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I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok

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Re: I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok

#551

Post by harun_karaca »

senordevnyc wrote: post #419
leros wrote: post #355

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…

Ugh, I run a B2B SaaS app that's mobile friendly, but people keep asking for an app (and I really do need push notifications, I'm spending thousands per month on text messages right now), but I've been putting it off. Did the App Stores have issues with you publishing just a simple RN wrapper app?

[dead]

Re: I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok

#552

Post by CivBase »

tosti wrote: post #405
CivBase wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right... but I think you have incorrectly conflated "web" with "desktop". Websites work perfectly fine on smartphones when they are designed to do so. I'm using HN on my phone's web browser right now to type this comment. I don't need an app for HN. I don't have many apps on my phone because I've found I simply don't need them. There are basically only two cases where I use apps: 1. When I want push notificati…

If Android, try going into accessibility settings and set display size to maximum. Then see if you still like HN and many other websites with shitty unresponsive CSS.

Why would I do that?

Re: I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok

#553

Post by tosti »

CivBase wrote: post #552
tosti wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Android, try going into accessibility settings and set display size to maximum. Then see if you still like HN and many other websites with shitty unresponsive CSS.

Why would I do that?

IDK. In my case, instructions are much more readable in osmand while driving. Better readability is kinda the whole reason why such a setting exists. I certainly hope I'm not the only one trying to break my own work by adjusting a11y settings in the os. Computers are meant to support people, not the other way around.

Re: I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok

#554

Post by neutronicus »

jcattle wrote: post #550
neutronicus wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My parents save files on the Whatsapp chat That's becoming dangerously true of my wife and I as well, to be honest. The friction is just so much lower than Google Drive or whatever. As long as I handle it right away. It's just finding something from more than an hour ago that's intolerable.

Also, you usually have context for the file. Like "Hey, can you send me this blueberry crumble recipe?". I do this quite frequently. I know which person knows, I know I've asked them before and usually a quick keyword search is enough to find whatever I'm looking for again. So this thing has at least two more information points I can search for to pinpoint the file than a simple file on my PC. It tells me who, and mo…

Yes, I think "Gen Z doesn't understand file systems" is at least partially an indictment of file systems.

Hierarchy was always a poor substitute for tagging. You have to either decide a bunch of arbitrary parent / child relationships to encode your tags in a deep directory structure or just stuff them all into the file name and filter with regex.

I actually have similar frustrations with emacs org-mode. I get paralyzed by tree-structure decisions and I'm realizing that a tree structure is just not what I want. A flat collection of knowledge items festooned with every conceivable piece of metadata that might help me find them later is.

Re: I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok

#555

Post by dredmorbius »

jonathanlb wrote: post #51
camdenreslink wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit comes to mind. I have so many issues with their mobile website. The back button has been broken for years, comments will frequently just hang as loading indefinitely (only fixable with a hard refresh), videos will sometimes not be replayable, sometimes if you change the zoom on the page it will just hard refresh, etc. I'm not sure if it is intentional to push you to the mobile app, but I have to imagine the mo…

Thankfully, old.reddit.com as a default option still works. The kicker is that the text is so small and to make the site usable (and readable) you need to rotate your phone to landscape mode. This works well enough that I haven't downloaded the reddit mobile app or used their mobile site ever since they killed Apollo.

But i.reddit.com does not. That was the original mobile experience.

And worse: neither would propagate to on-site links. That is, if someone had explicitly linked "www" rather than "old" or "i" at reddit, then regardless of which interface you'd arrived at it from, requiring you to constantly re-specify the actual interface you want. Particularly when not logged in to the site.

I'd begun using Reddit nearly 15 years ago, my last comment is now two years old, and my subs private (and inactive). Site's dead to me.

Re: I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok

#556

Post by abustamam »

gpvos wrote: post #468
abustamam wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is silly but you have to meet customers where they are. I think the problem is also that PWAs don't have any discoverability, and no standardization. I did some consulting work for a company that had a PWA. They had a 200-line long react component that was intended to determine what modal to show the user depending on what web browser and OS they were using to instruct them how to install PWA depending on the comb…

I actually don't know what you mean by PWA. Is that a mobile web site? And by installing it, do you mean installing a link to it on a phone's launcher?

Haha. Not sure if this was intentional but this is exactly my point! If someone on HN doesn't know what a PWA is, what chance does the average user have?

Re: I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok

#557

Post by runjake »

Jaxan wrote: post #335
runjake wrote: post #234

I specifically do this with apps like Discord, because it seemed like every time I launched the app, there was a 200mb+ update. I can just use the web version instead and skip all that, along with the memory usage (for the most part).

I find it so annoying that certain apps update every single time I open them. Why can’t they build something more stable?

Because, CI[1] and "Move fast and break things"

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration

Re: I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok

#558

Post by sumtechguy »

sdfjkhdfjkdhs wrote: post #252
sumtechguy wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question do you really use all of those tabs? As a small handful of tabs user I use the bookmark feature to hold things I want to keep for later. ctrl-d and it is in the list. Even then 99% of the time I open it again and go 'why did I keep this'. I get it that it is your workflow. Just sort of curious why you would consider that a 'power user' thing? Would not saving them to the bookmark list be more of 'powe…

The whole bookmark/tab system really needs to be completely revised. I have a new system I'm thinking about for my Chromium fork which will be radically different. More like a full-page "new tab" screen where everything can be visualized and sorted into different projects etc. Just look at how most people do a search, for instance. These days for me it often involves 20-30 tabs, or even more, due to the horrific stat…

Interesting. I personally aggressively prune open pages. If I have too much open I get off task and wander into whatever random thing pops up. Anything that needs long term storage I bookmark it in a folder.

Using the session manager that is one I used to use. But backed away from. I use a lot of tools to keep me on task and not wander off into random things.

For me it is about attention and focus. You seem to have a very different pattern than what I use. ctrl-w and alt-left arrow are my buddies.

Re: I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok

#559

Post by efreak »

denysvitali wrote: post #3

I understand the user point of view, but some web UIs nowadays are so bad and the app so good that I'm not sure this always holds true. I do agree that this seems to be exception rather than the rule - so having both is actually nice IMHO.

Better can be relative, too. If your app is native (desktop or not) and now efficient with ram than your website is, I'll download it and use that instead. My mother's computer has 16gb RAM and was ooming due to outlook and Google workspace alone using up 8gb of RAM in 7 tabs. I added an increased swap file and it started thrashing instead of just killing the browser. It's so bad Quicken 200X doesn't work properly (according to task manager, Quicken uses some 30mb RAM)

For local apps, I'll firewall it: on mobile I use rethinkdns and trackercontrol to block unnecessary network calls; on desktop I'll mostly just deal with it (I have an extensive hosts file), but that doesn't mean everything).

Re: I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok

#560

Post by leptons »

palata wrote: post #542
leptons wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You completely underestimate it. I am absolutely certain that you cannot create a browser extension that meaningfully solves this problem in 15 minutes. You are absolutely wrong. I write browser extensions, I can spin up a new one in a minute, and the code to monitor and hash all resources loaded by a webpage is trivially easy to do. It would be simple to set up a server to allow comparing the hashes, in a POC. I'm…

> I'm not talking about making this a robust service that everyone can use Right. So you cannot do it. Thank you. > I'm also tired of this pointless internet interaction. Goodbye. Seems to me that you don't enjoy discussing with people who behave like jerks, which I admittedly did, just for you). You may not have realised it, but you started it. I am happy to disagree in a respectful tone, but you broke it first. May…

I'm tired of this pointless internet interaction. Goodbye.
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