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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

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"clock in well under the 100MB mark" But this is still incredibly ridiculously comically gross. The fact that we can afford it these days is an irrelevant seperate thing. These numbers are just unjustifiable for what most apps actually do.

I mean, it scales with complexity. Naturally, well-made native SDK apps bumping up against 100MB are more likely to be highly functional, while simple apps are very small. For a couple examples pulled from my TestFlight list, there’s a social media site reader app that’s 7.6MB and a text editor that’s 697KB. Those sizes aren’t the least bit unreasonable.

What are these you are listing?

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#292
I've found it somewhat kludgy to use most apps in their mobile web version, which was for me a benefit more than a curse. The friction in using Instagram on the web was just enough to stop me from doomscrolling, without obstructing all access to seeing what is happening with the people I care about.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the value of being able to talk to people who share the same hobby you do. Or the value of being able to see a community made wiki about some topic you are trying to learn about. Even being able to see cat pictures is valuable to people.

None of that is unique to the app though, and existed before the app.

Nothing existed before a user was born. It is impossible for someone that has always had something to imagine in a real manner what not having it would be like. Hell, if there's an AWS outage for a couple of hours, those that have always had it freak out like the world is ending.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#294
I don't offer a native app for my business. We have a PWA. It works great on mobile. Yet users keep asking for an app. They're so conditioned to look in the app store now. I keep having to tell them to just pin the website to their desktop. Just a couple taps. All good.

I don't need or want their data. It's a liability. They pay a monthly subscription. I want their money. Not their data.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#295

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.

There isn't even a need for JavaScript for reddit though it does seem to require it. I posted this without JavaScript enabled so it obviously would be fine for reddit too. Using an app for reddit doesn't make any sense to me at all. Banking apps make sense, they are doing some crazy device finger-printing to avoid id theft. But when the goal is to convey information use html and css. If you are taking payments then y…

Reddit is in full in AI data hoarding mode. Try to load their website with fingerprinting entirely mitigated and you'll be greeted by impossible are you a robot validation

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#296

I don't offer a native app for my business. We have a PWA. It works great on mobile. Yet users keep asking for an app. They're so conditioned to look in the app store now. I keep having to tell them to just pin the website to their desktop. Just a couple taps. All good. I don't need or want their data. It's a liability. They pay a monthly subscription. I want their money. Not their data.

Just don't collect any data. Having an app doesn't mean you need to collect any data.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#298

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.

They would seamlessly in the background pre-cache all the articles and images coming up in your feed so if you had intermittent connections like on the subway, you could browse nearly[0] unaffected.

[0] Unfortunately, the app I used in the before-time did not implement queuing for submitting comments/posts so that functionality was broken while you were between stations, and videos weren't cached.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#300
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better features, less ads, smoother experience and in the case of Apollo—the one I used—it just looked much better.

So apart from the ad blocker, that's ... features, smoother, better. What? Edit: I'm not trying to be rude (it comes naturally). But you just explained "great" as "better, with more". I guess smooth might mean faster, which might be because it isn't doing ads and tracking. It seems to come back to third-party being the crucial difference, and "app" not mattering.

UI/UX is not that tricky. Caring about your users is the hard part usually.

Third party clients could be webapps, too, of course.

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