Do not download the app, use the website

Everyone knows all the apps on your phone (1195 points, 3 months ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43518866

What does "desktop class browser" means in practical terms? What is it in the mobile version of Safari that holds you back?

Yes and no. As an alternative to apps, it's a far better far more distributed system.

But man. PWAs copy app behavior. And app behavior is garbage! The web has my back: I have forward/back buttons, urls, history, tabs, extensions, and so many other excellent amazing web things. The PWA is a vast improvement over apps, but it still misses 75% of what is so so good about the web, is still a place where you have only what the app developer grants you. The web is quite clearly better, is such a fairer shake, and it's so sad to lower oneself to an app experience, even if it is a "progressive web" app. It's a regressively sadly native apps, an RSNA. Boo that; give me the capable can do web instead please.

I do think there's a lot of successes for PWA. It's on offer in a lot of places and a far better far safer option than native. But it's so curious to me that PWA was a thing, given that it has always felt like such a remarkable downgrade going from web to app, always. Appealing only to Stockholm Syndrome sufferers. Why? Why do worse?

I installed the GitHub app and immediately all the links on Google search to GitHub projects turned to "open in app". Absolutely toxic degradation of experience, taking meaningful data about where I was going to navigate and turning into useless dumb ignorant OS level garbage.

I uninstalled the app, almost immediately. Because it poisoned my web experience, destroyed my ability to see where I was navigating on the web.

But still Chrome shows GitHub links as "open I'm app". Even though the app is uninstalled, even though Chrome will open them, even though all I want and all that would be meaningful would be to show me a URL.

It's beyond my imagining how toxically bad apps are. How the OS would prefer to poison us with a zero dimensional facimile of useful information, to shunt us away from useful experiences to route us into the awful bad no good low information indistinct app world. Apps suck so bad. The OS does nothing to make apps any good. There's no principles, no backbone, no nothing outside the web: just co-opting and exploiting users, offering low power low information experiences to people who know no power, have no agency, on and on.

I really think Reddit did it as a rebrand. It's somehow 20 years old and still gets teenagers.

Social media almost always skews older as it ages, beyond the natural pace of time.

AOL became mostly seniors as did Facebook and Yahoo. Reddit has not only shaken off most of the aging legacy users but had also captured a new generation of effectively children.

I personally don't like what they've done but it's worked.

The younger users view it as an app with a website as opposed to a website with an app