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 first touchpoint with "the internet" for younger folks is a smartphone display. The even do homework on this small screens!
Companies are seeing this switch, so they adapt.
Personally, a service which is "only an app" will be not used by me as I prefer to have a larger screen with more information (actually I use my mobile phone only when Im in public transport or similar, at home I have a notebook laying around if I need something)
> But today, the very first touchpoint with "the internet" for younger folks is a smartphone display. The even do homework on this small screens!
I saw a tweet recently that perfectly encapsulates this: for most people over 30, certain things are "big screen tasks". I use my phone for a lot, but for some things I put the phone down and use my computer instead. I am most comfortable using a large screen and a keyboard for anything that requires writing more than a few words or using any interface for more than a few clicks.
For example, I read your comment on my phone and went to my computer to type this reply.
I personally find the idea of doing homework on my phone horrifying but I suppose kids today are either used to it and comfortable with it, or they've simply never used a computer and don't know what they're missing. Though I'd wager they probably aren't comfortable typing on a keyboard.
Honestly I think Apple perfectly captured it with their "what's a computer?" ad for the iPad. I seem to remember them getting some flak online for it but I think they were right on the money with regards to the younger generations.
> I saw a tweet recently that perfectly encapsulates this: for most people over 30, certain things are "big screen tasks". I use my phone for a lot, but for some things I put the phone down and use my computer instead. I am most comfortable using a large screen and a keyboard for anything that requires writing more than a few words or using any interface for more than a few clicks.
Yup. From the frontier of mobile tech, I can say that a foldable phone (Galaxy Z Fold 7) is the first mobile device that successfully ate into this category, and bit a rather substantial chunks out of it. It's only been ~6 months into this experience, but the "big tasks" now are the ones that benefit from substantial use of keyboard and/or mouse. If it's only about screen space or doing things in 2-3 apps at the time, chances are my phone is now good enough for its mobility to beat inconvenience - though chances are also good that at least one of the programs will be a browser, because mobile apps still suck.
> I personally find the idea of doing homework on my phone horrifying but I suppose kids today are either used to it and comfortable with it, or they've simply never used a computer and don't know what they're missing. Though I'd wager they probably aren't comfortable typing on a keyboard.
For college aged kids, most people are definitely not doing their homework on their phone. Many are still using paper and pencil. The one person I know who did do their homework on their phone tried to evangelize it to their friends and got ridiculed for it.
I just asked my college aged kid. He said pretty much everyone does their written homework on their laptop, but many will use their phones to do the reading.
Aside from being a bit small and having to be held close, phones are good proportions for reading. Computers screens have gotten wider and wider, and UIs bigger and bigger, and it eats into reading space pretty heavily. Especially if you don't have a high-density screen.
In addition to more space, having only one foreground application really reduces distractions and visual clutter. Also, for some reason I am comfortable using larger fonts on phones and tablets, which makes doing lots of reading easier than on my laptop.
Can't confirm. We had students at university (18-20-ish) that had not used a mouse prior to our courses. That was at least 3-4 years ago now and not a single case.
I started college 10 years ago and all of my homework was computer based, including Calculus and Linear Algebra. Of course for those higher level math classes I had to use paper and pencil to get to the answer but absolutely everything was submitted through an online portal. For any other classes the work was purely done on the computer.
What do you mean? A kid is anyone younger than the speaker. My step dad used to refer to Bill Clinton as a kid because he was the first president younger than him.
I was probably one of the first people doing some of these "big screen tasks" on my phone nearly two decades ago when I was a teenager who spent his first earned money to get an Openmoko Neo Freerunner - I learned a lot by programming the phone on the phone itself - but what was exciting about it was that I could do all these things even when I did not have a big screen and a keyboard in front of me. When I do, it's just so much more comfortable to do it there, especially these days when touch screens are capacitive and not very accurate anymore!
I was somewhat shocked a while back when a coworker told me that they offered their kid a laptop for school work and the kid apparently said : Thanks but I’ll stick with my phone.
It is also the case that PCs are still more expensive than phones. Had a work colleague in one of my first customer facing service jobs who relied almost completely on an android phone to get everything done from mortgage applications to entertainment before I gifted them one of my lesser used laptops.
For many kids, they have one device and it’s a phone or tablet. They may have access to a computer, but not on demand. Much like when many of us were growing up and had one computer.
This resonates. There are certain tasks, like dealing with any government or healthcare-related web page, that I won't even bother attempting on my phone. In my case, it's because I just know in my heart of hearts that the crummy mobile app won't be feature-complete enough for me to complete my goal.
My wife is the opposite. It doesn't occur to her that the problem may be with the janky website, not with her. She'll ask me for help with a thing out of frustration and my first troubleshooting step is to reach for my laptop. This is almost inevitably followed by "hey, wait, how come you're able to press the Submit button but I wasn't able to?" "Because the dev never tested this on a phone and it's broken." "So it's not just me being incompetent to use this website?" "Nope, never was."
> For example, I read your comment on my phone and went to my computer to type this reply.
Thanks for the honor! :)
Sometimes I even copy links from here and send them by mail to myself so I can reply later - maybe Im getting tooo old? :-D
(on the iPhone I would store it in a simple textnote)
I find much of the HN community insightful and interesting, but in terms of consumer feedback (especially in a B2C environment) I wouldn't touch feedback here with a 10-foot pole.
I don't mean that to be an insult, quite the opposite. Most people here are power users. But that is a galaxy away from how the average user interacts with the internet.
"Why do I need to download a 100+ MB app, give it permission to track my location, and let it run background processes just to browse through a restaurant menu, buy a ticket, or scroll through a list of posts?"
-------------------
Hardware/software companies have, historically, targeted power users because regular users listen to them. The companies producing these apps do so because they can benefit from exploiting the data of regular users, but risk little blowback from power users if they keep their web versions up to date and in good shape.
That doesn't mean power users should ignore the presence of these apps however. We should be telling regular users to avoid them for their own safety. We should also be worried that, if we stay quiet and let regular users flock to apps, the motivation to maintain web access will be eroded. When all power users vanish into a single percentage point and a platform achieves total dominance over the alternatives, companies might well choose to focus on only apps.
> that is a galaxy away from how the average user interacts with the internet
Exactly! Esp if you just move away "one tile" from tech/IT or business-power-users, most people are more or less clueless what they are doing/have to do with a computer.
Yes, we are in a bubble here - as with every niche/special interest topic: It would be same for me if I would join a "car tuning event" or similar - Im just a car user, and I do not know of all these details and nuts & bolts
> Exactly! Esp if you just move away "one tile" from tech/IT or business-power-users, most people are more or less clueless what they are doing/have to do with a computer.
I don't think so. A majority don't want to. But they are forced by geeks/nerds. Geeks/nerds often show off especially in family/friends parties with older/common folk - telling - I can do this/that. Then average CEO or parent is forced to get a smartphone.
Next the geek/nerd - has no time to maintain the computer/laptop of the parent. Or loses patience explaining updates/double-click/avoid scammer installing software. Then - boom - geek son/daughter - if smart gets a decent pixel/iphone - otherwise gets a shitty Android device - installs everything there. Moves on.
And finally remember it is the young same geek/nerd that will eventually do programming for FAANG/palantir etc. which forces people to install apps, degrade privacy, worsen webapp/websites - all for money.
As an actual power user, I take exception to this comment.
Most people here are NOT power users. I've lost count of how many arguments I've seen for example where someone Just Can't Believe anyone would have a good reason to have more than 5-10 browser tabs open at a time. Meanwhile I've got a list of thousands and growing.
Or look at the dogged adherence to Windows even to this day after decades of Microsoft abuse, and long spiels about the difficulty and complexity of the Linux command line. Especially when it comes to systemd for example, where one of the most common complaints against sysv is "eww, shell scripts? yuck!"
I don't call these people power users, or recognize them as peers in the realm of technology. The difference between them and me is like the difference between them and the commoner who knows nothing at all about tech.
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 'power user' sort of thing to do?
I don't know why, but equating how many tabs a person has open to how much of a power user they are sounds like something right out of a south park episode.
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 state of internet search. Many results have to be explored, many links from those results also explored, more searches done to narrow in on the precise keyword needed to bring up some hopefully good results, etc. And I can't close all that until the answer is found, as I may need to backtrack, so they just pile up. It's really quite ridiculous how much work it takes to find a good answer these days.
Compare with the typical person who just does one search with some suboptimal keywords then clicks on the first link, or starts dutifully absorbing the AI-generated garbage. Orders of magnitude difference.
I have dozens of projects I'm actively working on just for my Linux distro. Dozens of tabs open for things like X11 window management, for instance, or some info on C++ modules for another project. Lots of tabs open for a hardware project. All kinds of balls are up in the air here. Why put any of this stuff in bookmarks which is a waste of time and energy to manage, when I can just leave it in the tab list, organized in multiple windows spread across different desktops? (I have 64 desktops on my 55" plasma display.)
(lol @ the other guy's reply. That didn't age well.)
hey, light power user here - for a while I was using tabXpert browser extension for this, but they have recently changed to paid-only and I havent had a chance to check out their competition but might end up just buying it anyway
it groups sessions, not just tabs, so i can (for example) have all my banking websites together as a session that i can open and close as a window of tabs. the convenience is it organizes the sessions as named things that i can manage in a UI. transfer tabs from one session to another, close tabs, check tabs that have been closed in that session, etc.
if you know of any tools like this or an easy way to manage it independently without a 3rd party browser extension, I would be interested. Sounds like maybe you are doing something similar but at the desktop level, creating a new desktop to pick up and put down? are they savable and transferable between devices? I like to close everything down at night to run some games with friends, and am going to be building a new comp soon and for various reasons starting fresh with software and importing things as i need them rather than flashing my current setup forward to the new hardware
I agree with this a lot tbh. I think we need to have better support for tiling or something iframe-like in web interfaces. Probably for deep research or focused work, we need something more tree-shaped than the flat tabs-with-back-button structure web browsers expose.
I've never explored 20-30 search results. Not since Google anyway. If I don't find what I want in the first few I rephrase the search or try a different search engine. The world beyond the first page of results basically doesn't exist.
It's a bit insulting to assume that having more than a dozen tabs open must be "disorganized", especially in a context where it is likely that the power user in question is using browser extensions. Something like TreeStyleTab makes it easy to keep hundreds of tabs organized with clear, easily-manipulated structure, and lower friction than manually creating and curating bookmarks.
It looks like you're either showing off your own ignorance of tools that enable workflows you can't imagine, or you're assuming that everyone's organization methods must resemble your own habits.
I read a UI book in the early 2000s that cited research showing that most users didn't understand filesystems. They would seem to, but then the idea that the same filename in two places was two unrelated files would just lead to a mental block. Those who got it, didn't find it hard. It's just that some people can't get it.
The disconnect is not between some developers, and the younger folks. It is between some developers, and most of the world.
I think a lot more people than most HN readers realize simply struggle significantly with abstract thinking and reasoning.
It's natural that people who enjoy programming and hacking and related fields are very comfortable with such abstract types of thought. But I really think that isn't all that common amongst most people. I think the average person has to learn such thinking abilities with difficulty (though they can). I'm sure many people here got into programming precisely because abstract thinking came easily to them.
> the idea that the same filename in two places was two unrelated files would just lead to a mental block.
Which is actually why the "files and folders" metaphor is apt. In a filing cabinet in a school office (once upon a time) there were likely hundreds of documents labeled "Report Card" in many different folders, each labeled with a different name.
> 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 me years to fully understand it.
And I was hell-bad at math in school (or maybe just too lazy), the only thing to which I a relation was all this geometric stuff (because this was needed for .. game dev! :-D )
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.
OP had no problem with pointers prior to trying C++. I think there is a case to be made that C(++) makes pointers unnecessarily confusing and there is no real disconnect between understanding pointers in theory and in practice otherwise
> Which is actually why the "files and folders" metaphor is apt.
It's a starting point, but I certainly wouldn't say it's the best metaphor that there could be. The idea of subfolders just doesn't make sense in a filing cabinet analogy, because you have to consider paper size - any folder which could fit into another folder is not going to be able to contain your regularly sized documents.
People understand hierarchy. That named file is in a folder in a particular drawer of a particular cabinet in a particular room of a particular building in a particular neighborhood in a...
What some people struggle with is recursive hierarchy where each step doesn't change the kind of container. I guess they never saw a Matryoshka doll when they were little.
> The idea of subfolders just doesn't make sense in a filing cabinet analogy,
Sure it does. The document is located in Building C, Sub-basement 2, Room 123, cabinet 415, folder labeled "Accounts". And a physical folder can certainly contain other folders. Nit-picking the analogy wastes everyone's time.
I can't blame them. We've been force-upgraded to Windows 11 at work and that OS and its apps do their upmost to obscure where files are located.
I've frequently saved on OneDrive instead of locally, by accident, and then been perplexed when I try to reopen the file later.
And I've been using filesystems for 35+ years, so I feel sympathy for those who don't understand the abstraction. At this point Android is more transparent about its files.
By that logic, operating system developers struggle to understand that putting two files with the same name into the same folder(1) is very much possible in the physical world.
(1) or referencing them from the same directory, which was the earlier metaphor.
In the time it took you to write this comment, you've thought more about the abstraction than most of the people who are confused by it -- and it will never succeed to coax them out of their confusion with such logic. :)
I think that's perfectly understandable. File systems require the user to remember a hierarchy in their head (even if there are tools like breadcrumbs to help you out), and many people aren't willing or aren't able to hold an arbitrarily complex structure like that in their head. A name is a flat piece of information, no extra structure to imagine.
I worked with a professor one time that used floppies for all his files (after they had been surpassed by thumbdrives) because each floppy was essentially a single folder, and he could wrap his head around that conceptually.
> two unrelated files would just lead to a mental block
Because in the analog world, each "document has usually a single/unique headline" and file names are often perceived as some type of unique identifier as well, Id guess?
> It is between some developers, and most of the world.
not even the older generations. My parents save files on the Whatsapp chat, and my father is one who bought the first IBM PC when it came out, so someone who has touched these things for decades (tho very superficially).
I think that the software industry, especially operating systems, have completely failed to provide a balanced product between the overly bloated and messed up (Windows), the overly complicated (Linux) and the overly simplified (Android/iOS).
Maybe some Linux distros are now at the right spot, I was positively surprised by PopOS to give an example, but it's too late. With AI this is only going to get worse.
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.
I met a business partner who is doing some work for SME retail investors last week for lunch:
He showed me his WhatsApp: People are sending _ALL_ type of critical documents by WhatsApp to him. Everything.
(and bank statements are among the class of "less critical" documents in his case)
My theory here is: "If you have any function in your product, people will use it for anything appropriate to them in a given minute"
To be fair, what other simple way is there to send a document to a contact through an e2ee channel? Mail + PGP/GPG? Wormhole?? openssl???
Sending it via WhatsApp (which also has desktop clients, btw) strikes me as a perfectly reasonable solution. (Which is somewhat of an indictment of the current state of cryptographic software, but that's a different topic.)
This exact scenario happened with me in a prior job. Invoices, payments, everything could (and sometimes was) sent through WhatsApp. It was absolutely shocking to see people do this.
