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Do not download the app, use the website

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Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#281

Post by frollogaston »

c-hendricks wrote: post #243
frollogaston wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apps are normally made semi cross-platform nowadays. Not much point in maintaining a PWA that's effectively an Android-only app. But even aside from Apple's lack of support, the PWA standard seems kinda bad. Weird boilerplate like the serviceworker.js even if all you want is to make it addable to home screen.

You don't need a service worker if that's all you want to do. You just need a manifest.

Oh, this used to be a requirement to make the app installable in Chrome but seemingly got removed around 2023: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53594466/are-service-wor...

Idk about iOS

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#282

Post by jay-barronville »

> And let's be honest, how many of us meticulously read through every single permission pop-up? Most of the time, we just tap "Allow" to get to what we want to do.

I do. I also, without exception, read and make sure that I understand every single word of every piece of legalese that I’m presented with to agree to and/or sign. My wife sometimes jokes that she married me so that I could become her in-house attorney. I digress…

You should regularly review and reevaluate all of your devices’ configurations/settings from a privacy and security perspective (I do so at least once every two weeks).

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#283

Post by h4ck_th3_pl4n3t »

scarface_74 wrote: post #230
bitpush wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify was an example, but since you were harping on it. Why is it that on desktop everyone uses spotify.com to listen to music, purchase subscription but when it comes to iPhone, we have to install an app from the App Store. Who do you think is stopping from that happening?

Well seeing that you could play music in the background from Safari since 2007, Spotify is the one forcing you to use an app Apple makes no money from the Spotify app being on the iPhone and hadn’t for over a decade.

This is an untrue statement.

Music was played by the iTunes process on mobile until 2016, and only a single audio stream at a time. How dare you wanted a fade in/out with less than 3 seconds latency!

And even then Apple was reluctant to implement a correct Promise based Audio API in WebKit, which in turn was incompatible with all other Web Browsers (up until today, btw) and also had very different audio formats supported that were only compatible with iOS due to proprietary patents.

Saying WebKit played music in 2007 is literally a worse experience than a Flash web player doing that.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#284

Post by meehai »

markbao wrote: post #7

Don’t agree, but to each their own. The native app experience for every app noted in the article is better and smoother than the mobile web version, in my opinion. Lots of people hate Electron apps, which suggests to me that my preference for native apps isn’t unique. Web apps can ask for your location or microphone the same way native apps can. Just reject it, there’s nothing that says you have to accept on either p…

Tbh, the web won the application platform mostly because it's a standard. Everybody knows html, css and a little JS.

On the other hand, for mobile apps, there is still a device-specific mentality.

Imagine web apps being built with a different flavor for all the major browsers...

I hope that the same level of standardization comes to mobile apps too with the option to use more device-specific features on top of the generic UI.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#285

Post by jasonjayr »

Gigachad wrote: post #253
spauldo wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is one of the cases where a native app makes sense. Some of the 3rd party Reddit apps were great. But I'll eat my hat before I'll install Reddit's own app. Reddit killing off 3rd party apps is why I post here and not there.

How does an app for Reddit make sense? It’s an image and text platform. There’s no weird hardware apis required. Native apps make sense when you need to tap in to platform specific features like the Lidar api and such. They don’t make any sense for most websites.

The 3rd party Reddit apps made an effort to be more 'native', and actually used native UI elements to make rendering and interactions faster than the web page could.

WAAAAAY too often the 1st party native app is exactly what the other poster said: a browser context with access to some local native API's in order to hoover more data about the user. It is rare that a first-party app actually has some effort put into it to be a quality app. Is in fact so rare, that the sites that actually put in the effort suffer because folks can't believe that a native app for a site could actually be better or worth it.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#287

Post by dylan604 »

thfuran wrote: post #227
dylan604 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, it's not for you... This is key. Companies pushing apps is not for your benefit. It's so they can further monetize you right under your nose and with your full permission by accepting their EULA. This is just a furtherance of the if you don't pay for the product you are the product.

We have moved beyond that. Even if you pay, you’re usually still the product.

moving beyond is usually what happens when something is furtheranced

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#288

Post by beached_whale »

zholer wrote: post #221
chpatrick wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of apps don't need any native feature.

true, but 99% of the apps don't generate any traffic at all :) If you look at the top 1% of apps, all of them could have been PWA's but can't. Here is a case study from aliexpress who achieved a 104% increase across all users for conversions when they deployed as a PWA: https://web.dev/case-studies/aliexpress

And Aliexpress is annoying as heck because they keep trying to redirect to app owned URI's for things like tracking. I'm already there to buy. The privacy of apps is just not as good as web with no benefit to me.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#289

Post by dylan604 »

charcircuit wrote: post #210
johnnyanmac wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nostalgia, network effects, and boiling thr frog. Then you build on that with business incentives; you may not like Facebook, but you need to advertise there because that's where everyone is. Basically, you rely on goodwill from yester-year and slowly ad in intrusive stuff that users adjust to. Thars enshittification in its raw essence. Admittedly, this mostly works because the general user is not "active" and will n…

Nostalgia changes how people perceive value. Network effects is about how exponential value can be gained from linear user growth. Boiling the frog us about slowly doing things to avoid changing how people perceive value. None of these are a sign a product has no value. No one would advertise with Facebook if there was no value from purchasing ad space. The billions of dollars people spend is evidence there is value…

> Network effects is about how exponential value can be gained from linear user growth

network effects is the momentum that keeps everyone from stopping the use of the service/product. it takes too much energy to stop, so people just keep using. it also helps there's nothing to replace. any fledgling service that might offer an alternative just gets bought up by the service.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#290

Post by ghostpepper »

jasonjayr wrote: post #285
Gigachad wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does an app for Reddit make sense? It’s an image and text platform. There’s no weird hardware apis required. Native apps make sense when you need to tap in to platform specific features like the Lidar api and such. They don’t make any sense for most websites.

The 3rd party Reddit apps made an effort to be more 'native', and actually used native UI elements to make rendering and interactions faster than the web page could. WAAAAAY too often the 1st party native app is exactly what the other poster said: a browser context with access to some local native API's in order to hoover more data about the user. It is rare that a first-party app actually has some effort put into it…

I think the parent's point was that an app for reddit only makes sense because they deliberately don't add the features you like to the mobile site. There's no reason those features couldn't work perfectly well in a browser, they just choose not to (and to kill off third party apps).
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