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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

#371

Post by kristopolous »

Eisenstein wrote: post #343
kristopolous wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Unfortunately they have a major problem that is going to hit them soon: they rely on volunteer moderators to run the site for them, and the young people aren't doing it.

They'll LLM that, or at least they'll majorly try.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#372

Post by Wilder7977 »

devman0 wrote: post #301
esseph wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carry two, leave another in a safe somewhere in your home country? Otherwise, yeah... Passkey it is

The principle issue with hardware keys as implemented today via FIDO2 or U2F is that you can't enroll them without having them in your physical possession, which means if you have a backup key stored offsite, you have to fetch it anytime you sign up for a new service.

A good strategy for this is to enroll it at day 0 for the most sensitive systems (e.g., password manager, email accounts). This way you are able to use it as a backup in the sense of giving the option to reset or access (e.g., via backup codes) all the services, without being necessarily enrolled in all of them.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#373

Post by madduci »

One big drawback is represented by banking apps, that force the usage of their apps to act as a 2 Factor Authentication mechanism, sending a request for logging in.

I would like to use only the browser, but unfortunately for some use cases it isn't really possible.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#374

Post by create-username »

jorisboris wrote: post #258
kristopolous wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "download app" notifications on reddit are like some kind of art project to maximimally annoy you. Probably the worst offender is facebook where they have what can only be called an intentionally broken mobile website - the idea of losing the person's name if you edit a comment, the page deciding to reload you back to the main page if you switch tabs to research something or the post box clearing out if you switc…

And it literally blocks users from using messenger in the mobile browser, I need to ask for desktop website

Websites shouldn’t know if you’re on desktop because they are clearly gonna abuse that bit of information.

Web browsers were designed by naive, pre surveillance capitalism developers

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#375

Post by pastage »

madduci wrote: post #373

One big drawback is represented by banking apps, that force the usage of their apps to act as a 2 Factor Authentication mechanism, sending a request for logging in. I would like to use only the browser, but unfortunately for some use cases it isn't really possible.

If you use a third party for identification that works out better.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#376

Post by landl0rd »

ghostpepper wrote: post #290
jasonjayr wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

They’re not indifferent to browsers (less data mineable contexts) so much as actively hostile. For the past few years some things I have to add “-reddit” to my Google searches, because they killed i.reddit.com, which was the only useable, fast, non-complete-shit mobile site they have ever built. Their old. subdomain isn’t really readable in a cell phone.

Their new version is incredibly slow, moves me to sub-pages trying to expand comment threads (very disruptive if I saw something in the Google preview snippet and want to control F to it, but whatever comment that was literally isn’t loaded), and sometimes outright fails to load. now I can’t/wont use it.

So screw reddit, it’s a glorified q&a site, with sub forums run by fedora neckbeards, that’s gotten uppity and chosen to be hostile to users. And for some reason Google hasn’t just downranked it to death. The other day there was a thread complaining that their AI responses are reducing websites clicks. I hope that it is very damaging to reddit.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#377

Post by zxexz »

DrewADesign wrote: post #354
ghostpepper wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

If Figma runs perfectly well in a web browser, Reddit can do the same. It was built for and evolved almost entirely within the browser, like many other Internet forums. Pure data grab.

Reddit runs well IMO if you go to old.reddit.com. The mobile site is borderline useless, presumably intentionally.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#378

Post by abeindoria »

rustystump wrote: post #134

I cannot agree more and this has always been a pet peeve of mine. Most native apps are some half gig large where even the heaviest website is a few mb. They dont let you highlight text and have other bizarre design choices. Even worse, they request importing contacts list which isnt even an option on the web. Native apps could be butter but more often than not they are like margarine. Smooth, oily, and not good for y…

What makes margarine not "good for you?"

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#379

Post by xyse53 »

madduci wrote: post #373

One big drawback is represented by banking apps, that force the usage of their apps to act as a 2 Factor Authentication mechanism, sending a request for logging in. I would like to use only the browser, but unfortunately for some use cases it isn't really possible.

I don't install apps for simple websites, ever.

Banking happens to be the one where I do keep the app for each bank/brokerage that I have an account with. Some of the features like mobile deposit work better. And the biometric login on Android is convenient when I'm looking up things quickly.

(I use the banking websites too, and for those prefer hardware passkey where supported, and if not everything else is in bitwarden).

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#380

Post by judah »

singpolyma3 wrote: post #219
johnnyanmac wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's partially by design. Apple makes it a pain to make proper PWA's, and companies with websites make extremely intrusive elements to ruin the mobile website in order drive to the app. Which is easier to monetize and harder to adblock, I imagine. Some places outright disable the mobile view for the app. More simply, I don't need an app for every website I visit. a bookmark is much more lightweight than downloading…

I'm not apple lover, but safari support for PWAs is pretty good. What do you think is missing?

I work on PWABuilder, Microsoft's open source dev tool that packages PWAs for app stores.

I can say with certainty Apple has been hostile to PWAs.

Unlike Google Play and Microsoft Store, iOS App Store doesn't allow publishing PWAs. (You instead have to build a native web view app to load your PWA.) And many of the PWA features just don't work on mobile Safari.

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