I witnessed a cop attempting to manipulate some files I provided to him on a thumb drive. It was a slow laborious process of dragging files one at a time from the Windows image viewer to shared folder. I would have liked to just do a Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, but that was way above his level of thinking and he didn't seem like the type who wanted an education. So I just sat there through the long, painful process--and then at the end he completely screwed up the report. Idiot.
No. There is a disconnect between domain insiders and those that are not. This is not specific to any one domain. It's also not about age.
Some insiders know about this disconnect and fewer still can bridge it easily.
Those that cannot even sense this disconnect, they're a bit of a pain in certain situations. You know, like talking to project stakeholders or customers.
(17 yo here), I think that I am eternally grateful to my cousins who convinced my parents to give me a desktop computer which is still working right now (it had a minor hiccup in the processor recently but it works), before that, I was having a 1 gb crt monitor win7 on which I somehow ran Vscode smoothly.
I am very frugal (to save money on webcam, in online classes, I had droidcam /wo-mic setup with one of my parents old phones that were so old that online classes couldn't work or were just too slow) but spending money on a decent personal computer is genuinely one of the best investments personally.
One thing my cousins did which I am sorta grateful in retrospect is they didn't buy me a gpu so my computer was really nice/smooth in everything but gaming, I still ran some games like portal series , inscryption and many other games like valorant and it was playing valorant when I started realizing its chinese company roots and kernel level access meaning that there was no proper way to guarantee to have piece of mind unless I reinstall it
So I felt like if I was reinstalling, I was watching some the linux experiments video anyway and was fascinated by linux, so I just decided to choose myself to use nobara-linux for the first time which was another one of the best decisions that I made as it opened me up to the terminal.
> grateful in retrospect is they didn't buy me a gpu
Great sentence! I will apply this to my kids as well, I guess.
I always tell them already: "In the future, you can game as much as you want, IF you learn a good programming language [which will be defined by me]" - let me see how this will work out in 1-2 years :-D
The first thing that my brothers did when I had the computer was firstly change the wallpaper to a good mountain wallpaper, installed vscode and asked me to program a python program to reverse print in python so print 10 9 8 7.. 1 each in new line (iirc) [I was in 8th grade]
then they asked me to square while reverse printing or something too. so printing 100 81 64 .. 1 each in new line.
> let me see how this will work out in 1-2 years :-D
Keep me updated haha! To be honest, I will admit though that I am not the greatest within coding itself right now as much as I love tinkering with open source. Personally I am wishing to learn coding with better interest when I get into college, I will have 4 years to learn peacefully (well hopefully if I get into decent college ie) :D
For me the challenge after using Linux was that I wanted to use archlinux because my brother (not cousin, real), flexed me his iirc distrotube archlinux once when we were eating something and I thus always considered arch to be the final boss of Linux lol and so I decided to install it and then I fell in love with arch (currently on cachy on desktop, but right now on mac which my brother gifted me :D)
On my birthday iirc once long time ago I think in 5-6th not sure, my brother gave me his laptop, I wanted to do python but python wanted admin password on windows to install properly. So what I did was I dont even remember how, but download one operating system which could then crack the windows password so that I can set new and I used that to then set a new password to then install python. to then only print hello world :D (I think only because one of the cousins I really admire mentioned that he made 2k loc of python once and I thought during that time, python is the endgame). We are talking about windows 7 but I think that windows 10 security must've gotten better. So these are some things that I have done, I wouldn't call it coding as much as tinkering but I love doing these things from as long as I can remember :D
I think this all started because I tried pirating pokemon-yellow so that I can play it. My brother just said to me google it, or told me the word rom and asked me to figure it out and I was in 2nd or 3rd grade maybe 4th grade lol and I pirated it (Hope nintendo doesn't sue me now xD)
Sorry for making this long but your comment somehow made me remember somethings that I had forgot/weren't touched in a long time xD! I think the main takeaway is that I just treated all of these as challenges I guess, like I wanted to prove myself that I can do that or if a thing is possible/not. I haven't done too much coding myself so I just say that I am tinkerer :D
I hope that this can be helpful to you to teach your kids what you mention. I mean make it a challenge where if they fail, they don't feel pressure but they also feel competitive just enough to try their best as much as they can :D and I think in some sense personally I just wanted some respect/to impress my elder cousins/brothers as they were really elder/mature than me. It's also not been all good though if you are too young than most of your cousins.
The thing is, I don't have any measurable advice, a lot of what I have done till now is just unquantified. Coding on the other hand is quantifiable in some sense (it works or it doesn't). I just do things because I wanted to, and I think I still do that same way. Sometimes I wish if the things that I want are something measurable but my mind doesn't work that way.
The thing is, which depresses me sometimes, is that I am just a number at the end of the day to many if not all whether including in future job/business etc., nobody to whom I interview when I wish to get a job from sometime from now is going to read a lot of this and with AI and some genuine problems in the industry like too many people, this problem gets even larger, sigh. So in that sense I just want to be happy sometimes.
Sorry for the long comment once again and the depressing end, but I recommend watching some cat videos though and I wish you and your kids to have a nice day! :D Say hi to them from my side!!
Wrong. While I agree about younger people’s impression and experience with apps and the internet, that is not what companies are responding to - in fact it’s backward.
Companies have for ages pushed apps due to more control and data. That’s why younger folk grew up with apps.
The push to apps was absolutely not due to companies responding to consumer sentiment. Yes now it has been ingrained so now there are expectations, but those are due to companies pushing people to apps for years and years
Apps generally have a lot more access to the user info than Web sites. I remember getting into an argument, here (one-sided, I didn't argue then, and I won't now), about how a Web site is just as intrusive and privacy-endangering as an app (I think they wrote PWAs, and didn't want to cede the point to native apps). I feel they were wrong. Apps can get more information than web sites; even with sandboxing.
In my experience, apps can figure out a lot more about the user, than a Web site.
I just reported a game to Apple, that, after the app has been resident for 24 hours, pops up an unescapable modal to sign into their Web site. I am sure the 24-hour delay, is so they don't get caught by the App Store folks. I suspect that what happens, during this "daily checkin," is that the app sends a bunch of encrypted data that it got from your device, to the servers in China.
Basically, they can learn more about you from the app, than from the Web site.
I generally avoid apps, where the Web site will do. I won't install banking apps, at all.
The OP Blog post is comparing web versions vs applications. Both on the phone. And arguing that browser representation is often better than app functionality. Using desktop vs small screen phone is a different matter.
I don't see any evidence that is a user-driven change.
For years now, often multiple times with the save vendor, I've been installing some vendors software, using it to complete a purchase that I had started in a web interface, then uninstalling the software, all so I could take advantage of ann unrealistically good promotion. I'm not talking about the type of savings that might be in an exceptionally good holiday promotion, that eats into most of, if not all of, the margin in the transaction. I'm talking about the type of promotion that would be used to promote a credit card, banking account, or gambling platform-- the kind of promotion that costs months worth of income from a customer but is worthwhile because the customer will be milked for years to come.
This appears to be more related to modern security features that lock the vendor out of your computer, but lock you out of your phone, shifting which interface gives the vendor the advantage in future transactions.
Phones are perfectly capable of accessing websites. I think a lot of the shift here has to do with companies aggressively pushing apps because apps are more profitable, which in turn trains users to expect apps.
Sorry, there are by faaaar not as much useable mobile websites than crappy mobile websites - most mobile websites are not really optimized, more like "just let us deploy some custome mobile CSS and people will use it" style
My company corporate card requires an app because it has an Authenticator to access the website. I tried the ole “but I only have a flip phone” and they said there was no other option. The bastards forced my hand.
I'm old. I use my phone for as much as I can, but if something isn't optimized for that screen, i will definitely use a large screen instead of suffering through the crap. As I said, I'm old - too old to be frustrated by shit software.
Also, I prefer web apps to downloading native, with few exceptions. I don't want or need a lot of native apps.
I’d be happy to use the app if they didn’t suck. The websites have more info and the browser is more capable by default. Like by default I can select any text I see, an address to copy into a calendar, a phone number to send to someone else, a name I want to paste into a search engine. an app is the opposite, by default nothing is selectable and I’m at the mercy of the nearly universally bad UX designer’s whims
Even on mobile I find the requirement for app installation to be an irritating requirement. Many of these mobile apps are much larger than they need to be, and clutter the user experience. Throw in excessive push notifications, and in many cases I would like to just go to a website for services I use infrequently.
One thing that is useful to remember is that if you ask AI for help on using some app, it will likely refer to the mobile UI instead of the web UI. I find it annoying that sometimes there are features that are only available in the mobile UI.
It's worth mentioning that in many cases there is also the incentive to get away from Google's stranglehold on incoming traffic. Every app install is a path to your product that does not go through Google's SEO or SEM funnel.
I'm not sure about that. Kids around here seem to be learning to use a word processor (MS or Google), slide builder (MS, Google or Canva), search engine, as well as many educative apps on laptops at school starting from about age 8. Computers are not alien to them.
I am spoiled by big screen and tmux, I objectively cannot work with small screens any more.
I can tolerate chatting with a gateway agent, but that only last for maybe a single hour before I seriously need to vet all of the work that it and the underlying horde of agents has done.
> Most of folks on HN here are much older than todays "first customers" of 16y/17/18
17yo here, I know that I might be a bit of an exception here but atleast within my privacy conscious friend circle, I feel like they prefer websites more than apps and I feel like that plays an impact, (Obviously this might make a difference as well that for some of my generation, they only use phone so phone applications feel more intuitive to them)
I used to say to my elder brother that I wish to make websites not apps if I do because websites are more portable etc., but he said that websites are hard to monetize etc. rather than apps which are easier to monetize. I think that one of the reasons is also that app are easily monetized and this has become a norm to many people outside of HN/privacy-conscious sphere in general.
I really wanted to make f-droid applications sometime ago but I don't know Java and I really love how easy it is to make an applicaation in golang/python/any lang in desktops usually but I tried making an tauri android rust application from my desktop Linux and it was really frustrating, I feel like there are some very low hanging fruits privacy win where open source tools can be converted into just bare minimum-ly good UI/UX android/ios apps (which works) and be published to something like f-droid.
The fact that you are here on HN tells me: You and your friends are tech savy, most in your age are not :-)
Edit: Regarding monetization -> yes, either carrier billing (if available) or just by iTunes account is much much easier and higher conversion, just becaues of the fact that people do not have to remember their payment details :-D
I mentioned privacy savvy friends because most of my friends aren't privacy savvy :D
I can only count two (one offline, my former classmate/friend who we studied together for 11 years from KG to 10th grande) and some other people
I have convinced my same offline friend I mentioned to use Linux, specifically hyprland so its a win :D
> most in your age are not :-)
So I agree in that sense. To be honest. I am saying out of all my friend/peer/former classmate circle, only 1-2 people are some that I consider to be privacy conscious.
this where i think any claims that an iphone is not a full computing experience as justification for disallowing freedom on it to build and run your own software as you see fit as a bit ridiculous.
Agree. Also depends on nature of experience you want to consume/deliver. There are somethings i've slowly to come to prefer an app for, but it's been overtime.
I saw a television advert the other day that specifically called out Millennials and how, yes, you can book a vacation from your phone and you're going to be okay, dad.
I think, "I'm not downloading your app" is of course a perfectly fine perspective. I rarely do. And blogging about it is playing one's role in the techno-cultural tug-of-war. But I'm consciously aware that I'm in the dying minority and the world is changing regardless of how much I choose to yell at the clouds.
>I saw a television advert the other day that specifically called out Millennials and how, yes, you can book a vacation from your phone and you're going to be okay, dad.
I wonder when dynamic pricing will switch from booking on phones being more expensive because you're most likely in a hurry to booking on desktop being more expensive because you're old and have more money to spend. Did that already happen?
I think what most people don't get is that an app is a gateway to get way more personal data of the user than the browser. I'm distrustful of any "app only" service for this reason. I think the article goes into more detail about other good reasons. What you're suggesting isn't a talking point because it's not pertinent.
This isn't about a user's age, or mobiles. You can use Firefox on your smartphone. It's about digital literacy in terms of security and privacy. No matter how old you are, you do have to be taught that you're the product of these services, not just the customer. You have to be taught why that matters and how to combat it.
That's an interesting mindset, since those 30+ tech savvy millennials are the ones that actually still have some money to spend left on apps and similar crap.
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:
PWAs were more than an experiment - they were even mentioned in Apple keynotes (IIRC). And sandboxing was every bit as stable as website sandboxing.
They were killed because app store operators realized they bypassed an ability to police payments that could not be monitored and (effectively) taxed.
This was a technology that could have been successful in any environment where a merchant's freedom-to-request-direct-payment was protected. In such an environment, it would have shifted incentives that apps now become a burden on developers as well as on Apple and Google's review processes, and PWAs would flourish.
But that's not the environment we were in! And arguably, even post Epic's litigation, we aren't fully.
"The grandmas are too stupid to learn" but now it's the young people who are too dumb to figure out computers. So, I guess my generation is the only one that will ever figure out the Internet? Seems dumb.
This is true and goes further: There is no understanding of "the Web." For folks who "went online" and "surfed on the Internet" in the 90ies the whole thing with Internet addresses and the way a browser works are normal. For people gaining their experience on a phone the app icon on the home screen is the starting point to the individual offering.
Companies however exploit that and instead of just putting the icon on the home screen provide an app which allows more tracking, preventing ad blockers, avoiding the user from browsing elsewhere.
For me apps are limiting (tabbed browsing, ad blocker, ... are essential for anything serious), but others don't have that experience.
Linkedin is the worst offender of them all. My feeds don't get updated for days when I use the web mobile version and I start seeing new posts only when I switch to desktop mode (switching to mobile shows the same old feed). They also don't even let you reply to comment replies or see reactions. They even scroll you all the way to the top if you dismiss their annoying "linkedin is better on app" pop-up just to punish you for not using their app. I'll never install apps of these companies that are actively hostile towards those that don't want to be constantly spied on by them.
They are so paranoid against scraping or someone building automations on top of their app they don't want you to have, that they are willing to make their actual application borderline unusable for the power users who would actually be willing to pay for their first party upsells and features.
It's infuriating. I have literally tried all of their paid products in various forms (they are expensive but the value is clearly there if you're a business). If only they invested as much in making them actually good as they did in preventing you from using extensions or other tools to implement the features they can't or won't, I'm sure they'd get a lot more business.
> SeatGeek won't let you attend events without their app (no mailed tickets, will call, print at home, or mobile web)
Wow. I guess it's been a few years since I've used SeatGeek but this is news to me. Stuff like this and MSG's facial scanning regime (I'm sure the venues are all doing it to differing extents) make me not even want to bother with big concerts. Club shows are almost always a better time, anyways.
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 by 10x, and app users have way better metrics that website users.
It's pretty interesting, but as a website owner, having an app is valuable.
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 combination of OS and browser.
This is a lot of friction for the dev, and it's not clear to an average user what a PWA is. But they are familiar with, and for better or worse, trust, the App store. If I didn't know what a PWA and a site said "open menu and click on 'install!'" I'd be very wary of following those instructions!
I think Android and iOS should provide some sort of hook between the app store and PWAs before they really start to catch on.
