381–390 of 496 posts
(Yelp is mostly useless now, because they're not effectively purging dead businesses. About a third of listings in popular categories seem to be dead.)
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Twitter is the worst. You go to a page and scroll down and it banners a beater in the app thing and you can’t dismiss it. You either get the app or close the tab. Close the tab.
Reddit might be worse, actually, given their app is mediocre at best and they killed 3rd-party apps.
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That's funny, I've NEVER, not even once, encountered ANY app from any company, in any business, that is easier or more efficient than talking to a human being behind a counter. (So long as the human behind the counter is not also hamstrung by dreadful Indian crapware...) Seriously, like most people, I have dozens of apps on my phone, forced on me by various needs. The ONLY one that makes anything easier or better is…
I dunno. It's so hard to get a plain ordinary brewed coffee at Dunkin these days, the kind of coffee I used to get there back in the 1980s. On the app I could actually pick one out, in person I'm likely to have a teenager give me something else and then have a nervous breakdown when I point out the one thing I care about on their digital signs: "If we get your order wrong we'll re-do it"
(Starbucks, too. They just discontinued the little protein box with hard-boiled eggs in favor of yet another one with cheese.)
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100% same. So many apps are just a WebView vessel for Crashlytics and Sentry and Dog knows how much more tracking. (My phone is always VPNed into my home network which has DNS-level ad and tracker blocking. This doesn't cover all the bases though.) Some, like Home Depot, have websites that are terrible and battery-draining enough to make the app nominally useful by comparison.
> My phone is always VPNed into my home network which has DNS-level ad and tracker blocking. I've been looking to do this setup. Would you share a few details of which tools you've used?
Almost no one else except the PC gamers I know really like using desktop (or laptop) computers. Most people love being able to sit on the couch and use apps on their phone. Its not like massive portions of the population were loving their desktops until smartphones arrived and they transitioned, no - smartphones are what helped the internet revolution really inseminate into the general population.
"Never let an abuser take you to a secondary location": It's OK to offer an app, but if a site is pushing, pressuring or forcing you to get one, it's almost certainly because they want to do something abusive that they currently can't. Installing an app is a matter of trust; trying to push me to install one against my will is the best way to demonstrate that you should not be trusted. (Interestingly, I've heard a sta…
Every UK bank is, IME.
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A small assortment of people that I found interesting/insightful/amusing at some point, plus a few local orgs occasionally announcing things. Why does anything need to be "so important"?
Without wishing to sound trite, what interesting/insightful/amusing people are still on that platform? Ditto local organisations announcing things: are there any respectable originations (such as local government and sports groups) that still wish to be associated with the cesspool Xitter has become?
Yes, that was the biggest topic under discussion in the threads about the Nitter C&D. And most of sports is apparently still on there, to the point I hear people talking about how they only use it for sports news.
Honestly, the belief that Twitter has suddenly become a cesspool and everyone left is a (vocal) minority view, and it's only the liberal tech/terminally online left echo chamber chamber that thinks that.
Hot take but I think the entire concept of a "web app" needs to die. My web browser does not need access to my GPU, OpenGL/Vulkan, USB, MIDI, HID, . All of those are things a native app needs, not a website. IMO if you need that kind of access and your instinct is to do it as a "web app" your doing it wrong. Same thing, I would argue, for things even like WebAudio or WebSpeech. At this point my web browser is so comp…
I largely disagree. The web, and the browser by extension, is a multimedia platform. Thats text, images, videos, animations, interactivity, video calls, etc. At the very least, I disagree about GPUs, OpenGL/Vulcan, and various audio and video related things.
Says who exactly though? The big companies and web devs who think your browser needs raw access to HIDs? Why exactly does a web browser need this level of access when a native application is far superior (and doesn't need to deal with the limitations of a web browser)? All this does is require that browsers be more and more complicated and be more and more invasive so that we can pretend that the web browser is our operating system. That in turn makes it harder and harder for web browsers to even be implemented in the first place.
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…
Which is pushing me to not use them at all.
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It depends. Truly working offline, which is as private as it gets in many scenarios, isn’t really feasible with web apps.
You could also work in a windowless steel box inside a cave at the top of a mountain, if you really want to move the goalposts.
Native apps can work reasonably well offline and online. Web apps can’t, currently.