121–130 of 131 posts
The web is a great publishing medium for magazines and news outlets. Apps are for doing stuff beyond passive browsing.
- Companies that publish content that gets linked to and shows up in google search results should mainly be web based.
- Companies that are about about getting stuff done (Gmail, Uber, banks, etc) are the ones who benefit the most from native apps.
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>Websites also can't spam you with push notifications I remember reading about this a while ago; not sure how widely implemented this feature is https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-notif...
Unlike with iOS or Android, in HTML5 invasive APIs (including notifications) are all opt-in. Each permission is granular, instead of needing to choose between granting all permissions an app requires or none. IMO this is a massive improvement. Although you could grant notification access to an app and then it could become a bad actor, I expect on the web you will be able to be far more choosy about granting access th…
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Websites also can't spam you with push notifications the way installed apps can, so I strongly prefer them as a user. But I suspect this is one reason companies like apps. I'm not sure whether it's my imagination, but this seems to have gotten a lot worse in the past year or two, and is no longer limited to apps from shady no-name companies. Apps from reputable companies used to try to have some plausible reason rela…
There's a web feature for push notifications; I got a dialogue box asking me if I wanted to enable it for Facebook the other day. It was easy enough to push No (since push notifications were one of the reasons I got rid of the @#$%er in the first place), but many people will still get those.
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Techmeme is a prime example of this — bookmark it on your homescreen and it's as good as an app. Their mobile design is, IMO, easier to parse than the web, too.
Financial Times does not have an iOS app - just a mobile website. They have been very clever in building the site so that it is very app-like, for instance they use local storage to store the days download stories. But, was initially confusing because I couldn't find their app in the app store, where I was expecting it.
In my experience this is a huge problem. Along with the process of adding to home screen - people just don't get it. Once they have it installed they're very happy, but getting them to that point is difficult.
+1 for the article As a web vs. app proponent I love this. I do have a few apps installed on my Note 4 but I prefer getting Twitter, FB, etc. as a web site. Web standards like HTML5 are wonderful so let's use them and make the web awesome. My brother and one friend each have a few hundred apps installed on their phones. I am sometimes surprised that their phones still function with so much cruft installed, never mind…
> My brother and one friend each have a few hundred apps installed on their phones. I am sometimes surprised that their phones still function with so much cruft installed, never mind the privacy considerations. This is a common misconception (also concerning desktop OS "bloat"). As long as those apps are not running at the same time and competing for CPU resources, they could have 100000 apps installed and no issue a…
+1 for the article As a web vs. app proponent I love this. I do have a few apps installed on my Note 4 but I prefer getting Twitter, FB, etc. as a web site. Web standards like HTML5 are wonderful so let's use them and make the web awesome. My brother and one friend each have a few hundred apps installed on their phones. I am sometimes surprised that their phones still function with so much cruft installed, never mind…
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While apps have more capability, the web can do pretty much anything you need with content and data. The only time you really need an app is for CPU-intensive work or accessing hardware.
> Not on mobile. Due to serious, oft-encountered performance issues, the web remains crippled on mobile compared to native . By "native" I'm referring to apps where the UI is rendered natively as opposed to being rendered in a `WebView`. React Native is bending the rules here but it is important to note that it is divergent from the web platform and convergent with the native platforms.
The issue I have, and I think others have, is that 99% of "apps" don't need the extra capabilities and performance. Or if they do, it's only because of problems they've created themselves. "We're loading 45 tracking and advertising scripts, and now our site is slow. We need an app!"
The article here demonstrates the problem perfectly. Mobile browsers are absolutely capable of displaying the text articles on the site. The browser on my flip phone from 1999 was capable of browsing a site like that.
+1 for the article As a web vs. app proponent I love this. I do have a few apps installed on my Note 4 but I prefer getting Twitter, FB, etc. as a web site. Web standards like HTML5 are wonderful so let's use them and make the web awesome. My brother and one friend each have a few hundred apps installed on their phones. I am sometimes surprised that their phones still function with so much cruft installed, never mind…
It feels like using different apps is like using separate "browser profiles" for each website, which is possibly what I want--it's so difficult to compartmentalize on mobile browsers. So things at least seem isolated to a greater extent than using the same web-browser for everything?
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>Websites also can't spam you with push notifications the way installed apps can, so I strongly prefer them as a user. On Android, at least, you can disable notifications on a per-app basis. Press and hold on a notification, touch the icon that appears, and uncheck the notifications checkbox on the next screen.
This can be done via a checkbox on the app's info page. It's nice to know it can also be done directly from the notification too, that's even more convenient.
Interesting that a smallish magazine is moving away from native mobile back to web while not too long ago I saw that some large retail company discontinued their mobile web site and require use of their native app (flipkart I think). I don't think expecting a new audience just because you have an app is reasonable. I'd be interested in seeing how many new users they generate with just the mobile web site - I suspect…
One of their acquired companies Myntra is now app only. Only have a pc and the internet ? Sorry. You can only purchase from our apps.