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.
Besides users being more familiar with apps in the past, PWAs are still kneecapped in some subtle ways to make them want apps. I wish PWAs were the norm, so much easier.
I had a doctor tell me that I had to buy an Android or iOS phone (I own neither) and install their new app, or they would be unable to continue seeing me as a patient.
Found a new doctor, because anyone that thinks this way I do not trust my heath to.
Absolutely no one will make me own a cell phone or install corpo spyware. It is still actually a choice.
That's my stance as well. Unless the website is completely broken or the devs force me to download the app by blocking features on the website I prefer the web.
With responsive design becoming mainstream I'm fine with using my browser for 90% of my internet work. In some cases like Google docs it's painful to use the web version so I just use the app.
EDIT: I wish they'd add a console to mobile web browsers though.
Yep. If someone is trying to make you do something, or stop doing something, or buy something, your first question should always be "Why?".
Why would someone try to force me off of my browser (that has ad-blocking and tracker-blocking mitigations) and on to a locked-down app that may want permission to run in the background, display notifications, access my files or camera, etc?
Maybe it really is to "improve my experience"... yeah, right.
Yeah, crippling your website in order to force users to download an app that may be able to access for of a user's data, is a clear sign that there are people you don't want to do business with.
There are several sites I use regularly for which I refuse to install the app. There are a lot more sites that I visit only occasionally because someone links to it, and that site immediately wants me to download the app and refuses to show me the content that was linked to. Fuck off with that.
As a developer, I resent having to go beg for permission for getting my app published. It just rubs me the wrong way to have to play approval roulette with some bored jerk working for Apple or Google. I've had both reject things that were previously alright, then weren't, and then were again.
I default to building web applications. Actually getting people to install your special app is in any case a race to the bottom. Some will, most won't. It's onboarding friction. If you can shave a few steps of your onboarding process, the chance that somebody comes out the other end is simply higher.
As a user, I rarely install apps to begin with and frankly the appeal of "native" is limited to well guarded APIs into jealously magical device capabilities that phones have that most applications don't actually need. I know how the sausage is made and there just isn't that much there.
Same. My app is a PWA. Most users won’t install a PWA and won’t repeatedly navigate to a website so it limits the reach. But the advantage is that I can deploy instantly. I love when someone sends a bug report and I can tell them it’s fixed ten minutes later. Pretty great, compared to “it’ll be fixed in there business days” you get with the iOS app store
100% agree. I'm not a big fan of apps being distributed through stores owned by big corporations.I had faith in Fdroid but sadly it hasn't taken off.
I also think app development requirements are too high. Just to compile your app and run the build process you need a very high end computer. I could never do it with my modest laptop and therefore gravitated towards web programming and more backend work. Thankfully I avoided all the pain of building apps and getting them approved by store owners. But I do have respect for people who have to deal with this bs.
It may sound too opinionated and may hurt some feeling but I don't like android at all. I think it sucks. But I have little choice. So I grin and bear.
> Unless the website is completely broken or the devs force me to download the app by blocking features on the website I prefer the web.
Facebook seems to be in this game. Constant notifications to install the app, and as well increasingly degraded experience in the web version (both desktop and mobile).
often the blocked features are specifically blocked on the mobile web (i.e. on your desktop they won't make you get your phone out to use the app instead), so forcing the webpage to desktop mode helps.
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 for a dozen use cases and web for the remaining one million use cases), but that's orthogonal to the fact of which one is actually better.
Edit: And to be clear, I'm not referring to cases where the web app is purposefully restricted or injected with dark patterns to drive users to native. Even if you ignore those cases, this pattern still stands in my experience. Though, that doesn't mean there is no indirect quality bias, e.g. more money spent on the native devs than the web devs.
Yea, webapps (even PWAs) still can't compete with native apps when it comes to responsiveness, but I still don't know why. I've yet to see even a demo PWA that passes the "native turing test" where I can't tell whether it's a native app or not.
Even native apps that were built with cross-platform frameworks feel a bit "off" sometimes.
WASM apps get around this for the most part but there's so many more layers between the app and the hardware for web apps compared to native, plus it's javascript. And a lot of the cross-platform frameworks use a javascript bridge so that becomes the bottleneck. Kotlin/Compose multiplatform is fast on everything.
Can't relate. Except for Google Maps and Docs, I can't think of a native app that couldn't be a WebView. Hell, most of them are anyway!
The worst kind is French banking apps or IBKR app: many features are native, but then because of some weird tech debt or incompetent tech leadership, they'll sometimes show you web pages in a shitty, slow, completely different UI-wise built-in WebView for mundane tasks like downloading a PDF statement.
I feel like its because other than the user, the people involved have a benefit to running native instead of as a webapp. The phone OS companies get their percent of apps developed in their stores and the app developers get better access to your data to resell. Apple in particular has been really hostile to webapps.
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.
The site that irks me the most here is New York Times. Opening an article in the mobile browser often has a toast over the bottom third of the article to open it in their app for "a better experience". I struggle to think how nytimes isn't a perfect fit for a site over an app. The only frustrating experience I have with the web version that would be better in the app is not seeing that that pop-up.
I recently signed up for a membership (you can now supposedly cancel without making a phone call; WaPo has officially died in darkness) and this has been driving me mad, too.
If I'm paying for your service, you should not be degrading my experience using UX anti-patterns in any way, for any reason.
For games I agree that an app makes sense (though I think at least the games I used to play were in a separate nyt games app). For interactive articles, I've not seen anything I couldn't use fine in my browser, but in theory I wouldn't mind covering up the interactive part with a "Open in the app for a better experience" button (similar to what YouTube does on the video portion of the page). Where I encounter this though is in standard, text-heavy articles that maybe include a photo or two.
I assume the reason they are pushing me to the app is that it benefits them not me (longer dwell times, maybe easier tracking for behavior/ads), and that is precisely why I want to stay in the browser. Covering up a good portion of the article and preventing me from scrolling until I click the tiny link to decline is hostile and is the only thing degrading the experience on the website for most articles I read.
Web browser is a sandbox by default. Worst a sketchy site does is eat a tab, less if you run an adblocker. Native app? Background processes, hardware ID shenanigans, your contacts, location. The whole buffet.
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, too (on mobile OSes like Android and iOS). When you download it, you can check a hash that you can (if you want to) compare with a friend to see if they got the same app. With an app, there is intermediary (the "app store") that would need to collude with the developers to send a backdoor just for you, and even then you would still have the app binary as proof.
That's always a question I have with "secure" web services: if you use ProtonMail, you trust that Proton doesn't send you a web page that leaks your key. But if you trust Proton for that, what's the point of the end-to-end encryption? When you use the Signal app, the whole idea is that you don't have to trust Signal for the end-to-end encryption, at all.
>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:
>On the other hand, an app is sandboxed, too (on mobile OSes like Android and iOS). When you download it, you can check a hash that you can (if you want to) compare with a friend to see if they got the same app.
That isn't what "sandboxed" means, it has nothing to do with checking hashes. And no, mobile apps are not really sandboxed, they have full access to your mobile device once you install it and give it access - and let's be real, most people are just going to blindly click "allow" for anything the app requests after installing an app.
>With an app, there is intermediary (the "app store") that would need to collude with the developers to send a backdoor just for you, and even then you would still have the app binary as proof.
You keep referring to "backdoor", and I don't think you really know what that means.
>That's always a question I have with "secure" web services: if you use ProtonMail, you trust that Proton doesn't send you a web page that leaks your key. But if you trust Proton for that, what's the point of the end-to-end encryption? When you use the Signal app, the whole idea is that you don't have to trust Signal for the end-to-end encryption, at all.
That isn't how any of this works. The main value proposition of Signal is that we do trust its end-to-end encryption. Protonmail sending a "web page" that "leaks your key"? WTF?
The weather app I used sent location data from pretty much everyone who didn't manually go through the effort to opt out to some shady American data broker that got hacked. Most people using the app gave it location permissions because of its ability to warn for rain coming to your precise location with decent accuracy.
Nobody wanted to share their location with these data brokers, but thanks to underfunded privacy watchdogs, you have no idea what happens to any app that you give any kind of permission.
I'd argue it's absolutely ludicrous to give _other people's information_ up to an app (or website). Your contacts contain names, phone numbers, potentially photos and addresses of _other people_.
One of the most enraging things about life since 2005-ish is that no matter how private and careful I am, it doesn't even matter because every other inconsiderate fool I know and interact with will HAPPILY let some random company have access to THEIR contacts--which includes me--in order to play Farmville for a month until they get bored of that and offer up my private information to the next bullshit ad company that asks for their contacts.
It used to frustrate me that people didn't care about their own privacy, because I genuinely didn't want evil people to hurt them. But, it's even more angering that people don't have the common decency to consider whether their friends and family would want them sharing their phone numbers, email addresses, photos of them, etc.
As long as the application is made aware of the permissions and can prevent functioning when they get denied, that doesn't really help much. It's the choice between getting mugged or never leaving the house.
The ability to deny permissions without the app noticing or filling it with fake data doesn't exist on either system.
Not without my knowledge or your knowledge sure. But I'd bet there's significant percentage of the population who is tired of thinking about permission popups and just hit yes yes YES to get the App started. Especially if it forces retries before going forward.
I think they're counting on these popups wearing people out.
After GDPR made these incessant annoying cookie popups mandatory, I just robotically click any button to dismiss it as fast as possible. Some website could probably write "Give root access" in that box and I'd probably click it without thinking.
bias disclosure: i used to do Android dev and kinda hate the browser personally.
i don’t get this take. “Web browser is sandbox by default”. sure, it has to do the rail grind with a rake to access system calls, but in a modern system apps are also sandboxed, especially on a smartphone or when downloaded with a managed app service. the OS gives you the ability to specify permissions, although to what degree depends on your provider. your browser _obviously_ also has the permissions you’re talking about. and now we have introduced yet more vectors in the form of cookies where web _applications_ can track activity _between applications_ with that just kinda being part of the spec, and it totally neuters the protections that the OS gives you because once you configure Firefox to get your location for Open Maps, now you’ve totally given control to your location permissions for _all web apps_ to yet another corporate driven point of failure.
don’t even get me started on the UI mess.
my tinfoil hat theory is that the browser is pushed by mostly bad actors trying to get data, while anyone providing a real user experience has a nice native app.
Good night, sweet reputation and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
Seriously though, I appreciate this perspective. While I prefer using a browser whenever possible, I'm well aware of modern fingerprinting techniques. But I didn't know about permission "sharing" between apps in the same browser. Thanks!
Privacy and security have always been a game of cat and mouse. Doesn't seem like that's going to change anytime soon.
Exactly. The only app-specific abuse I can think of is apps that run in the background (the "don't kill apps" advice from Apple is factually wrong), Android where apps get push by default, or apps that just hope the user will grant broad permissions that web can't do.
Apps have to request your permission for contacts and location. iOS is really good about not giving bad permissions to apps without user being asked for consent.
I think it's more than that. It's a walled garden. If you want to leave go somewhere else, it's further away than just a tab. That increases stickiness.
For example, let's say I'm an airline. I don't want you in the browser, where you're going to have my competitors in the adjacent tabs. I want you in my app, where all you see is my version of the world. (I mean, yes, you can have multiple apps open, too, and switch between them. It's still a bit more friction than moving between tabs. Or maybe that's just my mental model, and young people see apps as just another kind of tab?)
Unless you use it several times a day, downloading an "app" just gets in the way. You should never have to download an "app" for a one-time use.
We never went back to the restaurant in Cupertino where the table QR code tried to force downloading an app that onboarded you into a food delivery service. That restaurant was treating on-site customers as delivery orders with a very short delivery distance. The food wasn't very good, either.
Browsers don't allow notifications if you don't have the site open. Browser ads can get blocked by browser extensions. Browsers make it harder to have an icon for a site/service directly on the home screen. Browsers make it harder to get extensive permissions. Browsers allow content to displayed without first being run through an approval process.
For companies these are all downsides but for me they are all upsides. It really is us vs them when it comes to apps vs browsers. The only reason they offer websites at all is out of fear of losing a big chunk of users.
Browsers most definitely do allow for notifications if you don't have the site open. I use that feature all the time and it works perfectly.
Google Chrome does seem to catch spam sites that abuse notification permissions to send ads, though, so for a certain category of crapware websites aren't an option.
This is my stance as well, but keep in mind that a lot of people have the opposite preference.
They didn't grow up with the world wide web. They only started using technology when Android and iPhone was popular. They only know Whatsapp, Youtube, TikTok. They're not used to using the browser.
There's a meme that "Gen Z Kids Don't Understand How File Systems Work" [0]
There's a reason the "small web" is having a revival among these kids, because they increasingly haven't experienced a real web to begin with. Circa ~2010, the web effectively died in the mainstream since Google decided it wasn't worth showing. Platforms become a thing, and despite being web-based, are practically their own intranets that use the web as a cross platform zero install delivery platform
When you say "meme", it sounds like it might not be true. But, a few years ago I handed my stepson a USB flash drive with some files on it, he plugged it into his laptop and the very first thing he did was launch Google Chrome and then not have any clue what to do to access the files (it was a Windows laptop).
I will cast my vote for mobile websites over apps on phones. For personal choice reasons I have always had a "budget" phone with less memory and storage (and less cost) than a flagship phone. I also kept them running for years.
At the end of the cycle I can barely run the base phone let alone the menagerie of apps the world would like me to run.
I have opted out of app only service such as a Loyalty programs that forced me to transfer point from a partner only if I installed an app on my phone. They have enough info on me from purchase, they don't need more. (I even offer my card to strangers in the grocery cash if they did not have the loyalty card so they would get a discount and I would get a list of products I never buy in my loyalty list. Its a small, willful act of rebellion )
I decided to operate on a older budget phone for a while when my phone died outside of my planned budget and timeline for replacing it. By far the greatest problem was managing storage space. Except for core productivity apps, if a website option wasn't offered I was never going to be one of their users.
> I will cast my vote for mobile websites over apps on phones. For personal choice reasons I have always had a "budget" phone with less memory and storage (and less cost) than a flagship phone. I also kept them running for years.
Then, unfortunately, apps are a better choice for such phones (unless the app itself is just a thin webview wrapper). These days too many websites would fry a budget phone.
I also find that because the web version is worse in order to push you to download the app, it is a good way to not get sucked into endlessly scrolling. Get in, do what you need, and get out because of bad experience.
The sad reality is people _want_ apps and the people paying for web/apps to be built also want apps (even before we talk about tracking/ad-blocking reasons).
I too love the web, but throughout my career the idea of web-first/web-only has been DOA. There is some level of perceived prestige from having an app.
I've told this story countless times but on multiple occasions I've written cross-platform apps using web technology. Throughout the development process, I have urged or even begged the stakeholders to try out the web-based version on their phone. It's almost identical. You just see the browser chrome in the web version. And yet it's not until I provide native builds that some people will even bother to look at.
I provide web interfaces as part of the package but I could probably skip that and no one would bat an eye (I won't though, it's practically free to do that alongside the native apps and I prefer it).
