431–440 of 599 posts
Mostly I am quite tired of the 30 step onboarding funnel all apps have. I was trying out a fitness app and the second I opened it, I was about step 9 into it and I just deleted the app.
I have an app that is literally just a wrapper around the website. The mobile website and the mobile app are the exact same experience. Before I built the app, people were constantly asking me to build a mobile app. Yes, I had a PWA but people still wanted an app. I thought it was kind of silly but I eventually built that wrapper app. It immediately got thousands of downloads, users upgrading to paid plans increased…
It could be that your app is amazingly well done. But most PWAs and web apps turned into an "app" are not meeting my quality standards. It's usually a clunky experience (well, like a browser). I think once you've seen the actual possibilities of what e.g. an iOS app can do, when done correctly, everything changes for you.
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> I'm sure many people here got into programming precisely because abstract thinking came easily to them. Counter here: When I wanted to switch from TurboPascal during school (14y/15y) to C++ (because it was "more cool" and that was the tool that the 'big boy' game-dev-pros were, we thought), it was so damn hard for me - really! I was struggling so massivly, I head massive problems with this pointer stuff - it took m…
Pointers are famously difficult to learn and reason about even though the basic principles are simple. Programming in a style that requires direct manipulation of pointers when it's not actually necessary is usually regarded as unwise because it's so hard to get right.
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old.reddit.com
I've been on reddit since the beginning. If they kill old.reddit, I'm gone.
A few years ago I had an interesting experience at a company where I was working on a new prototype iPhone app and asked people around the office to install it... and a surprising number of people didn't want to do it because their phone was full already and they didn't want to delete photos in order to try a new app. Made me realize that for a lot of people who get cheaper phones with less storage installing a new a…
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> Web browser is a sandbox by default. So I take this is a security concern. How do you feel about the fact that when you open a webapp in your browser, you re-download that app code every time? That the server can send you a backdoor every single time, made just for you, and nobody else will ever know? And that you can't check the "hash" of the webapp, like you can with an app? On the other hand, an app is sandboxed…
>That the server can send you a backdoor every single time, made just for you, and nobody else will ever know? There is no "backdoor" when the browser is sandboxed. "backdoor" is a specific thing, I think you need to read up on it before you keep using it incorrectly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor_(computing) >On the other hand, an app is sandboxed, too (on mobile OSes like Android and iOS). When you downloa…
We can't do this with Proton where our mail is supposedly end-to-end encrypted. They can easily view our mail if they can send us a different code when we load their site.
> That isn't what "sandboxed" means, it has nothing to do with checking hashes. And no, mobile apps are not really sandboxed
Apps ARE somewhat sandboxes and GP didn't mean than sandboxing == checking hashes. It was 2 sentences appearing one after the other.
My experience might be the minority, but I have found that 95% of the time, when an app is available on both web and native mobile, the native mobile version is significantly better - usually not because it's a fantastic app or has more features, but rather because the web version is more buggy/slow/confusing. Whether I prefer an app to be web or native is purely based on the use case (I probably would choose native…
Whether or not the UX is better, from a security standpoint I choose the web version because of browser sandboxing unless I'm forced to use the app. If I'm forced to use the app, I probably choose not to use the service.
Ironically applications are far more secure running in the OS sandbox than the browser if you're on Android or iOS.
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> Computers screens have gotten wider and wider, and UIs bigger and bigger Sadly, most websites forcefully limit the width of the text. It's like they pretend our monitors are oriented to be tall rather than wide. Even HN has unnecessarily big margins. So unless I try to cram another window in my FHD monitor, I have ~50% or more completely wasted space. Margins should be 2-3 pixels wide, not 20-30% of the screen.
There are actual user studies to show that wider text is harder to read. https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability The major difference is that in the era of print, it was pretty logical where a multicolumn wide layout could go like on a newspaper, but in an desktop experience the browser markup is theoretically endless.
What most people dont get: Most of folks on HN here are much older than todays "first customers" of 16y/17/18 For them: The "Smartphone is the internet", while for most of us the "Smartphone is an extension of the internet from our desktops" that we were used to (remember the years before dot com bubble, saying: "I will be down in the basement at the computer to surf on the net little bit" ? :-) But today, the very f…
This. I posted this on my other comment, but there's a meme that "Gen Z Kids Don't Understand How File Systems Work" [0]. There seems to be a disconnect between some developers and the younger folks. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30253526