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The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

cwilso.com

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Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

#71

Post by MereInterest »

kllrnohj wrote: post #56
MereInterest wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a large reason why I was really annoyed when Google removed the "Merge Tabs and Apps" option back around 2016. With that feature, a bookmark to a URL could open up a new tab, appear in the list of active applications, and be closed just through that list. Effectively, there was no difference in usability between a bookmarked URL and an app that loaded the webpage in a captive browser, but you got all the sand…

Just as a different perspective I hated that feature. I use my list of tabs almost as a set of bookmarks and todos. Trying to find them in the recents app switcher sucked. I don't object to the feature existing of course just offering a perspective on why it maybe wasn't universally loved.

That makes sense, and I definitely see that neither is a universally applicable setting. Effectively, it's a choice between having one level of organization or two. For me, having two levels of organization was an extra unnecessary step, especially where the majority of interactions required the same choice at the top level. For you, having one level of organization was insufficient. So it makes sense to have it as a setting, but removing it entirely was unnecessary.

I suppose it was extra frustrating due to the slow removal of the feature. First, make it no longer be the default setting. Then, move the setting into chrome://flags. Then, periodically break the flag for it, depending on undocumented interactions with other flags, which A/B testing group you're in, locale, and phase of the moon. Finally, remove it altogether by arguing that nobody uses it. It felt like somebody had decided to kill the feature, and only later constructed a reason to kill it.

Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

#72

Post by finiteseries »

theK wrote: post #35
Supermancho wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The web won. I don't think so. Either way the statements are rife with soft terminology, but I'll use raw traffic as my metric for dominance in the functional space. https://www.perficient.com/insights/research-hub/mobile-vs-d... . The majority of traffic is mobile and apps still rule that platform due to both a superior experience and better interfaces. The trend is clear and ongoing, so I'm not sure why people th…

If I’m reading this correctly this survey only focuses on web usage. They even go to the point where their no. 1 takeaway at the end is „design your mobile web site first“. So I guess the web really did win, even on mobile.

~90% of the average site’s mobile traffic, as a rule, comes from in-app browsers.

Mobile users, as a rule, rarely open an internet browser, they are redirected there.

It’s become a glorified zen-mode type feature for articles or indie web stores at this point for a substantial part of the population, especially young people, at least on iOS.

This is a huge reason why “Open this in our app!1!” is a thing as well. The alternative isn’t browsing a mobile site through Safari, it’s using whatever social media app led you there in the first place.

Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

#73

Post by kitsunesoba »

spideymans wrote: post #58
aparticulate wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are more notifications inherently desirable? My lock screen is a disaster and I honestly don't have that many apps. I can recall in 2007 when even having third party apps was a debatable topic. Call me fogeyish but it's inarguable that this was not really the intention of iOS, rather, we have mitigated and papered over the problem due to insane app store popularity. Macs didn't have native notifications for decad…

There’s some recognition within apple that push notifications were a mistake (at least as they’re implemented today). iOS 15 introduced notification filters and notification summaries iOS 16 doesn’t even show notifications on the Lock Screen unless the user explicitly asks to view them (there’s just a small “view notifications” button at the bottom of the screen). Further, the Live Activities widgets will eliminate a…

I've certainly enjoyed notifications being "delivered silently" by default paired with the morning/evening summaries more than I thought I would. Most of the time those notifications contain nothing of value and on the odd occasion they do, the summary surfaces those pretty well without me needing to scroll through it all myself.

Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

#74

Post by kitsunesoba »

spideymans wrote: post #40
lampshades wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure companies force their app for monetization reasons and because they know it’s a better experience and want you to see that. I remember when Reddit started throwing the app in my face everyday until I eventually downloaded it. Now I always open for an app. Even for newspapers. The web experience on mobile blows.

At some point the industry needs to have an honest discussion with itself about the state of the UX of the open web. I feel like we keep telling ourselves the mobile web is fine because we have PWAs and all these other native-like gizmos, but truth be told the UX pales in comparison to native apps.

I think there's a hard ceiling in terms of PWA UX quality that can't be shattered until browsers start bundling better UI building blocks. There's just too much that's too easy to screw up with the "bring your own everything" approach.

Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

#75

Post by kitsunesoba »

rchaud wrote: post #27

Article should be suffixed with "(2015)". A lot has changed in the past 7 years. People don't install new apps anymore. They have their go-to apps for entertainment, work and logistics (IG, TW, Netflix, Google Docs, Bank, Uber), a couple of games maybe and that's it. For everything else, it makes less and less sense to have to install yet another app.

I still install apps for frequently used products/services if only because juggling tabs with browser UI is always going to be more cumbersome than managing apps with the OS task manager. It's also often useful to have alternative UI implementations easily available – there's been many occasions where something is broken in the web UI but works fine in the native app UI or vice versa, and it's nice to be able to instantly flip between implementations as needed while waiting on bug fixes.

Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

#76

Post by YetAnotherNick »

ryaniscool wrote: post #20

This article is all over the place. The debate is over. The web won. You can see that by the way popular websites will try and force you to install their apps. That’s because their web experience is perfectly competent to scratch the users itch. They are forced to artificially cripple their mobile web experience to drive app installs. There is a strong niche left to native. I’m thinking of things like creative tools.…

This is so illogical. Our government forces people to not use violence. So using violence is better?

Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

#78

Post by spideymans »

depressedpanda wrote: post #64
spideymans wrote: post #48

We’ve been hearing about web being the future of mobile apps for at least 15 years now. Yet alas, mobile users still spend the vast majority of their time in native apps. What’s going wrong here? I feel like we’re spinning our tires in the mud.

> Yet alas, mobile users still spend the vast majority of their time in native apps. What’s going wrong here? Easy: - Apple only allows one browser -- their own -- on iOS - Apple uses this control to cripple PWAs on iOS - Apple's iPhone market share is significant enough that if Safari/iOS doesn't support something, businesses won't spend time on using it E.g.: chat/communication apps cannot be written as PWAs, since…

This doesn't explain why PWAs are still a rarity on Android though. You'd think that the ability to target both desktop (web) and Android (web/PWA) would've attracted more developer interest.

I can't really comment on other companies, but my company is currently moving our product from MVP to a more mature project. When comparing various options (PWAs/web, Flutter, React, Native), PWAs/web was immediately discarded as an option because we didn't believe we could deliver the level of UX excellence we're targeting. Nor did we believe that PWAs would be any easier to develop and maintain than two native apps.

Perhaps the strongest argument in favour of the web is that it's a lot easier to hire web devs than iOS and Android developers. But that's all moot if the web can't deliver the product experience we're targeting.

We're still considering React, but I feel like we're inevitability going to end up building a full native experience.

Generally speaking, I feel that PWAs and the web have a long way to go in terms of tooling, performance and UX excellence, before companies in our position will be comfortable adopting it. At least with iOS, it's really easy to create fantastic user experiences and maintainable software as long as you're willing to follow Apple's guidelines. It's a lot more difficult to achieve the same on the web.

Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

#79

Post by karussell »

ryaniscool wrote: post #20

This article is all over the place. The debate is over. The web won. You can see that by the way popular websites will try and force you to install their apps. That’s because their web experience is perfectly competent to scratch the users itch. They are forced to artificially cripple their mobile web experience to drive app installs. There is a strong niche left to native. I’m thinking of things like creative tools.…

> The web won.

I wish that were true. We wrote a navigation application with GPS, turn-by-turn instructions, fullscreen-mode, always-on-screen and more. This is possible directly in the browser! (its open source)

But the problem is that even if you pick Chrome as target you'll still have a lot of problems to solve. Can you disable the display to save battery for your long hiking tour and navigate just by voice? A native app can do that in the background, but I have not found a way to make this possible for a web app.

And then there are many Web APIs (sensor API, always on screen), that are only implemented by Chrome.

Or did you mean "Chrome won" :) ?

Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

#80

Post by [deleted] »

ryaniscool wrote: post #20

This article is all over the place. The debate is over. The web won. You can see that by the way popular websites will try and force you to install their apps. That’s because their web experience is perfectly competent to scratch the users itch. They are forced to artificially cripple their mobile web experience to drive app installs. There is a strong niche left to native. I’m thinking of things like creative tools.…

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