There are a handful of things you can only do, or only do well, in an app so I do understand that argument. Also, I find some PWA-advocates to clearly not be living in reality: "You can do X in a PWA" - only if you hate yourself and enjoy silly limitations that clients do not and will not understand or care about ("Just make it work, an app can do this!").
I went to a gas station and they had someone offering to pay customers if they'd install their app. Discount gas for X months. No one seemed interested.
People do want apps for things they do quite often, but that's mostly social media or video games. The hassle of install and account setup simply exceeds the benefit of rarely used apps.
I've more than once had a company reply to a bug report about their website, "did you try using the app instead." To which I usually reply, "why would I trust your site with direct access to my phone when you can't make a website that works correctly?"
That's just my thinking... I try not to install apps most of the time, I don't want them to have access or even the greater chance at breaking security/isolation. On a similar vein, I still can't believe that LinkedIn didn't get permanently banned from Apple and Google stores when they broke security to spy on emails.
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 app is actually a pretty big decision.
If the app can be replaced by a website the app is useless. The web is not as powerful as an app and you will miss out on emerging tech. Facebook doesn't actually need an app, but I can not unlock my door, tap to pay, or connect to a specific selection of speakers in my home on a website.
100% of the emerging tech you listed either allows for a hacking / warrant / data leakage risk or is else so decadent I don't know how to respond. I don't want any of it.
Then all your interactions on the computer in your pocket that is more powerful than the computers that took us to the moon are just a bunch of JSON and REST calls. I will locally map out my home in 3D for renovations while you let social media dictate how you use your computer.
I am with you here.. there is actually name for why companies do this. They are not pushing app because it is better, but because browser tab cannot lock you in.
Those are valid arguments but I like apps better, for other reasons. Mostly security.
When I use, say, the Signal app:
- I can audit it, download it or even compile it myself from sources
- Once I have installed it, Signal doesn't get to change it "in my back"
- As a result, I don't need to trust Signal for the end-to-end encryption, which is the whole point of end-to-end encryption.
When I use a webapp, say ProtonMail:
- Every time I load the webapp, it is downloaded from the Proton servers. Even if I once stop to audit it, next time I load it, it may totally be a different codebase (that e.g. adds a backdoor, potentially just for me, and just this one time).
- I need to trust that Proton doesn't inject a backdoor to extract my key, then end-to-end encryption is useless. I could also trust Proton to not read my emails, right?
- If a webapp is served by a CDN, I have to trust that the CDN doesn't tamper with it. Actually Meta has an extension made for verifying that for WhatsApp Web. The extension is a bulky way to make sure that you loaded what Meta wanted you to load (i.e. that Cloudflare did not tamper with it), but it DOES NOT ensure that Meta did not inject a backdoor just for you, just this time.
I asked the same question a few years ago, and the answer I arrived at is that the app has, by default, more permissions (not only technical but also conventional) to collect data, send push notifications, and otherwise harass the user.
I'm only familiar with Android, and it bothers me that I cannot exert complete sandbox control over every app.
I think I should be able to completely cut it off from the network and/or local storage; prevent it from running even though it is installed; and prevent it from having any personalizing information about me, my movements, my network connectivity status or patterns, my device usage (i.e. screen on versus locked, any proxy like battery state of charge), etc.
I am very reluctant to install apps because I see that the platform is designed for needs and a mindset that is not my own. I do not see it as essential or preferable that an app be able to monetize my usage or really gather any telemetry at all.
Sometimes apps lack the features of the web versions. For example, I wanted to translate a document on Android. When I was trying to open Google translator website, the system was redirecting me to the app. Unfortunately, I couldn't see document translation feature in this app. Could still open the website in incognito mode. This is really maddening me.
Strava is an example where to enjoy all the features of the platform you have to use the app for some and the browser for others. Neither has all of them.
While I sympathize with the author, and feel the same way, I think Apple/Google have some blame here. They make certain simple things only possible in the apps, because the APIs are not exposed via the web.
Notifications is a big obvious one. Not sure if they've changed it since I last looked into it, but having an app installed was the only way to send a notification to someone for a long time.
Do people allow website notifications? One argument I have heard raised in favour of mobile apps is that people are more likely to give an app notification permission.
That's one of the main reasons to not install an app. Extremely few apps are able to limit their notifications to actually transactional events. As soon as they have the capability they start spamming away.
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 mobile app doesn't have all these issues.
I'm especially angry that if you go to reddit.com in a mobile browser, it will sometimes fully block you from certain subreddits (not just NSFW ones) and tell you that you can only access it from the app. Meanwhile, you can easily visit the exact same subreddit by typing old.reddit.com/r/whatever. The outright lying bothers me so much. I refuse to be desensitized to lying just because everyone is lying all the time; it's still really wrong, and they really should be ashamed of themselves.
you can launch it from a comment linking to r/All (with a as upper case) iirc. How long that'll still be available, I have no clue, but I like to imagine the devs who work on reddit realise how braindead of a decision removing it is but have to please the shareholders by removing any obvious access of it
I think they took the wrong signal from the people avoiding the default feed since it's filled with days-old posts you've already seen from subs you haven't joined.
If it's really "by design" then you are saying they have a staff of web developers who are told, "No, no, no... all that quality work you're capable of--don't do it. Here are some JIRA tickets to make the web site shitty and slow and eat the user's battery. Go implement them and make everything worse!"
What kind of sad, self-loathing software developer sits down and says "OK boss, whatever you say, boss, gonna go make it bad now..." I mean, I know to a lot of people, it's just a 9-5 and you do what your boss says, and "pride in your work" is not really a thing anymore, but come on. Who gets even a shred of satisfaction doing this?
I think a better explanation is just incompetence.
It's usually done in such small portions the developers don't know exactly what they're doing. That, or they've become so numb to it to not really care
I can't think of a web app that really feels like a (good) native one. For example, I would never use Google Calendar as a web app / Google Maps as a web app as they're far inferior IMHO
I used Home Assistant as a web app for years before deciding to download the companion app instead to give it access to my phone's sensors.
I used to care a lot about app designs feeling "native" but when I actually took inventory of the apps I use, I came to the conclusion that all app developers (including Apple and Google themselves) will force their own designs and theming into every app. The only exception seems to be coming from a bunch of open-source apps that don't have branding concerns to worry about.
With the realisation that most apps look and navigate must as bad as their website equivalent, I found it much easier to use web apps.
Unless it’s required (Starlink) or something I check often (not much this day), I don’t use the app version. I prefer grabbing my laptop and use the web version. But best is when there’s an API available so I can write my own tools.
My analog is something along the lines of "please build a small room in your house, closet-sized at first, but with enough room to grow to twice that as we add features, so we can give you the best possible temperature and weather information. Also, we need access to your full contacts so you can share how you feel about the weather more easily, with just a push! Also also, we need a hot microphone in your closet, so you can shop our umbrella store by just talking to our AI assistant! Also also also, your privacy is important to us."
It only needs to be "an app" if it is using hardware to do it's main job. There is never another reason to make it an app.
How much of the native app push is to bypass ad blockers? If you’re just using a browser plugin like AdGuard or uBO it can’t block in a dedicated app unless you replace it with AGH or PiHole, can’t help but wonder if that plays a role as well
The cookie/session isolation is underrated. Half the reason services push you to the app is because the mobile browser experience for juggling multiple web apps is genuinely bad — not because the web can't do it, but because nobody's made it comfortable. I got annoyed enough to put together a small webview manager that keeps a few web apps in tabs with separate cookies: https://github.com/theoden8/webspace_app (yes, it's written in flutter)
I've been running a video game collection site for years. The number one request I get from people is to build an app. I've worked so hard on making the mobile version of the site to be just as functional as the desktop version, and I don't really understand why people want an app over just using the web version. I sometimes wonder if I should just do it to see if I'm missing out on market share, but I don't really want to have to maintain two different user interfaces.
My take on it is that frequent users perceive apps as desktop launchers/shortcuts.
They don't care about the difference between app and web, per se, but the bookmarking situation in mobile browsers is awful (desktop too, honestly), and an app presents a convenient launcher for the service/site/data they want.
Adding a springboard launcher for a PWA is easy but still apparently more frictional than installing an app.
You could add features to make it a PWA and explain to users how to save it t their desktop. I used ProtonMail for years that way (I do not have a smartphone anymore, so no longer do so).
The restaurant QR menu situation is peak 'we installed an app for the app' energy. I scanned a code expecting a menu and instead got a Play Store redirect. Just let me see the food.
The worst offenders are services that literally work fine in mobile Safari but pop a banner saying 'for the best experience download our app' covering half the screen. The web version is already the app, you just painted a door on the wall.
> The restaurant QR menu situation is peak 'we installed an app for the app' energy. I scanned a code expecting a menu and instead got a Play Store redirect. Just let me see the food.
Now you've triggered me lol. At that point I'll ask for a physical menu, and leave if they don't have one. And no, I'm not going to look at my friend's phone. It's ridiculous!
I'm a huge supporter of the open web. However this issue was decided 16 year ago. If you recall the first push on smartphones were "web apps". Those sucked. The bottom line is that native apps provide a better user experience and that is why they became prevalent 16 years ago.
I feel the same. Take the Telegram app as an example: it's so slick, responsive. Even a simple button click doesn't work well on the web due to the long response time between clicking and seeing a response.
Additionally, apps allow for good offline functionality (for times when you're not near a cell tower), which I feel is important even with ubiquitous internet access in the 1st world.
The solution I feel is to have better sandboxing functionality in mobile Operating Systems.
1. Phone storage wasn't paid at an absurdly premium price. Sometimes the option with just higher storage may be $300 more.
2. High speed Internet was available cheaply everywhere.
If I'm in a town in the middle of nowhere. I'm not going to use my expensive data plan (because in the US mobile data is extremely expensive compared to EU)
To download a 500Mb app that will take 5 minutes to download because the Internet is slow just to pay for parking
For some reason, app sizes seem to have exploded, but especially on iPhones. Maybe it's the fact cheap Androids are still being used but I was surprised to find out how many 50MB Android apps were in 200MB iPhone apps.
When it took ages to download the same app to my work iPhone as I was downloading to my normal Android I thought there was something wrong with the iPhone at first, but it was literally spending five times the data to download what seemed to be an identical app.
There's something to be said for downloading a 50MiB app to save yourself from downloading 1MiB every time you pull out the website, but with modern app sizes, things are getting ridiculous.
Folding phones are the big/small screen compromise. One you fold, nobody goes back.
The samsung fold7 in particular is the same thickness/weight as slab phones, but unfolds to become a tablet. Please don't vote if you haven't held one. The compromise is cost, durability (dust, water), some battery life & some camera. Huge gains in productivity and night-to-day difference consuming video and photos. Google Maps FTW.
Not just dust and water but folding screens are plastic with a mohs hardness of 2-3, as opposed to normal phones with glass screens which are a 6-7 hardness. I like having phones that can't be permanently damaged by pressing my fingernail a little hard into it.
I also can trivially replace the screen on my regular phone at home, whereas I'd have to get a folding phone professionally repaired for many hundreds of dollars.
I will not download them on a train, I will not download them on a plane, I will not download them in a box, I will not download them with Firefox. I will not download them Sam I am.
On one hand, I don’t know why startups make apps. It requires more devs and keeping everything at parity is tough with desktop, iOS, android, mobile web. Seems pragmatic to just simplify and use web.
But on the other hand, I’d love to pay you $0.99 if it meant I could get an ad free version of your little widget and I’m not sure how to do that easily with web
Like you touched on, they're just trying to get you to make a small commitment to being in their walled garden and then they add on a bunch of other things
Agree with the article. I’m increasingly jaded by the state of the web.
Something that has been happening for a long time on iOS Safari that I only recently realized: pinch to zoom on sites like Reddit, instagram, shopping sites, and many others cause what I’m calling “website seizures.” Where I try to zoom in and half the time the page reloads completely or triggers a reload but ends up throwing an error.
I don't understand it from the app developers point of view. Having to pay app store cuts over basic card processing fees. I understand the appeal of access to a market, like selling on eBay gets you eyeballs. But once you have a customer using their app, what does the app give you that a PWA doesn't unless you need access to specific sensors / file system access patterns etc?
As an app developer it comes down to the full access to phone APIs and the smoothest app experience. The more biased opinion is rooted in preference for the native language over web languages. And I recognize this is an opinion that is self-preservation in nature but it is what it is.
But I'll also say some apps don't really need to be apps (like ordering food from one specific store) but I won't complain about having those apps if it is a convenience.
The vast majority of apps come from companies where the app developer has little to no say in how things work. Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, Uber, Ebay, Shein, etc are certainly not paying Apple 30% for purchases made inside the app. They also operate at a scale where they get bulk rates from MC/Visa on processing fees.
For years, Apple has muffled PWAs under a pillow. No one knows that you can add them to your homescreen or how that unlocks the possibility of getting push notifications. You also lose any stored data when you go from Safari to an homescreen web app.
How do you add them? I am using https://actualbudget.org as a Safari page, and it works surprisingly well when "off network" - but a button on the home screen would be nicer.
I recently switched for m the developer mindset of build websites for everything to make apps if I can. My logic is that an app never needs to go back and forth with me, it's something the user can have without me managing hosting and constantly having a relationship with the user.
This also skips over with some hand waving that a lot of mobile app uses cases simply can’t be replicated with web sites. Take gps or smart home control as two easy of the top of my head example the author skipped too.
Also the fact that people here would rather have their info stored in the cloud vs local on device is interesting.
I do mention cases where the browser model doesn't work, like accessing Lidar sensors. Just didn't want to bloat the post with too many examples. But I totally agree with you on this front: not everything can be done as a PWA.
I wish there was a version of this website that was simpler, more educated and that I could show to the "normies" who own business and insist on asking me to download their app (I'm looking at you, TKD school!). This one is too aimed at the cooks.
We're all here debating the friction of downloading apps versus the convenience of the mobile web, but we might be missing the bigger picture. Both are UI-heavy paradigms designed for humans to click things.
In a few years, we won't care if a service has a slick React app or a native iOS build. We’ll just tell our AI agents: 'Book that flight' or 'Fix my billing issue,' and they’ll talk to the APIs directly. The era of 'interfaces for humans' is peaking; the era of 'headless services for agents' is just beginning. Interfaces are becoming a legacy tax.
Explanation and summarization without visual interactables is so much harder to do. A person can talk to an interface but I don't know how many people would like natural language back.
Yes, the TC is right and I completely agree, but we all know the reason for forcing users to install an app: retention, ARPU and other metrics grow for this audience, and push notifications also help with that.
My Google Chrome app is by far the most used app on my phone. If you catch me at a random moment on my phone, chances are I'm on Chrome.
Sometimes the mobile app experience is better than the mobile browser for me, though. Examples are Twitter, Spotify, Upwork, Google Keep Notes.
If I'm on my computer I don't even download the apps, I just use the browser. It just feels more convenient.
I haven't thought much about why they all feel good on my laptop browser while some apps offer better experience on mobile.
Edit: It's also why I keep procrastinating on getting into mobile app development. I just generally prefer web experience. With some exceptions as already stated here.
I take back my comment on Twitter being better on mobile apps. I just tried it on my mobile browser and it doesn't have that stupid bug (feature?) where you leave the detail page of a tweet and the app automatically takes you to the top and you miss where you were initially.
ios Native App > web app > android app > anything made with a cross platform toolkit like react native or flutter.
