401–410 of 760 posts
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I argue that this decade shows you do not have to provide value. You capture the market yester-decade and then you can hold the users hostage as you do any and everything to appeal to shareholders and advertisers. This is indeed a short term strategy, but tech companies right now are thinking very short term.
How do you hold users hostage without providing them value?
At AutoTempest we resisted making an app for years, because anything that a hypothetical app could do, we could do with the website. And in my opinion, when searching for cars, it's more convenient to be in your browser where you can easily open new tabs, bookmark results, etc. And for years, it was our most requested feature, by far. We had instructions for how to pin the site to your home screen, and would explain…
> People just really like apps! I would say people really hate websites on mobile. The browsers are horrible, the pages are slow and oftentimes broken in some way. You get all these popups everywhere, ads are much more intrusive. It's just bad experience, so of course people would prefer app for something they use. I avoid the browser on mobile as much as possible and I don't remember ever having a good time using it…
- Banking: Install it on a different android profile because my websites forces me to use the App one way or the other anyway.
- If the site uses an existing open protocol to interact (IndieWeb, Fediverse, etc), use a non-browser/non-electron app that can handle multiple instances of such protocols.
- If not, and it has PWA, is responsive, and I use it at least twice a day, use the PWA (so far I have one).
- If it does not have PWA, but have has nice responsive layout, Firefox Android with uBlock Origin (I use Iornfox).
- For everything else, if I'm outside without a laptop, whine, complain, and use the website in the mobile browser, enable desktop mode if it has a crappy UI.
- If I'm not outside, browse it from my laptop.
An ad show on a native mobile app pays between 5x to 10x more than the same ad in a webpage.
Advertiser's also get way more data from the mobile app than the data they can get from a webpage.
The company I work for makes 75% of their revenue from showing ads and they pushed very aggressively to install their app.
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Why is that a bad thing? Wouldn't we be better off with all of them being PWA's?
It's not a bad thing for users . It would reduce the ability of Apple and Google to extract revenue from their stores though, so they're motivated to do the opposite.
At AutoTempest we resisted making an app for years, because anything that a hypothetical app could do, we could do with the website. And in my opinion, when searching for cars, it's more convenient to be in your browser where you can easily open new tabs, bookmark results, etc. And for years, it was our most requested feature, by far. We had instructions for how to pin the site to your home screen, and would explain…
> People just really like apps! I would say people really hate websites on mobile. The browsers are horrible, the pages are slow and oftentimes broken in some way. You get all these popups everywhere, ads are much more intrusive. It's just bad experience, so of course people would prefer app for something they use. I avoid the browser on mobile as much as possible and I don't remember ever having a good time using it…
I think Apple's core apps that ship with iOS are about the only things that don't annoy me. They work offline and disconnected for days at a time quite happily and generally work as intended. No one else seems to bother with that and rather ships some fat web turd instead that works occasionally and forces you to sign in all the time.
I'd argue that a this task can be taken up by the mobile browser itself: i.e., to offer to install a shortcut icon that'll launch the page within an app container/sandbox. The common resistance to using website directly--and thus the preference to use the app, other than for performance reasons--stems from the inconvenience of typing and navigating on a small screen. If the browser helpfully offers to bypass that step (you've to do that at most once), a large number of apps would suddenly lose their pull.
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I feel like Apple is some lazy target for people to point to why PWAs have little uptake. Android has long had PWA support. Almost no one uses it at all. In fact iOS users have long had significantly high web browser usage than their Android compatriots. "It's because iOS doesn't support it...somehow. Despite entirely separate bases that could be served in entirely different ways, it's actually Apple's fault" A coupl…
>Android has long had PWA support. Almost no one uses it at all. Yes. Because if you're making a mobile app you want to target the two major platforms. If IOS's PWA's suck, you're not going to try and make a PWA for android. So it's a negative feedback loop. >Despite entirely separate bases that could be served in entirely different ways, differnt ways costs money. So often it isn't done. They pick a framework that l…
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These things only exist because some people just allow it. They allow it and occasionally buy something, enabling the entire hellhole we now all live in.
These things exist because companies and the people working there are predatory assholes. Let's not make the victims to be the villains and get off your high horse. Most people don't even know how.
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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.
On desktop, the browser’s always been the best way to use Reddit — as long as old.reddit still works. If you are on a non-Safari browser, there's also RES.
Same goes for many other sites. Like HN — it’s fine on mobile browser unless I bump the font size, then it pretty much breaks. But I’m not installing an HN app for something the mobile usage time share is barely 5–10%.
The problem is, this article assumes that you have an option to choose between the app and web page. This is not true in most important cases. The web site is gone or made a useless page which only tells you to download the app. Banks won't allow you to do much on their website. Infact, you can't login to their website if you don't have the app. I can't login into my work PC or laptop, if I don't use my company apps.…
Which bank is that where you can’t log into their website from PC or mobile?