig.

And I know this is more of a government regulation thing but I wonder if there's no other way to be compliant with regulations and also save solo/small businesses from this little extra bit of annoyance and cost.

Large companies or even relatively small businesses that exist in leased commercial space don't have this problem since their mailing address does not represent a real person's house and has no ties to an individual.

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

#453

Post by Grombobulous »

Telaneo wrote: post #165
Grombobulous wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How far down does this go? Should I be able to contact the individual person who picked the specific strawberries in my carton of strawberries? In the Walmart t-shirt example, should I have the contact info for not only the factory but the other suppliers who made the dyes, threads, cotton, the people who made the fuel for the harvester, the people who welded the tractor together? Sure, maybe your idealist answer is…

> How far down does this go? Should I be able to contact the individual person who picked the specific strawberries in my carton of strawberries? Down to the manufacturer of the whole product you're buying. In the case of your strawberries that would probably be the farmer. > In the Walmart t-shirt example, should I have the contact info for not only the factory but the other suppliers who made the dyes, threads, cot…

I see your point and I think it's a reasonable one.

I know this may seem like moving goalposts, but I forgot to mention another point here, which is that I'm perfectly happy with allowing my customers to reach me by mail and they actually can reach me that way. What I'm much less okay with is someone knowing where my family and I sleep.

I have a mail forwarding service so that I don't have to give out my home address. If you send me mail to that address, I will see it!

It's another cost and hassle to have to set this up just to avoid the rare but possible doxxing situation that comes along with putting things out in public. The other part of this is that big corporations are obviously much better equipped to handle this scenario and they don't represent a single person's reputation or literal home in the same way.

I realize that addresses aren't really private but you never know what can happen. Maybe my app blows up and goes viral, there's some kind of controversy that gets out of my control via the media or something like that, and now my App Store listing for my viral app has my home address and a bunch of people on the Internet start sending me poop in the mail.

Now, all of this may be more of the fault of EU regulations and that's also perfectly fine but it makes me wonder a little bit if there can't be some kind of solution that is compliant but a little friendlier to small/solo businesses? If it's not possible I can definitely accept that.

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

#454

Post by Grombobulous »

Telaneo wrote: post #266
berkes wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Down to the manufacturer of the whole product you're buying. In case of an app, what is the "product" you are buying? Because according to Apple, they add a lot of "value" by ensuring the software is safe, performant, etc etc. Am I not buying "a safe, checked app"? Or am I buying an app and then separately pay Apple for an added service of "checking the app for safety" etc etc. I'd very much presume the first. But…

> In case of an app, what is the "product" you are buying? The app. > Because according to Apple, they add a lot of "value" by ensuring the software is safe, performant, etc etc. Am I not buying "a safe, checked app"? Or am I buying an app and then separately pay Apple for an added service of "checking the app for safety" etc etc. I'd very much presume the first. If you want to, you can imagine the 30% cut being that…

I think a good analogy for this difference would be this:

Walmart sells both fresh/frozen/packaged food (lots of food safety regulations) and t-shirts (few regulations by comparison). They also sell things like cell phone plans and subscription services that have entirely different sets of regulations.

Exactly as you described, if I make a specific type of app, maybe the business address and responsible party should really be Apple. If I make a subscription service app, then it should be me.

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

#455

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

vaylian wrote: post #405
adamwk wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eh it's partially true - the browsers on phones needed to get better as well.

Zuckerberg famously made the Facebook apps basically just a responsive webpage under the belief that maintaining one codebase for all platforms would be best.

The performance on mobile was so terrible that Instagram started eating his lunch simply by maintaining native mobile apps that are actually performant, and Zuckerberg was forced to panic purchase Instagram (made by a team of 13 people) for a billion dollars.

Eventually phones got more powerful and mobile web browsers got good enough that PWAs could perform comparably to native apps, but it was too late, and Apple and Google had absolutely zero interest in promoting something that would damage their app store / play store revenue.

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

#456

Post by Rohansi »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #442
swishman wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qui…

Or, you know, it's small because it's just a WebView wrapping a website.

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

#457

Post by gymhasanapp »

bloppe wrote: post #445
adamwk wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The real reason is really simple tho, and we could identify it ahead of time even before apps existed:

The average users sucks at managing bookmarks.

Telling a user that a feature is a webpage instead of an app means that they, in their glorious tech illiterate brain, think they have to memorize the url. They don't want to do that. They want to "have it" so they don't forget it. And having it is easier in the app mental model to them than in the bookmark one.

I know sufficient 40+ year olds who have the most absolute disgraceful phone desktops, filled with garbage. And yet, this is what they want. They want their bookmarkrs in the one place they'll check. And they want no folders.

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

#458

Post by gymhasanapp »

ksec wrote: post #395
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, they probably would have been perfectly happy with a bookmark on their home screen, but have you ever tried walking someone who doesn't know how to enter a url into their browser through the process of making a home page bookmark on their phone? Ultimately I ended up making a PWA that does nothing except act as a bookmark. Which was way more of a PITA than it should have been.

>Ultimately I ended up making a PWA that does nothing except act as a bookmark. Which is exactly what I was going to reply to your original post. I am willing to bet 80-90% of user don't want / need / care if it is an Native app. They simply want the website / PWA bookmark icon on their App Screen selection. The problem right now is the experienced of getting a PWA on to an App screen is not user friendly or in somew…

That and Apple ACTIVELY does not want PWA to catch on and be user friendly.

If a stupid website is turned into an App, then any purchases made through it instantly get slapped with a transaction fee straight to Tim Apple's pockets. There was a whole court case with John Epic about this and everything.

A PWA would bypass that. They really, really, really, really, really dont want that.

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

#459

Post by bizzybeezy »

OMG! I am dead. I don’t think I laughed out loud in about a month. It’s been an oddly humorless summer so far. But this made me feel alive. I literally installed on of these shitty apps for my boss for a work trip to a museum leadership retreat-all the information in the app was redundant and sent to us in form of emails, calendar invites, pdf attachments all of which were printed out -and all of them were slightly different in detail. Another variant of this fucking nightmare is an app my boss had to download a month earlier that “page gate” style force you to interact with an ai chat bot to chat about what was maybe 5 pages of conference content

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

#460

Post by mvdtnz »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #312

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…

> When I announced the update, the number of people who asked me variations of "how to get website on phone if website on computer" or requested I make the damn thing an app was outrageous.

This level of technical illiteracy shouldn't be tolerated in the workplace in 2026. We all work on computers all day, there's simply no excuse for being incapable of basic computer operations. Upskill or get out.

Post reply on HN