I would much prefer a really well-crafted ios Native App with extensive attention to detail than anything, even a web app made with similar detail (in most cases). And also ios apps are far more likely to receive that level of attention than just about anything else.
I've got an old-ish phone, so in most cases, I can't download your app even if I wanted to. You deliberately set your minimum iOS deployment version to be higher than what my phone can even install. So I have to go to your web site or just stop doing business with your ass. Just because your developers decided that developing for older phones is too hard to figure out, or it takes too much effort, and they'd rather just cut us off.
You can support older devices, but admittedly Apple does not make it super easy to find. The easy "happy path" in Xcode is to only support the most recent OS versions.
iirc even then there's a minimum that xcode will still deploy to. The only way to have an app work on older versions than that is to not update it at all
It’s a little tough these days. With AI and scraping, running an open webapp/website is now more expensive than ever before. My friends and I have launched a product in the last few months and decided to focus on mobile first and wait to develop a webapp simply because we couldn’t feel we could optimize the costs of open webapp while we have so few resources.
I just randomly looked at Railway and for $20 a month you get a whole lot. I've hosted many a web project (successful personal projects and enterprise projects alike) and I don't see a large barrier to entry on "hosting a website" here.
Blocking AI scrapers and crawlers is not a huge ordeal. Planning for a unicorn before just putting a product up isn't the way to go.
> Blocking AI scrapers and crawlers is not a huge ordeal.
If you have content they want, then it is a huge ordeal. You can pay some one like CloudFlare to take care of it for you, but if you can't or won't make a deal with those types of companies, it's going to take up a significant chunk of your time.
Before AI I regularly consumed a larger international news aggregator ran by a single person.
Then with ChatGPT he had to enshittify his website with all these cloudflare capture stuff, making the site leeesssssssss fun to use; when complaining he mailed me that AI scrapers are slashing his servers
This is especially true for dev tools. Engineers already have 20 browser tabs open with dashboards, CI/CD, docs, and logs. The last thing anyone wants is another Electron app eating RAM in the background. The best tools meet you where you already are.
My gripe is how iOS allows these companies to constantly bug us to use their stupid apps. I ended up installing the NYTimes app, not because I use it, but just to shut it up. I switched to duck duck go because I was sick of being bugged to install chrome. How many times do I need to say no?
I take this to be mainly about cloud services that can/could just as well be used in the browser instead, and where installing the app doesn't really allow you to meaningfully use it offline anyway. It's largely orthogonal to the question of local apps vs cloud services.
The author touches on this in the last section, but I'd reframe this a different way. The natural conclusion for a company who wants to funnel you to the app is, "the web version is a-OK? Let's make the web version worse."
I'd rather see this framed as, "if you don't have a high functioning web version, I don't need to use your service." Gimping my preferred medium will lose me as a customer. If enough people draw that line, "enshittifying" your web app should hurt your metrics, not help. That way maintaining a good web version is looked at as a long-term necessity, not a top of funnel.
If the elevator was invented today, use of it would require an app which demands access to one’s contacts and microphone, and has a rating of 1.4 stars.
Anecdotally had the axios maintainer used the Zoom desktop app, he'd be used to seeing the "Open this link in the app" prompt on the call page and less likely to fall for the scam upon not seeing the same prompt when following the phishing link. I think there's some value in having the app installed for the extra validation.
It's a waste of resources too. I've seen startups waste soooooo much time and effort on simple native apps that could trivially be webviews, it's tragic.
I honestly don't mind downloading apps for things I use all the time so long as the app isn't a nightmare. It's when I am having a single interaction with a brand (such as buying my wife a gift) and I'm bombarded with "it's better in the app" that drives me nuts.
I realize that I am perhaps not the target demographic of this app-centric culture; but, I cannot count the number of times in a week that I utter the phrase, "no, I don't want to download your app" as I try to accomplish what should be a simple task.
I'm okay with downloading your app provided it's actually good and does something substantially better than a website could do. I'm talking seamless mobile UI, use of mobile features like gps or nfc, or easier/better security and authentication.
However, I don't want your bloated or minimum effort dog-shit app just to watch a movie on a plane, browse a site like Reddit, order a pizza, read a news article/blog, or shop at your specific online store. I will begrudgingly download it if I must, but I'll hate you for it.
Last year the same idea made it to the front page [0]. I understand that the apps can be faster, or easier to use. But that's intentional. Developers are deliberately making the web experience worst to force you to use the app. The reason is they have control over the experience in the apps. For example, blocking ads on the apps is much harder, and they can extract things like your contacts, GPS data, and run in the background.
At this point, the only apps on my phone are bank apps. Even that is something I'm trying to get rid off.
App developers are not living up to the expectations and needs that these services have in our lives. MyQ for example, is a Garage Door opener . It’s a key. It needs to meet the responsiveness and reliability expectations of a key. Instead, the app is slow, the buttons often freeze , the app logs itself out without notifying you – so in the most urgent situation you don’t have access to open your door.
Even some of the better ones don’t take themselves seriously. Buggy, hostile UIs , slow.
Honestly I don’t believe most of the producers are even using their own apps. I’m able to discover critical bugs within 2 minutes using nearly any app.
If a website disrespects "request desktop site" and still tries to force you into an app... ugh.
Had this happen yesterday when someone sent me a link to something on AllTrails. If the service was good and the website was usable, I might have even considered getting the app for offline features. Not anymore - screw companies that do this.
I described my own attitude, obviously companies are going to do what they want.
In this case, AllTrails has a perfectly functional website which they allow users to access from computer web browsers, but they force mobile phones (even when in "request desktop site" mode) to redirect to the app. If a site breaks in that mode it's on the user - I'm specifically requesting to get access to something they already provide and being denied.
This is especially egregious given how many "apps" are just websites in a wrapper anyway.
I think that sucks, and I'm entitled to my opinion. Now get off my lawn.
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 actually enjoy having mobile apps for lots of use cases – travel, news, entertainment, utility bills, banking. I have probably around 100 apps on my iPhone right now and I'm fine with this number.
There are 2 things though that make me dislike mobile apps.
First, regularly logging me out. It's so frustrating, especially if the app does not support biometric login. I have a password manager, so I can log in rather quickly, but I just want to be logged in for months.
Second, webviews, I just can't understand mobile apps that render part of their content inside webviews. Like, either commit to having a proper native mobile experience or just let me use your website. One of the more annoying cases for me personally is NBA app. I'm searching for some stat, I open their website in a browser, it redirects me to the app, the app opens and then renders the same web page in a web view. What's even the point?!
I think it's best to ignore this kind of user feedback and focus on the users who really want the service or product and are willing download an app if necessary or use the web version if necessary. Popular opinions on apps/web and desktop/mobile change every few years. I remember when Facebook became deeply unpopular and was afraid of going under because they didn't manage to provide a native app.
Because of the walled gardens, duplication of efforts, and waste of resources I'd personally favor if apps died out but that is never going to happen because they always have better platform integration.
Do you really think developers are going through the hellish pain of dealing with Google and Apple for no reason? Real world users prefer and expect apps as opposed to web versions for many product categories.
I'm not going to download an app for every company I do business with. It's as simple as that.
I'm not going to download an app to order food from your restaurant.
I'm not going to download an app to operate an appliance.
I'm not going to download an app to get a discount on a beverage at your convenience store.
I don't care about your stupid rewards system for trying to get a reasonable price on overpriced items. I'm not downloading an app for it.
There are many people who download every app they do business with without hesitation. It's crazy. I can't imagine how many apps these people have on their phones.
I think app stores are getting restrictive and their next attack would be on PWA because that's one loophole in their walled garden where they need to extract 30% cut. Only a matter of time.
As for me, I would be mostly relying on PWAs.
Being a smaller company, try pushing an app to production on Android. Good luck with that.
We should blame Apple for creating incentives that let it take a 30% cut from apps. I don't know why governments, especially foreign governments, allow Apple app store to operate in their countries.
Many many people are downloading the apps, and this is pushing a lot of younger people into apps-first over native web experiences.
I think we should call on Apple and Google to make web apps/sites a more first-class experience, rather than ask app developers to stop going where the people are.
The whole premise doesn't make much sense (to me) if the app doesn't have an inherent benefit over a website. Don't tell me that all the app first people would rather have a web wrapped app for every website they visit? Seems to be more of a "we can get more metrics out of app users than website users" thing so they intentionally break the mobile website to aggressively push an app. #LinkedIn #Facebook
PWAs make little sense at this point as most apps are useless without an active internet connection. You can't cache Uber ride searches, Amazon product listings or food delivery options.
Even with mobile FF and adblock their mobile website is completely unusable. Now ask me if I'm happy to download ther app if their website is a complete POS like that
The desktop website works "fine" for the most part though
It's already been beaten into acceptance that I have to use the Ticketmaster app (shockingly awful) or Dice app (not quite as bad but still sucks) to get into a lot of music venues in Boston.
But at one club they wanted me to install another app just to check my coat. I elected to hide it under a some furniture instead lol
what's funnier is that this could have been written 10 years ago and the situation was the exact same
apps function more so as a checkbox for investors to take an organization seriously, as well as for the founder to self aggrandize and feel like their own app store presence means something. for devs it is functionally a make-work program.
The only reason they want you to download their app is to farm more data about you. They will push you to huge extent just to collect more data.
To share an egregious example, Mercury (which is a great bank) sent KYC notice literally saying "we noticed you use app outside of declared locations" for one of my friends companies. And yes they push their app hard.
dozens of apps on the smartphone is gross. an indicator for me of an elderly / technically illiterate smartphone user is the presence of a ton of apps, most of which were used long ago and seldomly.
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 first touchpoint with "the internet" for younger folks is a smartphone display. The even do homework on this small screens!
Companies are seeing this switch, so they adapt.
Personally, a service which is "only an app" will be not used by me as I prefer to have a larger screen with more information (actually I use my mobile phone only when Im in public transport or similar, at home I have a notebook laying around if I need something)
> But today, the very first touchpoint with "the internet" for younger folks is a smartphone display. The even do homework on this small screens!
I saw a tweet recently that perfectly encapsulates this: for most people over 30, certain things are "big screen tasks". I use my phone for a lot, but for some things I put the phone down and use my computer instead. I am most comfortable using a large screen and a keyboard for anything that requires writing more than a few words or using any interface for more than a few clicks.
For example, I read your comment on my phone and went to my computer to type this reply.
I personally find the idea of doing homework on my phone horrifying but I suppose kids today are either used to it and comfortable with it, or they've simply never used a computer and don't know what they're missing. Though I'd wager they probably aren't comfortable typing on a keyboard.
Honestly I think Apple perfectly captured it with their "what's a computer?" ad for the iPad. I seem to remember them getting some flak online for it but I think they were right on the money with regards to the younger generations.
> I saw a tweet recently that perfectly encapsulates this: for most people over 30, certain things are "big screen tasks". I use my phone for a lot, but for some things I put the phone down and use my computer instead. I am most comfortable using a large screen and a keyboard for anything that requires writing more than a few words or using any interface for more than a few clicks.
Yup. From the frontier of mobile tech, I can say that a foldable phone (Galaxy Z Fold 7) is the first mobile device that successfully ate into this category, and bit a rather substantial chunks out of it. It's only been ~6 months into this experience, but the "big tasks" now are the ones that benefit from substantial use of keyboard and/or mouse. If it's only about screen space or doing things in 2-3 apps at the time, chances are my phone is now good enough for its mobility to beat inconvenience - though chances are also good that at least one of the programs will be a browser, because mobile apps still suck.
> I personally find the idea of doing homework on my phone horrifying but I suppose kids today are either used to it and comfortable with it, or they've simply never used a computer and don't know what they're missing. Though I'd wager they probably aren't comfortable typing on a keyboard.
For college aged kids, most people are definitely not doing their homework on their phone. Many are still using paper and pencil. The one person I know who did do their homework on their phone tried to evangelize it to their friends and got ridiculed for it.
I just asked my college aged kid. He said pretty much everyone does their written homework on their laptop, but many will use their phones to do the reading.
Aside from being a bit small and having to be held close, phones are good proportions for reading. Computers screens have gotten wider and wider, and UIs bigger and bigger, and it eats into reading space pretty heavily. Especially if you don't have a high-density screen.
In addition to more space, having only one foreground application really reduces distractions and visual clutter. Also, for some reason I am comfortable using larger fonts on phones and tablets, which makes doing lots of reading easier than on my laptop.
Can't confirm. We had students at university (18-20-ish) that had not used a mouse prior to our courses. That was at least 3-4 years ago now and not a single case.
I started college 10 years ago and all of my homework was computer based, including Calculus and Linear Algebra. Of course for those higher level math classes I had to use paper and pencil to get to the answer but absolutely everything was submitted through an online portal. For any other classes the work was purely done on the computer.
Kinda stretching the definition of kid there, a little past the breaking point imo.
What do you mean? A kid is anyone younger than the speaker. My step dad used to refer to Bill Clinton as a kid because he was the first president younger than him.
> or they've simply never used a computer and don't know what they're missing. Though I'd wager they probably aren't comfortable typing on a keyboard.
On the other hand, I've noticed lots of people use voice on their phone instead of a keyboard.
Many friends of mine send occasional nonsense in the middle of a text message, and it becomes obvious they're using voice to text.
As a young kid, why would I laboriously type a homework paper when I could dictate it from the couch or some other better location than a desk?
I was probably one of the first people doing some of these "big screen tasks" on my phone nearly two decades ago when I was a teenager who spent his first earned money to get an Openmoko Neo Freerunner - I learned a lot by programming the phone on the phone itself - but what was exciting about it was that I could do all these things even when I did not have a big screen and a keyboard in front of me. When I do, it's just so much more comfortable to do it there, especially these days when touch screens are capacitive and not very accurate anymore!
I was somewhat shocked a while back when a coworker told me that they offered their kid a laptop for school work and the kid apparently said : Thanks but I’ll stick with my phone.
It is also the case that PCs are still more expensive than phones. Had a work colleague in one of my first customer facing service jobs who relied almost completely on an android phone to get everything done from mortgage applications to entertainment before I gifted them one of my lesser used laptops.
For many kids, they have one device and it’s a phone or tablet. They may have access to a computer, but not on demand. Much like when many of us were growing up and had one computer.
This resonates. There are certain tasks, like dealing with any government or healthcare-related web page, that I won't even bother attempting on my phone. In my case, it's because I just know in my heart of hearts that the crummy mobile app won't be feature-complete enough for me to complete my goal.
My wife is the opposite. It doesn't occur to her that the problem may be with the janky website, not with her. She'll ask me for help with a thing out of frustration and my first troubleshooting step is to reach for my laptop. This is almost inevitably followed by "hey, wait, how come you're able to press the Submit button but I wasn't able to?" "Because the dev never tested this on a phone and it's broken." "So it's not just me being incompetent to use this website?" "Nope, never was."
> For example, I read your comment on my phone and went to my computer to type this reply.
