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“It works better in the app”

shkspr.mobi

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Re: “It works better in the app”

#101

Post by iamkeithmccoy »

Unfortunately it's the norm in large companies to never polish anything. Google has gotten worse and worse at this. But Microsoft is king. They bring a team together to build a new thing and then as soon as they can check that feature box on their sales deck they move that team off onto something else. Loop is a good example of this. Microsoft started building a Notion competitor and then just stopped. The Loop component model got pulled into Copilot and integrated everywhere. But you still cannot move a document between workspaces - one of the most basic pieces of user functionality ever.

I also look at Application Insights / Azure Monitor w/ their OTel SDK, Teams, SharePoint, Visio, . Basic functionality is missing and requests are left open for years or decades. Nothing is ever polished. Nothing is ever finished. Everything is good-enough.

Re: “It works better in the app”

#102

Post by nunez »

pelotron wrote: post #64

This past weekend I was flying on Delta and my first flight was delayed such that I was going to miss my connecting flight, so I rebooked onto a later one. During my layover I visited the gate agent to get a boarding pass with a seat assignment. "Do you have the Delta app?" "Nope." Then he pressed a few keys on his keyboard and printed out a new boarding pass for me within five seconds. I couldn't believe he was tryi…

MLB is the exact opposite of this. You can't get tickets without the Ballpark app. No paper tickets at most stadiums. The app asks for all sorts of personal info too (which I usually spoof). They're even trying for biometric check-in now.

Re: “It works better in the app”

#103

Post by FatherOfCurses »

LPisGood wrote: post #79
brk wrote: post #9

At this point the barrier for me to install an app is pretty high. If you're going to needlessly gate certain functions behind an app that work on a desktop browser (or could work in-browser), then I just won't use those functions. If by extension that degrades the value I get from your site, then I just won't use the site, and I won't be contributing to ADU stats you promote to advertisers. Every single company has…

What really grinds my gears is when the app is a _broken_ version of the website. I find the app really expects you to be on the happy path in a way the website does not. Uhaul is a great example of this. The app looks a little better on mobile, but if you don’t make an account and search by reservation ID, all features related to things like extending a reservation time are nonfunctional. I have to go to the mobile…

UHaul is the only app I've ever encountered that is less efficient than talking to a human being behind a counter. I have tried multiple times to pick up a reservation via the app and it has taken so long or failed at some point that I had to walk into the store anyway.

And it wants a photo of my license EVERY GODDAMN TIME. And no I can't store a photo of my license on my phone and just upload it - it has to take a photo directly. And boy does it not like to take photos in bright sunlight. You know, when I'm outside in a parking lot beside a white truck.

Re: “It works better in the app”

#104

Post by nickburns »

joshuakcockrell wrote: post #77
em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "do something that can be done in a web app" I'll bite. What important features can only be done in an "app" but not a web app nowadays?

It’s also about friction. No one wants to troubleshoot a card decline by logging into their mobile browser bank account in checkout at the grocery store.

You mean some kind of perceived personal convenience through the uneven-handed profit of others and at the expense of everyone else.

Trying to check why your card was declined at a checkout—while still standing at said checkout? Troubleshooting "PIN issues" (meaning your bad)? Is everyone still standing behind you at this point? LOL. Exactly.

Re: “It works better in the app”

#105

Post by _fat_santa »

This is a constant argument i have with by business partner. He's always asking me "when are we making an app for our " and I always reply back: "We already have an app! It's just a PWA"

PWA's are freaking awesome for both users and developers. Users don't have to install a massive app and me as a developer can focus on making one platform better rather than 3.

And they are pretty freaking powerful in what you can do. Not to toot my own horn too much but I created an "app"[1] for viewing cities on the other side of the earth from where you're standing. It's got camera, gyro and GPS to determine what you're looking at to the folks I've shown it too, anyone non-technical has been completely fooled and thought it was a proper app.

[1]: https://earthview.sunny.gg

Re: “It works better in the app”

#106

Post by virtyaluk »

I noticed a long time ago that Google apps are designed by people who never actually use them. Here's one example. I'm a big fan of reading, and it happened that I stack dozens and dozens of books on my GDrive, so naturally I use mobile Google Drive to download and send those books to the reader app on my iDevices. Finished books are renamed to have an exclamation mark at the beginning of the file name - that puts those books at the start of the list, so it is easier to visually tell apart once I've read them and have not. Obviously, the unstarted books fell off the bottom of the list. And here's the crazy thing - Google has put a big-ass plus button and a "scan document" button right in the bottom-right corner of the app screen, which effectively prevents me from opening the file menu for the last 2 books in the list. Very nice!

Re: “It works better in the app”

#107

Post by nickburns »

dmayle wrote: post #84
em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "do something that can be done in a web app" I'll bite. What important features can only be done in an "app" but not a web app nowadays?

A ton of features work only or better on app: - anything privacy sensitive - anything processing intense (using optimized binaries) - widgets - camera and audio based features *can* work, but are more finicky (or outright broken on ios) - local storage (exists in web app, short lifetimes on web site) - performance/latency sensitive work - (I'm less familiar, but probably local sensors, like gps and acceleration)

[flagged]

Re: “It works better in the app”

#108

Post by pyrale »

Humanity would progress leaps and bounds if every app was deleted, and people just made websites that worked for phones instead.

Yes, I know some apps wouldn't make it in the browser. These are sacrifices I am willing to make.

Re: “It works better in the app”

#109

Post by ulyssys »

The most painful part of this is that, at a certain point in mobile app development, many of them switched to using web frameworks instead of native. We're literally figuratively building web apps to replace native apps that replaced web apps, and hoping to performance optimize them back into near-native.

Re: “It works better in the app”

#110

Post by dspillett »

carlosjobim wrote: post #92
noir_lord wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I've no interest in native apps to do something that can be done in a web app and if you don't let me do it in a web app I'll bounce and either find someone who can or do without unless there is a seriously compelling use case (I'm not that dogmatic). As a result the only native apps I use on my phone are Kindle, Authy and Firefox because I trust Firefox to prevent apps doing a lot of the sketchy shit locally…

A real native app practically always has better performance than web apps. And your data is on your machine. And it can integrate with the operating system. And you can do work offline. And performance saves battery. A web app is almost never better.

True for genuine native apps, but most apps these days are just wrappers around web apps so you get none of the benefits of a true native app while also losing some of the benefits of a web app.
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