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“It works better in the app”

shkspr.mobi

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Re: “It works better in the app”

#431

Post by goosejuice »

reaperducer wrote: post #367
goosejuice wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you run a consumer to web app? What do your users say? What's the predominant device and OS?

I do. With over 200,000 paying users. The Customer Service department (we're a real business, so we have one of those) forwards all email, social media, and phone contacts about it to me. Number of middle managers who have brought up having an app since 2019: Around five. Number of actual users who asked for an app since 2019: One. Maybe two. Your turn.

> Number of actual users who asked for an app since 2019: One. Maybe two

Have you ever asked them?

Re: “It works better in the app”

#432

Post by PlunderBunny »

steezeburger wrote: post #356
fallinghawks wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the last couple months if you go to their site in a mobile browser (e.g. from search results), after a short scroll down they have this popup demanding you install their app and it completely takes over the screen. I take it as a reminder never to install their app.

It's the worst on iPhone, because it won't even let me scroll back up to show the button to open the tabs view, I have to switch out of the browser and re-open it to be able to scroll to show.

Maybe you can two-finger pinch to shrink the web page to the grid view, then close the page from there?

Re: “It works better in the app”

#433

Post by tpmoney »

goosejuice wrote: post #430
indidjdjendk wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. “Add to Home Screen” living on the share menu is as insane as “Find on Page” living there. Which both do. And I don’t think there’s a master plan behind “find on page” being tucked away bafflingly on the share button. It’s just bad UX. No conspiracy here.

It's not a conspiracy that they once promoted PWAs as being the future and then reversed course so far as to removing the ability completely.

They only removed it completely in a jurisdiction where they were being told that they had to open all of their internal APIs around web applications to all comers if they were going to use those APIs in their own applications. They claimed (whether you believe them or not) that doing so would open risks they didn’t want to take and so they removed it in that jurisdiction.

If this was some grand plan to stop the few hundred PWAs out there entirely, one would think they would have removed the PWA functionality in other less hostile jurisdictions where no law makers were looking to force a change. I could absolutely believe that the security risks were overblown, but if the assertion is Apple is trying to suppress PWAs, they’re doing a pretty bad job of it given they could just turn it off in the US and no one would blink an eye.

Re: “It works better in the app”

#434

Post by tompark »

mikestew wrote: post #361
fallinghawks wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the last couple months if you go to their site in a mobile browser (e.g. from search results), after a short scroll down they have this popup demanding you install their app and it completely takes over the screen. I take it as a reminder never to install their app.

I thought I'd be clever and use iOS's "Hide Distracting Items" to get rid of elements like that. But reddit kills the scroll, too, so even after the dickover[0] is gone the page is still non-functional. Nothing says, "we don't want your business" like a non-functional web page, which seems like a bad move unless you're selling food or potable water. 'cuz I get along just fine w/o reddit. [0] https://daringfireball.ne…

I use various bookmarklets to address this issue. The javascript is easy enough that you can modify it even if you're not a programmer. For example see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43488943

Re: “It works better in the app”

#435

Post by frizlab »

radicalbyte wrote: post #213
jader201 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am the customer, not the product dammit. That’s an illusion that died a long time ago, unfortunately. Just because you’re using their service on a browser doesn’t stop them from harvesting data from your usage, especially if you’re logging in (and if you’re using their services, chances are that you are). Using browser over app can help, but it doesn’t eliminate it. Like it or not, we’re the product, and I don’t…

They're not able to spy on all the other websites I visit or apps I use via the browsers in the way they are by forcing me to install spyware on the spyware machines from Apple and Google.

I’m pretty sure they actually can actually. On an iPhone with a “ask for no tracking” configuration (no IDFA), I’d wager it’s probably even easier on the web than it is in an app.

Re: “It works better in the app”

#436

Post by tpmoney »

bel8 wrote: post #134
tpmoney wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s intuitive in as much as anything on smart phones is, because the share menu is the OS mechanism for sending data from any iOS app to somewhere else. You use the same menu to save a file to Dropbox, put a photo into a note, add a bookmark etc. Effectively if you want to take something that lives in an app and have it live somewhere else, you use the share menu.

You're not sending any "data" though, much less sharing anything. I just asked my colleague and they had no clue how to do it in their iPhone. I guess a win for Apple.