Thanks for the honor! :)
Sometimes I even copy links from here and send them by mail to myself so I can reply later - maybe Im getting tooo old? :-D (on the iPhone I would store it in a simple textnote)
This isn't phone vs desktop. It's app vs browser. To wit, there's no official HN app. I'm presuming you did both of these tasks in a browser.
To this day, using soft keyboards + autocorrect boils my blood. Q: Are we not men?
This hit the nail on the head.
I find much of the HN community insightful and interesting, but in terms of consumer feedback (especially in a B2C environment) I wouldn't touch feedback here with a 10-foot pole.
I don't mean that to be an insult, quite the opposite. Most people here are power users. But that is a galaxy away from how the average user interacts with the internet.
"Why do I need to download a 100+ MB app, give it permission to track my location, and let it run background processes just to browse through a restaurant menu, buy a ticket, or scroll through a list of posts?"
-------------------
Hardware/software companies have, historically, targeted power users because regular users listen to them. The companies producing these apps do so because they can benefit from exploiting the data of regular users, but risk little blowback from power users if they keep their web versions up to date and in good shape.
That doesn't mean power users should ignore the presence of these apps however. We should be telling regular users to avoid them for their own safety. We should also be worried that, if we stay quiet and let regular users flock to apps, the motivation to maintain web access will be eroded. When all power users vanish into a single percentage point and a platform achieves total dominance over the alternatives, companies might well choose to focus on only apps.
This cuts to the heart of it for me. I will not install Meta or LinkedIn apps on my phone because they have been found to be very intrusive.
> that is a galaxy away from how the average user interacts with the internet
Exactly! Esp if you just move away "one tile" from tech/IT or business-power-users, most people are more or less clueless what they are doing/have to do with a computer.
Yes, we are in a bubble here - as with every niche/special interest topic: It would be same for me if I would join a "car tuning event" or similar - Im just a car user, and I do not know of all these details and nuts & bolts
> Exactly! Esp if you just move away "one tile" from tech/IT or business-power-users, most people are more or less clueless what they are doing/have to do with a computer.
I don't think so. A majority don't want to. But they are forced by geeks/nerds. Geeks/nerds often show off especially in family/friends parties with older/common folk - telling - I can do this/that. Then average CEO or parent is forced to get a smartphone.
Next the geek/nerd - has no time to maintain the computer/laptop of the parent. Or loses patience explaining updates/double-click/avoid scammer installing software. Then - boom - geek son/daughter - if smart gets a decent pixel/iphone - otherwise gets a shitty Android device - installs everything there. Moves on.
And finally remember it is the young same geek/nerd that will eventually do programming for FAANG/palantir etc. which forces people to install apps, degrade privacy, worsen webapp/websites - all for money.
> Most people here are power users.
As an actual power user, I take exception to this comment.
Most people here are NOT power users. I've lost count of how many arguments I've seen for example where someone Just Can't Believe anyone would have a good reason to have more than 5-10 browser tabs open at a time. Meanwhile I've got a list of thousands and growing.
Or look at the dogged adherence to Windows even to this day after decades of Microsoft abuse, and long spiels about the difficulty and complexity of the Linux command line. Especially when it comes to systemd for example, where one of the most common complaints against sysv is "eww, shell scripts? yuck!"
I don't call these people power users, or recognize them as peers in the realm of technology. The difference between them and me is like the difference between them and the commoner who knows nothing at all about tech.
Maybe we need a geek ranking system or something.
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 'power user' sort of thing to do?
I don't know why, but equating how many tabs a person has open to how much of a power user they are sounds like something right out of a south park episode.
Apparently bookmarks and self-hosting a read it later web app on my home server but only having 5 tabs open at a time makes me a filthy casual.
I think you failed to correctly apply DeMorgan's laws to the statement you're reacting to.
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 state of internet search. Many results have to be explored, many links from those results also explored, more searches done to narrow in on the precise keyword needed to bring up some hopefully good results, etc. And I can't close all that until the answer is found, as I may need to backtrack, so they just pile up. It's really quite ridiculous how much work it takes to find a good answer these days.
Compare with the typical person who just does one search with some suboptimal keywords then clicks on the first link, or starts dutifully absorbing the AI-generated garbage. Orders of magnitude difference.
I have dozens of projects I'm actively working on just for my Linux distro. Dozens of tabs open for things like X11 window management, for instance, or some info on C++ modules for another project. Lots of tabs open for a hardware project. All kinds of balls are up in the air here. Why put any of this stuff in bookmarks which is a waste of time and energy to manage, when I can just leave it in the tab list, organized in multiple windows spread across different desktops? (I have 64 desktops on my 55" plasma display.)
(lol @ the other guy's reply. That didn't age well.)
hey, light power user here - for a while I was using tabXpert browser extension for this, but they have recently changed to paid-only and I havent had a chance to check out their competition but might end up just buying it anyway
it groups sessions, not just tabs, so i can (for example) have all my banking websites together as a session that i can open and close as a window of tabs. the convenience is it organizes the sessions as named things that i can manage in a UI. transfer tabs from one session to another, close tabs, check tabs that have been closed in that session, etc.
if you know of any tools like this or an easy way to manage it independently without a 3rd party browser extension, I would be interested. Sounds like maybe you are doing something similar but at the desktop level, creating a new desktop to pick up and put down? are they savable and transferable between devices? I like to close everything down at night to run some games with friends, and am going to be building a new comp soon and for various reasons starting fresh with software and importing things as i need them rather than flashing my current setup forward to the new hardware
I agree with this a lot tbh. I think we need to have better support for tiling or something iframe-like in web interfaces. Probably for deep research or focused work, we need something more tree-shaped than the flat tabs-with-back-button structure web browsers expose.
I've never explored 20-30 search results. Not since Google anyway. If I don't find what I want in the first few I rephrase the search or try a different search engine. The world beyond the first page of results basically doesn't exist.
This guy thinks he's a power user because he doesn't know how to close tabs.
Measuring tech skill by how many tabs you have open is like measuring carpentry skill by how disorganized your workshop is.
It's a bit insulting to assume that having more than a dozen tabs open must be "disorganized", especially in a context where it is likely that the power user in question is using browser extensions. Something like TreeStyleTab makes it easy to keep hundreds of tabs organized with clear, easily-manipulated structure, and lower friction than manually creating and curating bookmarks.
It looks like you're either showing off your own ignorance of tools that enable workflows you can't imagine, or you're assuming that everyone's organization methods must resemble your own habits.
> Or look at the dogged adherence to Windows even to this day after decades of Microsoft abuse
Or the people who absolutely refuse to give up Chrome, despite the whole adblock situation. "But I don't like the way Firefox tabs look!"
Wait, you mean typical consumers _don’t_ want to build my terminal-based TUI app from source?
Evergreen: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1atqusj/ne...
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
That's not new.
I read a UI book in the early 2000s that cited research showing that most users didn't understand filesystems. They would seem to, but then the idea that the same filename in two places was two unrelated files would just lead to a mental block. Those who got it, didn't find it hard. It's just that some people can't get it.
The disconnect is not between some developers, and the younger folks. It is between some developers, and most of the world.
I think a lot more people than most HN readers realize simply struggle significantly with abstract thinking and reasoning.
It's natural that people who enjoy programming and hacking and related fields are very comfortable with such abstract types of thought. But I really think that isn't all that common amongst most people. I think the average person has to learn such thinking abilities with difficulty (though they can). I'm sure many people here got into programming precisely because abstract thinking came easily to them.
> the idea that the same filename in two places was two unrelated files would just lead to a mental block.
Which is actually why the "files and folders" metaphor is apt. In a filing cabinet in a school office (once upon a time) there were likely hundreds of documents labeled "Report Card" in many different folders, each labeled with a different name.
> 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 me years to fully understand it.
And I was hell-bad at math in school (or maybe just too lazy), the only thing to which I a relation was all this geometric stuff (because this was needed for .. game dev! :-D )
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.
OP had no problem with pointers prior to trying C++. I think there is a case to be made that C(++) makes pointers unnecessarily confusing and there is no real disconnect between understanding pointers in theory and in practice otherwise
And C++ makes everything extra confusing with the capability of operator overloading.
That has to be one of the worst features ever added to a language.
...thats the reason why I love managed environments like C#/Java/etc :-))
> Which is actually why the "files and folders" metaphor is apt.
It's a starting point, but I certainly wouldn't say it's the best metaphor that there could be. The idea of subfolders just doesn't make sense in a filing cabinet analogy, because you have to consider paper size - any folder which could fit into another folder is not going to be able to contain your regularly sized documents.
That said, I can't think of a better metaphor.
People understand hierarchy. That named file is in a folder in a particular drawer of a particular cabinet in a particular room of a particular building in a particular neighborhood in a...
What some people struggle with is recursive hierarchy where each step doesn't change the kind of container. I guess they never saw a Matryoshka doll when they were little.
> The idea of subfolders just doesn't make sense in a filing cabinet analogy,
Sure it does. The document is located in Building C, Sub-basement 2, Room 123, cabinet 415, folder labeled "Accounts". And a physical folder can certainly contain other folders. Nit-picking the analogy wastes everyone's time.
A better metaphor would be trees and branches. Which is already somewhat used for computing.
I can't blame them. We've been force-upgraded to Windows 11 at work and that OS and its apps do their upmost to obscure where files are located.
I've frequently saved on OneDrive instead of locally, by accident, and then been perplexed when I try to reopen the file later.
And I've been using filesystems for 35+ years, so I feel sympathy for those who don't understand the abstraction. At this point Android is more transparent about its files.
Did they also struggle to understand that some people have the same name yet are not the same person?
By that logic, operating system developers struggle to understand that putting two files with the same name into the same folder(1) is very much possible in the physical world.
(1) or referencing them from the same directory, which was the earlier metaphor.
Hardly. That would be analogous to two people having the same name _and_ the same spacetime coordinates; they would indeed be the same person.
You cannot name 2 of your children the same names.
In the time it took you to write this comment, you've thought more about the abstraction than most of the people who are confused by it -- and it will never succeed to coax them out of their confusion with such logic. :)
I think that's perfectly understandable. File systems require the user to remember a hierarchy in their head (even if there are tools like breadcrumbs to help you out), and many people aren't willing or aren't able to hold an arbitrarily complex structure like that in their head. A name is a flat piece of information, no extra structure to imagine.
I worked with a professor one time that used floppies for all his files (after they had been surpassed by thumbdrives) because each floppy was essentially a single folder, and he could wrap his head around that conceptually.
it's not complicated at all, it's how operating systems present them to the users.
> two unrelated files would just lead to a mental block
Because in the analog world, each "document has usually a single/unique headline" and file names are often perceived as some type of unique identifier as well, Id guess?
> It is between some developers, and most of the world.
sigh
I can say for certain this is true. People my age look at me like I have 3 heads if I ask them to do anything more complex than open a web browser
I'm in India, people give me same looks when I ask them to open browser.
Internet to my parents and other old folks is YouTube and WhatsApp
Famously, there were surveys where people said they used Facebook, but didn't use the internet...
https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
not even the older generations. My parents save files on the Whatsapp chat, and my father is one who bought the first IBM PC when it came out, so someone who has touched these things for decades (tho very superficially).
I think that the software industry, especially operating systems, have completely failed to provide a balanced product between the overly bloated and messed up (Windows), the overly complicated (Linux) and the overly simplified (Android/iOS).
Maybe some Linux distros are now at the right spot, I was positively surprised by PopOS to give an example, but it's too late. With AI this is only going to get worse.
> 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.
I met a business partner who is doing some work for SME retail investors last week for lunch:
He showed me his WhatsApp: People are sending _ALL_ type of critical documents by WhatsApp to him. Everything. (and bank statements are among the class of "less critical" documents in his case)
My theory here is: "If you have any function in your product, people will use it for anything appropriate to them in a given minute"
To be fair, what other simple way is there to send a document to a contact through an e2ee channel? Mail + PGP/GPG? Wormhole?? openssl???
Sending it via WhatsApp (which also has desktop clients, btw) strikes me as a perfectly reasonable solution. (Which is somewhat of an indictment of the current state of cryptographic software, but that's a different topic.)
Whatsapp "claims" to be e2e, but nobody knows for sure since its sources are closed.
This exact scenario happened with me in a prior job. Invoices, payments, everything could (and sometimes was) sent through WhatsApp. It was absolutely shocking to see people do this.
Some European governments are effectively run via WhatsApp.
maybe China is right: one app to rule them all
I witnessed a cop attempting to manipulate some files I provided to him on a thumb drive. It was a slow laborious process of dragging files one at a time from the Windows image viewer to shared folder. I would have liked to just do a Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, but that was way above his level of thinking and he didn't seem like the type who wanted an education. So I just sat there through the long, painful process--and then at the end he completely screwed up the report. Idiot.
No. There is a disconnect between domain insiders and those that are not. This is not specific to any one domain. It's also not about age.
Some insiders know about this disconnect and fewer still can bridge it easily.
Those that cannot even sense this disconnect, they're a bit of a pain in certain situations. You know, like talking to project stakeholders or customers.
Except pretty much the entire millennial generation knows about computer folders and files, as that was necessary information for graduating school.
(17 yo here), I think that I am eternally grateful to my cousins who convinced my parents to give me a desktop computer which is still working right now (it had a minor hiccup in the processor recently but it works), before that, I was having a 1 gb crt monitor win7 on which I somehow ran Vscode smoothly.
I am very frugal (to save money on webcam, in online classes, I had droidcam /wo-mic setup with one of my parents old phones that were so old that online classes couldn't work or were just too slow) but spending money on a decent personal computer is genuinely one of the best investments personally.
One thing my cousins did which I am sorta grateful in retrospect is they didn't buy me a gpu so my computer was really nice/smooth in everything but gaming, I still ran some games like portal series , inscryption and many other games like valorant and it was playing valorant when I started realizing its chinese company roots and kernel level access meaning that there was no proper way to guarantee to have piece of mind unless I reinstall it
So I felt like if I was reinstalling, I was watching some the linux experiments video anyway and was fascinated by linux, so I just decided to choose myself to use nobara-linux for the first time which was another one of the best decisions that I made as it opened me up to the terminal.
> grateful in retrospect is they didn't buy me a gpu
Great sentence! I will apply this to my kids as well, I guess.
I always tell them already: "In the future, you can game as much as you want, IF you learn a good programming language [which will be defined by me]" - let me see how this will work out in 1-2 years :-D
The first thing that my brothers did when I had the computer was firstly change the wallpaper to a good mountain wallpaper, installed vscode and asked me to program a python program to reverse print in python so print 10 9 8 7.. 1 each in new line (iirc) [I was in 8th grade]
then they asked me to square while reverse printing or something too. so printing 100 81 64 .. 1 each in new line.
> let me see how this will work out in 1-2 years :-D
Keep me updated haha! To be honest, I will admit though that I am not the greatest within coding itself right now as much as I love tinkering with open source. Personally I am wishing to learn coding with better interest when I get into college, I will have 4 years to learn peacefully (well hopefully if I get into decent college ie) :D
For me the challenge after using Linux was that I wanted to use archlinux because my brother (not cousin, real), flexed me his iirc distrotube archlinux once when we were eating something and I thus always considered arch to be the final boss of Linux lol and so I decided to install it and then I fell in love with arch (currently on cachy on desktop, but right now on mac which my brother gifted me :D)
On my birthday iirc once long time ago I think in 5-6th not sure, my brother gave me his laptop, I wanted to do python but python wanted admin password on windows to install properly. So what I did was I dont even remember how, but download one operating system which could then crack the windows password so that I can set new and I used that to then set a new password to then install python. to then only print hello world :D (I think only because one of the cousins I really admire mentioned that he made 2k loc of python once and I thought during that time, python is the endgame). We are talking about windows 7 but I think that windows 10 security must've gotten better. So these are some things that I have done, I wouldn't call it coding as much as tinkering but I love doing these things from as long as I can remember :D
I think this all started because I tried pirating pokemon-yellow so that I can play it. My brother just said to me google it, or told me the word rom and asked me to figure it out and I was in 2nd or 3rd grade maybe 4th grade lol and I pirated it (Hope nintendo doesn't sue me now xD)
Sorry for making this long but your comment somehow made me remember somethings that I had forgot/weren't touched in a long time xD! I think the main takeaway is that I just treated all of these as challenges I guess, like I wanted to prove myself that I can do that or if a thing is possible/not. I haven't done too much coding myself so I just say that I am tinkerer :D
I hope that this can be helpful to you to teach your kids what you mention. I mean make it a challenge where if they fail, they don't feel pressure but they also feel competitive just enough to try their best as much as they can :D and I think in some sense personally I just wanted some respect/to impress my elder cousins/brothers as they were really elder/mature than me. It's also not been all good though if you are too young than most of your cousins.
The thing is, I don't have any measurable advice, a lot of what I have done till now is just unquantified. Coding on the other hand is quantifiable in some sense (it works or it doesn't). I just do things because I wanted to, and I think I still do that same way. Sometimes I wish if the things that I want are something measurable but my mind doesn't work that way.
The thing is, which depresses me sometimes, is that I am just a number at the end of the day to many if not all whether including in future job/business etc., nobody to whom I interview when I wish to get a job from sometime from now is going to read a lot of this and with AI and some genuine problems in the industry like too many people, this problem gets even larger, sigh. So in that sense I just want to be happy sometimes.
Sorry for the long comment once again and the depressing end, but I recommend watching some cat videos though and I wish you and your kids to have a nice day! :D Say hi to them from my side!!
Wrong. While I agree about younger people’s impression and experience with apps and the internet, that is not what companies are responding to - in fact it’s backward.
Companies have for ages pushed apps due to more control and data. That’s why younger folk grew up with apps.
The push to apps was absolutely not due to companies responding to consumer sentiment. Yes now it has been ingrained so now there are expectations, but those are due to companies pushing people to apps for years and years
Apps generally have a lot more access to the user info than Web sites. I remember getting into an argument, here (one-sided, I didn't argue then, and I won't now), about how a Web site is just as intrusive and privacy-endangering as an app (I think they wrote PWAs, and didn't want to cede the point to native apps). I feel they were wrong. Apps can get more information than web sites; even with sandboxing.
In my experience, apps can figure out a lot more about the user, than a Web site.
I just reported a game to Apple, that, after the app has been resident for 24 hours, pops up an unescapable modal to sign into their Web site. I am sure the 24-hour delay, is so they don't get caught by the App Store folks. I suspect that what happens, during this "daily checkin," is that the app sends a bunch of encrypted data that it got from your device, to the servers in China.
Basically, they can learn more about you from the app, than from the Web site.
I generally avoid apps, where the Web site will do. I won't install banking apps, at all.
> Companies are seeing this switch, so they adapt.
You’re confusing cause and effect here.
Companies are pushing apps very hard because it gives them a lot more ability to wield their various revenue enhancing dark patterns.
That kids see apps as the primary option is a corporate success metric, not an organic choice.
Anyway, the premise that “phone screen ==> native app not web app” is rather faulty, is it not?
> What most people dont get ...
The OP Blog post is comparing web versions vs applications. Both on the phone. And arguing that browser representation is often better than app functionality. Using desktop vs small screen phone is a different matter.
I don't see any evidence that is a user-driven change.
For years now, often multiple times with the save vendor, I've been installing some vendors software, using it to complete a purchase that I had started in a web interface, then uninstalling the software, all so I could take advantage of ann unrealistically good promotion. I'm not talking about the type of savings that might be in an exceptionally good holiday promotion, that eats into most of, if not all of, the margin in the transaction. I'm talking about the type of promotion that would be used to promote a credit card, banking account, or gambling platform-- the kind of promotion that costs months worth of income from a customer but is worthwhile because the customer will be milked for years to come.
This appears to be more related to modern security features that lock the vendor out of your computer, but lock you out of your phone, shifting which interface gives the vendor the advantage in future transactions.
Phones are perfectly capable of accessing websites. I think a lot of the shift here has to do with companies aggressively pushing apps because apps are more profitable, which in turn trains users to expect apps.
Sorry, there are by faaaar not as much useable mobile websites than crappy mobile websites - most mobile websites are not really optimized, more like "just let us deploy some custome mobile CSS and people will use it" style
Companies with poor quality mobile websites also usually have poor quality apps.
The website can be objectively bad, but still better than the app experience.
My company corporate card requires an app because it has an Authenticator to access the website. I tried the ole “but I only have a flip phone” and they said there was no other option. The bastards forced my hand.
So they issued you a company provided phone for this work specific functionality?
YES! Immense waste of money. But I’m one out of hundreds that avoided a corporate iPhone for years. I hate it.
You haven't confirmed WHY they have a flip phone.
If you're using a flip phone in this day and age, then it's not about the money.
There are authenticator extensions for web browsers.
Unapproved by my IT.
I'm old. I use my phone for as much as I can, but if something isn't optimized for that screen, i will definitely use a large screen instead of suffering through the crap. As I said, I'm old - too old to be frustrated by shit software. Also, I prefer web apps to downloading native, with few exceptions. I don't want or need a lot of native apps.
Young people are the ones who claim they are most likely to abandon a purchase if they have to install an app: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/02/15/91-of-u...
I’d be happy to use the app if they didn’t suck. The websites have more info and the browser is more capable by default. Like by default I can select any text I see, an address to copy into a calendar, a phone number to send to someone else, a name I want to paste into a search engine. an app is the opposite, by default nothing is selectable and I’m at the mercy of the nearly universally bad UX designer’s whims
Even on mobile I find the requirement for app installation to be an irritating requirement. Many of these mobile apps are much larger than they need to be, and clutter the user experience. Throw in excessive push notifications, and in many cases I would like to just go to a website for services I use infrequently.
One thing that is useful to remember is that if you ask AI for help on using some app, it will likely refer to the mobile UI instead of the web UI. I find it annoying that sometimes there are features that are only available in the mobile UI.
It's worth mentioning that in many cases there is also the incentive to get away from Google's stranglehold on incoming traffic. Every app install is a path to your product that does not go through Google's SEO or SEM funnel.
I still remember when everyone was saying the only way to access a service would be through its AOL keyword.
There is still no better interface than the command line.
I'm not sure about that. Kids around here seem to be learning to use a word processor (MS or Google), slide builder (MS, Google or Canva), search engine, as well as many educative apps on laptops at school starting from about age 8. Computers are not alien to them.
I am spoiled by big screen and tmux, I objectively cannot work with small screens any more.
I can tolerate chatting with a gateway agent, but that only last for maybe a single hour before I seriously need to vet all of the work that it and the underlying horde of agents has done.
> Most of folks on HN here are much older than todays "first customers" of 16y/17/18
17yo here, I know that I might be a bit of an exception here but atleast within my privacy conscious friend circle, I feel like they prefer websites more than apps and I feel like that plays an impact, (Obviously this might make a difference as well that for some of my generation, they only use phone so phone applications feel more intuitive to them)
I used to say to my elder brother that I wish to make websites not apps if I do because websites are more portable etc., but he said that websites are hard to monetize etc. rather than apps which are easier to monetize. I think that one of the reasons is also that app are easily monetized and this has become a norm to many people outside of HN/privacy-conscious sphere in general.
I really wanted to make f-droid applications sometime ago but I don't know Java and I really love how easy it is to make an applicaation in golang/python/any lang in desktops usually but I tried making an tauri android rust application from my desktop Linux and it was really frustrating, I feel like there are some very low hanging fruits privacy win where open source tools can be converted into just bare minimum-ly good UI/UX android/ios apps (which works) and be published to something like f-droid.
> I feel like they prefer websites more than apps
The fact that you are here on HN tells me: You and your friends are tech savy, most in your age are not :-)
Edit: Regarding monetization -> yes, either carrier billing (if available) or just by iTunes account is much much easier and higher conversion, just becaues of the fact that people do not have to remember their payment details :-D
I mentioned privacy savvy friends because most of my friends aren't privacy savvy :D
I can only count two (one offline, my former classmate/friend who we studied together for 11 years from KG to 10th grande) and some other people
I have convinced my same offline friend I mentioned to use Linux, specifically hyprland so its a win :D
> most in your age are not :-)
So I agree in that sense. To be honest. I am saying out of all my friend/peer/former classmate circle, only 1-2 people are some that I consider to be privacy conscious.
this where i think any claims that an iphone is not a full computing experience as justification for disallowing freedom on it to build and run your own software as you see fit as a bit ridiculous.
Agree. Also depends on nature of experience you want to consume/deliver. There are somethings i've slowly to come to prefer an app for, but it's been overtime.
The generation conflict doesn't justify to permanently bug me with "install our app, it's awesome". It ends up with terrible UX.
I saw a television advert the other day that specifically called out Millennials and how, yes, you can book a vacation from your phone and you're going to be okay, dad.
I think, "I'm not downloading your app" is of course a perfectly fine perspective. I rarely do. And blogging about it is playing one's role in the techno-cultural tug-of-war. But I'm consciously aware that I'm in the dying minority and the world is changing regardless of how much I choose to yell at the clouds.
Sure, I can book on the smartphone!
But its super uncomfortable! :-)
And: Typing - I learnt in school to type perfectly with 10 fingers, on a smartphone only using my thumb is just too slow
Right?!
How can I cross reference things and check deals and copy paste to my spreadsheet on a phone!
I feel like you can do these things but I’m very skeptical that people aren’t worse off by doing it on a phone (when they have the choice)
>I saw a television advert the other day that specifically called out Millennials and how, yes, you can book a vacation from your phone and you're going to be okay, dad.
I wonder when dynamic pricing will switch from booking on phones being more expensive because you're most likely in a hurry to booking on desktop being more expensive because you're old and have more money to spend. Did that already happen?
I think what most people don't get is that an app is a gateway to get way more personal data of the user than the browser. I'm distrustful of any "app only" service for this reason. I think the article goes into more detail about other good reasons. What you're suggesting isn't a talking point because it's not pertinent.
This isn't about a user's age, or mobiles. You can use Firefox on your smartphone. It's about digital literacy in terms of security and privacy. No matter how old you are, you do have to be taught that you're the product of these services, not just the customer. You have to be taught why that matters and how to combat it.
That's an interesting mindset, since those 30+ tech savvy millennials are the ones that actually still have some money to spend left on apps and similar crap.
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 notifications
2. When I want to use local files
PWAs were a cute experiment and they never took off, and even the vibe coders chose to vibe code native apps over half-baked PWAs.
There you go.
PWAs were more than an experiment - they were even mentioned in Apple keynotes (IIRC). And sandboxing was every bit as stable as website sandboxing.
They were killed because app store operators realized they bypassed an ability to police payments that could not be monitored and (effectively) taxed.
This was a technology that could have been successful in any environment where a merchant's freedom-to-request-direct-payment was protected. In such an environment, it would have shifted incentives that apps now become a burden on developers as well as on Apple and Google's review processes, and PWAs would flourish.
But that's not the environment we were in! And arguably, even post Epic's litigation, we aren't fully.
"The grandmas are too stupid to learn" but now it's the young people who are too dumb to figure out computers. So, I guess my generation is the only one that will ever figure out the Internet? Seems dumb.
This is true and goes further: There is no understanding of "the Web." For folks who "went online" and "surfed on the Internet" in the 90ies the whole thing with Internet addresses and the way a browser works are normal. For people gaining their experience on a phone the app icon on the home screen is the starting point to the individual offering.
Companies however exploit that and instead of just putting the icon on the home screen provide an app which allows more tracking, preventing ad blockers, avoiding the user from browsing elsewhere.
For me apps are limiting (tabbed browsing, ad blocker, ... are essential for anything serious), but others don't have that experience.
Hall of shame:
* Reddit won't let you read "unreviewed" content on mobile web (but will on desktop web)
* PayPal won't let you pick your 5% rewards category, or set up balance auto-replenish without their app
* Robinhood Banking won't let you see your credit card statement or pay your balance without their app
* Instagram won't let you share posts as stories without their app
* SeatGeek won't let you attend events without their app (no will call, mailed tickets, print at home, or mobile web)
How about an 81-year-old Dodgers fan who has held season tickets for 50 years, and doesn't even own a smartphone, who can no longer order the traditional book of season tickets: https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/dodgers-fan-printed...
Linkedin is the worst offender of them all. My feeds don't get updated for days when I use the web mobile version and I start seeing new posts only when I switch to desktop mode (switching to mobile shows the same old feed). They also don't even let you reply to comment replies or see reactions. They even scroll you all the way to the top if you dismiss their annoying "linkedin is better on app" pop-up just to punish you for not using their app. I'll never install apps of these companies that are actively hostile towards those that don't want to be constantly spied on by them.
They are so paranoid against scraping or someone building automations on top of their app they don't want you to have, that they are willing to make their actual application borderline unusable for the power users who would actually be willing to pay for their first party upsells and features.
It's infuriating. I have literally tried all of their paid products in various forms (they are expensive but the value is clearly there if you're a business). If only they invested as much in making them actually good as they did in preventing you from using extensions or other tools to implement the features they can't or won't, I'm sure they'd get a lot more business.
A counter example, Bank of America app don’t have functionality to do ACH transfer natively, you can only do it on the web app.
But this may be on purpose by Bank of America.
> SeatGeek won't let you attend events without their app (no mailed tickets, will call, print at home, or mobile web)
Wow. I guess it's been a few years since I've used SeatGeek but this is news to me. Stuff like this and MSG's facial scanning regime (I'm sure the venues are all doing it to differing extents) make me not even want to bother with big concerts. Club shows are almost always a better time, anyways.
Instagram has had both significant mobile only features, and desktop only features.
old.reddit.com
I've been on reddit since the beginning. If they kill old.reddit, I'm gone.
Red reader is another option to make reddit usable.
https://github.com/QuantumBadger/RedReader
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 by 10x, and app users have way better metrics that website users.
It's pretty interesting, but as a website owner, having an app is valuable.
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 combination of OS and browser.
This is a lot of friction for the dev, and it's not clear to an average user what a PWA is. But they are familiar with, and for better or worse, trust, the App store. If I didn't know what a PWA and a site said "open menu and click on 'install!'" I'd be very wary of following those instructions!
I think Android and iOS should provide some sort of hook between the app store and PWAs before they really start to catch on.
[delayed]
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.
Besides users being more familiar with apps in the past, PWAs are still kneecapped in some subtle ways to make them want apps. I wish PWAs were the norm, so much easier.