Did your colleague even know that such a thing was possible at all, because it’s been in the share menu pretty much since day one. Sure it could be put somewhere else but it’s also been in a consistent spot for generations of iPhones, and the built in help app/manual will tell you how to do it if you don’t know how. If you want to argue the menu should be renamed, you won’t get any argument from me. But a poorly named menu is bad for initial discovery, but it does nothing to make the actual process any more difficult.

The claim wasn’t that Apple put it in a poorly named menu, or that the share menu is bad UX in general. The claim was that iOS users can’t pin web apps because Apple made it “exceedingly difficult” to do so. A 3 click navigation through the standard menus that has been consistent for multiple generations and is documented in the on-device help doesn’t qualify as “exceedingly difficult”

Re: “It works better in the app”

#437

Post by edent »

munificent wrote: post #320
virtyaluk wrote: post #106

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 th…

I think this is much less about Google developers not using their apps. My experience as a Googler is that people are actually quite good about working on apps they themselves use frequently. "Dogfooding" is a common term around the office. What I think is going on here is: * You have some app developers working on an app and caring about its particular user experience. * Then you have framework UX designers/develope…

The silver bullet is caring.

There must be someone working on that app who notices those pain points.

"The turtoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over but it can't, not without your help. But you're not helping."

Why is that?

Perhaps they're incentivised not to care. Perhaps the job is just a paycheque. Perhaps they mirror those around them.

Either way, the end result is the same. They don't care and their users suffer.

Re: “It works better in the app”

#438

Post by Drew_ »

internet2000 wrote: post #403
the_bear wrote: post #61

In Google's defense, they weren't the ones that championed the "everything must be an app" movement. My memory of the 2010s is that Google (and while they were relevant, Palm) pushed cross-platform web apps, but Apple ran a successful marketing campaign to convince everyone that everything on mobile must be a native app for reasons[1]. So we end up with a walled garden of native apps that must be approved by and pay…

> [1]The "reasons" primarily are that Apple refused to support PWAs, hamstrung mobile Safari, and refused to allow third-party browsers. So while it's true that native apps can offer a better experience than mobile web apps, that's mostly just because Apple artificially restricts web apps. This is disingenuous. Quoting Steve Jobs himself: > We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software…

But all of those problems with 3rd party libraries also do exist in native iOS development?

Re: “It works better in the app”

#439

Post by goosejuice »

tpmoney wrote: post #433
goosejuice wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a conspiracy that they once promoted PWAs as being the future and then reversed course so far as to removing the ability completely.

They only removed it completely in a jurisdiction where they were being told that they had to open all of their internal APIs around web applications to all comers if they were going to use those APIs in their own applications. They claimed (whether you believe them or not) that doing so would open risks they didn’t want to take and so they removed it in that jurisdiction. If this was some grand plan to stop the few…

Both of you are conflating conspiracy with incentives. They have no incentive to promote a distribution model outside of the confines of the app store where they make all their money.

Re: “It works better in the app”

#440

Post by tpmoney »

goosejuice wrote: post #439
tpmoney wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They only removed it completely in a jurisdiction where they were being told that they had to open all of their internal APIs around web applications to all comers if they were going to use those APIs in their own applications. They claimed (whether you believe them or not) that doing so would open risks they didn’t want to take and so they removed it in that jurisdiction. If this was some grand plan to stop the few…

Both of you are conflating conspiracy with incentives. They have no incentive to promote a distribution model outside of the confines of the app store where they make all their money.

Sure I agree they have no incentive to promote them. But your claim wasn’t that they don’t promote them. You claimed that they’re making them exceedingly difficult to install. Apparently because they put the command for that in a consistent menu position for decades and removing the functionality temporarily in a single jurisdiction.

If they wanted to make it “exceedingly difficult” they could be disabling it in all jurisdictions, or hide it behind layers of developer mode dialogs and warnings. They could remove the instructions for how to do so from the on device help. They could require you to re-pin it every 3 days like they do for self loaded apps. They could stop adding support for newer PWA APIs as new ones get standardized and they could deprecate and remove APIs that already exist. We all know Apple isn’t precious about backwards compatibility.

If the goal is to make using a PWA “exceedingly difficult” Apple is failing miserably despite being very successful at making side-loading apps “exceedingly difficult”

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