SaasS or one-time? Did people pay via native App Store integration? Or pay via the desktop website? App price? Answers would be super helpful. Thanks!
I had a doctor tell me that I had to buy an Android or iOS phone (I own neither) and install their new app, or they would be unable to continue seeing me as a patient.
Found a new doctor, because anyone that thinks this way I do not trust my heath to.
Absolutely no one will make me own a cell phone or install corpo spyware. It is still actually a choice.
That's my stance as well. Unless the website is completely broken or the devs force me to download the app by blocking features on the website I prefer the web.
With responsive design becoming mainstream I'm fine with using my browser for 90% of my internet work. In some cases like Google docs it's painful to use the web version so I just use the app.
EDIT: I wish they'd add a console to mobile web browsers though.
> the website is completely broken or the devs force me to download the app by blocking features on the website
for me, this is signal that i wasn't supposed to be visiting that resource in the first place
Yep. If someone is trying to make you do something, or stop doing something, or buy something, your first question should always be "Why?".
Why would someone try to force me off of my browser (that has ad-blocking and tracker-blocking mitigations) and on to a locked-down app that may want permission to run in the background, display notifications, access my files or camera, etc?
Maybe it really is to "improve my experience"... yeah, right.
Yeah, crippling your website in order to force users to download an app that may be able to access for of a user's data, is a clear sign that there are people you don't want to do business with.
There are several sites I use regularly for which I refuse to install the app. There are a lot more sites that I visit only occasionally because someone links to it, and that site immediately wants me to download the app and refuses to show me the content that was linked to. Fuck off with that.
> Unless the website is completely broken or the devs force me to download the app by blocking features
That's already the norm.
As a developer, I resent having to go beg for permission for getting my app published. It just rubs me the wrong way to have to play approval roulette with some bored jerk working for Apple or Google. I've had both reject things that were previously alright, then weren't, and then were again.
I default to building web applications. Actually getting people to install your special app is in any case a race to the bottom. Some will, most won't. It's onboarding friction. If you can shave a few steps of your onboarding process, the chance that somebody comes out the other end is simply higher.
As a user, I rarely install apps to begin with and frankly the appeal of "native" is limited to well guarded APIs into jealously magical device capabilities that phones have that most applications don't actually need. I know how the sausage is made and there just isn't that much there.
Same. My app is a PWA. Most users won’t install a PWA and won’t repeatedly navigate to a website so it limits the reach. But the advantage is that I can deploy instantly. I love when someone sends a bug report and I can tell them it’s fixed ten minutes later. Pretty great, compared to “it’ll be fixed in there business days” you get with the iOS app store
100% agree. I'm not a big fan of apps being distributed through stores owned by big corporations.I had faith in Fdroid but sadly it hasn't taken off.
I also think app development requirements are too high. Just to compile your app and run the build process you need a very high end computer. I could never do it with my modest laptop and therefore gravitated towards web programming and more backend work. Thankfully I avoided all the pain of building apps and getting them approved by store owners. But I do have respect for people who have to deal with this bs.
It may sound too opinionated and may hurt some feeling but I don't like android at all. I think it sucks. But I have little choice. So I grin and bear.
> Unless the website is completely broken or the devs force me to download the app by blocking features on the website I prefer the web.
Facebook seems to be in this game. Constant notifications to install the app, and as well increasingly degraded experience in the web version (both desktop and mobile).
often the blocked features are specifically blocked on the mobile web (i.e. on your desktop they won't make you get your phone out to use the app instead), so forcing the webpage to desktop mode helps.
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 for a dozen use cases and web for the remaining one million use cases), but that's orthogonal to the fact of which one is actually better.
Edit: And to be clear, I'm not referring to cases where the web app is purposefully restricted or injected with dark patterns to drive users to native. Even if you ignore those cases, this pattern still stands in my experience. Though, that doesn't mean there is no indirect quality bias, e.g. more money spent on the native devs than the web devs.
Yea, webapps (even PWAs) still can't compete with native apps when it comes to responsiveness, but I still don't know why. I've yet to see even a demo PWA that passes the "native turing test" where I can't tell whether it's a native app or not.
Even native apps that were built with cross-platform frameworks feel a bit "off" sometimes.
WASM apps get around this for the most part but there's so many more layers between the app and the hardware for web apps compared to native, plus it's javascript. And a lot of the cross-platform frameworks use a javascript bridge so that becomes the bottleneck. Kotlin/Compose multiplatform is fast on everything.
Can't relate. Except for Google Maps and Docs, I can't think of a native app that couldn't be a WebView. Hell, most of them are anyway!
The worst kind is French banking apps or IBKR app: many features are native, but then because of some weird tech debt or incompetent tech leadership, they'll sometimes show you web pages in a shitty, slow, completely different UI-wise built-in WebView for mundane tasks like downloading a PDF statement.
I feel like its because other than the user, the people involved have a benefit to running native instead of as a webapp. The phone OS companies get their percent of apps developed in their stores and the app developers get better access to your data to resell. Apple in particular has been really hostile to webapps.
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.
> when an app is available on both web and native mobile, the native mobile version is significantly better
Did you read the article? One of the author's main points is this is a deliberate result by vendors.
I've found that the apps often just entirely miss out features that are available in the web versions. That's why I don't have the GitHub app.
The site that irks me the most here is New York Times. Opening an article in the mobile browser often has a toast over the bottom third of the article to open it in their app for "a better experience". I struggle to think how nytimes isn't a perfect fit for a site over an app. The only frustrating experience I have with the web version that would be better in the app is not seeing that that pop-up.
Having signed up for the New York Times recently, they're surprisingly hostile towards new customers:
- Autoplaying videos on the front page with no pause button. I expect video from CNN, but not a newspaper. That's not what I'm there for.
- The send you many "introductory" emails with no way to unsubscribe.
I mostly gave up on the front page, but it's marginally useful for reading the occasional article linked to from elsewhere.
I recently signed up for a membership (you can now supposedly cancel without making a phone call; WaPo has officially died in darkness) and this has been driving me mad, too.
If I'm paying for your service, you should not be degrading my experience using UX anti-patterns in any way, for any reason.
Also they only have dark mode in the app, even though the app is (or was) clearly not native anyway.
NYT occasionally uses fancy interactive articles. They have games, and other things that are better on the app. The NYT app is actually very good
For games I agree that an app makes sense (though I think at least the games I used to play were in a separate nyt games app). For interactive articles, I've not seen anything I couldn't use fine in my browser, but in theory I wouldn't mind covering up the interactive part with a "Open in the app for a better experience" button (similar to what YouTube does on the video portion of the page). Where I encounter this though is in standard, text-heavy articles that maybe include a photo or two.
I assume the reason they are pushing me to the app is that it benefits them not me (longer dwell times, maybe easier tracking for behavior/ads), and that is precisely why I want to stay in the browser. Covering up a good portion of the article and preventing me from scrolling until I click the tiny link to decline is hostile and is the only thing degrading the experience on the website for most articles I read.
Every time I end up trying an app for things like this, I end up missing tabs.
There is no reason they can’t have a native tab navigator. It kills me that Google maps app doesn’t have tabs.
Web browser is a sandbox by default. Worst a sketchy site does is eat a tab, less if you run an adblocker. Native app? Background processes, hardware ID shenanigans, your contacts, location. The whole buffet.
> 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, too (on mobile OSes like Android and iOS). When you download it, you can check a hash that you can (if you want to) compare with a friend to see if they got the same app. With an app, there is intermediary (the "app store") that would need to collude with the developers to send a backdoor just for you, and even then you would still have the app binary as proof.
That's always a question I have with "secure" web services: if you use ProtonMail, you trust that Proton doesn't send you a web page that leaks your key. But if you trust Proton for that, what's the point of the end-to-end encryption? When you use the Signal app, the whole idea is that you don't have to trust Signal for the end-to-end encryption, at all.
Apps can download code too, and often do
>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 download it, you can check a hash that you can (if you want to) compare with a friend to see if they got the same app.
That isn't what "sandboxed" means, it has nothing to do with checking hashes. And no, mobile apps are not really sandboxed, they have full access to your mobile device once you install it and give it access - and let's be real, most people are just going to blindly click "allow" for anything the app requests after installing an app.
>With an app, there is intermediary (the "app store") that would need to collude with the developers to send a backdoor just for you, and even then you would still have the app binary as proof.
You keep referring to "backdoor", and I don't think you really know what that means.
>That's always a question I have with "secure" web services: if you use ProtonMail, you trust that Proton doesn't send you a web page that leaks your key. But if you trust Proton for that, what's the point of the end-to-end encryption? When you use the Signal app, the whole idea is that you don't have to trust Signal for the end-to-end encryption, at all.
That isn't how any of this works. The main value proposition of Signal is that we do trust its end-to-end encryption. Protonmail sending a "web page" that "leaks your key"? WTF?
> your contacts, location. The whole buffet.
It's not like an app is getting those without your knowledge, and many times it's useful for an app to have your contacts or location...
The weather app I used sent location data from pretty much everyone who didn't manually go through the effort to opt out to some shady American data broker that got hacked. Most people using the app gave it location permissions because of its ability to warn for rain coming to your precise location with decent accuracy.
Nobody wanted to share their location with these data brokers, but thanks to underfunded privacy watchdogs, you have no idea what happens to any app that you give any kind of permission.
I'd argue it's absolutely ludicrous to give _other people's information_ up to an app (or website). Your contacts contain names, phone numbers, potentially photos and addresses of _other people_.
One of the most enraging things about life since 2005-ish is that no matter how private and careful I am, it doesn't even matter because every other inconsiderate fool I know and interact with will HAPPILY let some random company have access to THEIR contacts--which includes me--in order to play Farmville for a month until they get bored of that and offer up my private information to the next bullshit ad company that asks for their contacts.
It used to frustrate me that people didn't care about their own privacy, because I genuinely didn't want evil people to hurt them. But, it's even more angering that people don't have the common decency to consider whether their friends and family would want them sharing their phone numbers, email addresses, photos of them, etc.
Famously, that's how shadow profiles got created for Facebook and LinkedIn and many others.
But most of the time it’s really, really not.
Almost never is it useful for an app to have my contacts or location.
That said only on some platforms is it possible to stop a native app from getting them.
Android and iOS both require user permission for apps to access contacts or location.
Are there other platforms that can't even manage this basic level of user protection?
As long as the application is made aware of the permissions and can prevent functioning when they get denied, that doesn't really help much. It's the choice between getting mugged or never leaving the house.
The ability to deny permissions without the app noticing or filling it with fake data doesn't exist on either system.
Yes, Windows.
Not without my knowledge or your knowledge sure. But I'd bet there's significant percentage of the population who is tired of thinking about permission popups and just hit yes yes YES to get the App started. Especially if it forces retries before going forward.
I think they're counting on these popups wearing people out.
After GDPR made these incessant annoying cookie popups mandatory, I just robotically click any button to dismiss it as fast as possible. Some website could probably write "Give root access" in that box and I'd probably click it without thinking.
bias disclosure: i used to do Android dev and kinda hate the browser personally.
i don’t get this take. “Web browser is sandbox by default”. sure, it has to do the rail grind with a rake to access system calls, but in a modern system apps are also sandboxed, especially on a smartphone or when downloaded with a managed app service. the OS gives you the ability to specify permissions, although to what degree depends on your provider. your browser _obviously_ also has the permissions you’re talking about. and now we have introduced yet more vectors in the form of cookies where web _applications_ can track activity _between applications_ with that just kinda being part of the spec, and it totally neuters the protections that the OS gives you because once you configure Firefox to get your location for Open Maps, now you’ve totally given control to your location permissions for _all web apps_ to yet another corporate driven point of failure.
don’t even get me started on the UI mess.
my tinfoil hat theory is that the browser is pushed by mostly bad actors trying to get data, while anyone providing a real user experience has a nice native app.
press F for my reputation.
Good night, sweet reputation and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
Seriously though, I appreciate this perspective. While I prefer using a browser whenever possible, I'm well aware of modern fingerprinting techniques. But I didn't know about permission "sharing" between apps in the same browser. Thanks!
Privacy and security have always been a game of cat and mouse. Doesn't seem like that's going to change anytime soon.
Location can also be extracted by JS on a website with these geo functions, IIRC?
Requires permission.
so does an app
Exactly. The only app-specific abuse I can think of is apps that run in the background (the "don't kill apps" advice from Apple is factually wrong), Android where apps get push by default, or apps that just hope the user will grant broad permissions that web can't do.
Apps have to request your permission for contacts and location. iOS is really good about not giving bad permissions to apps without user being asked for consent.
Web browsers all support those facilities, with less obvious transparency and control than iOS and Android apps
Using flatpaks or mobile apps, you can view the sandbox permissions and adjust them if you have to.
I think it's more than that. It's a walled garden. If you want to leave go somewhere else, it's further away than just a tab. That increases stickiness.
For example, let's say I'm an airline. I don't want you in the browser, where you're going to have my competitors in the adjacent tabs. I want you in my app, where all you see is my version of the world. (I mean, yes, you can have multiple apps open, too, and switch between them. It's still a bit more friction than moving between tabs. Or maybe that's just my mental model, and young people see apps as just another kind of tab?)
Unless you use it several times a day, downloading an "app" just gets in the way. You should never have to download an "app" for a one-time use.
We never went back to the restaurant in Cupertino where the table QR code tried to force downloading an app that onboarded you into a food delivery service. That restaurant was treating on-site customers as delivery orders with a very short delivery distance. The food wasn't very good, either.
Yep. If your product needs me to install an app for a one-off thing, you've probably already lost me.
The crazy part is how many teams still treat the web as the demo and the app as the “real” product. For a lot of stuff it's the opposite now.
I know there are edge cases, but most of the time “download our app” just means “please care way more about our product than you currently do.”
Browsers don't allow notifications if you don't have the site open. Browser ads can get blocked by browser extensions. Browsers make it harder to have an icon for a site/service directly on the home screen. Browsers make it harder to get extensive permissions. Browsers allow content to displayed without first being run through an approval process.
For companies these are all downsides but for me they are all upsides. It really is us vs them when it comes to apps vs browsers. The only reason they offer websites at all is out of fear of losing a big chunk of users.
Browsers most definitely do allow for notifications if you don't have the site open. I use that feature all the time and it works perfectly.
Google Chrome does seem to catch spam sites that abuse notification permissions to send ads, though, so for a certain category of crapware websites aren't an option.
Darn as I wrote that I doubted myself.
This is my stance as well, but keep in mind that a lot of people have the opposite preference.
They didn't grow up with the world wide web. They only started using technology when Android and iPhone was popular. They only know Whatsapp, Youtube, TikTok. They're not used to using the browser.
There's a meme that "Gen Z Kids Don't Understand How File Systems Work" [0]
So, it'll depend on your target audiences.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30253526
There's a reason the "small web" is having a revival among these kids, because they increasingly haven't experienced a real web to begin with. Circa ~2010, the web effectively died in the mainstream since Google decided it wasn't worth showing. Platforms become a thing, and despite being web-based, are practically their own intranets that use the web as a cross platform zero install delivery platform
When you say "meme", it sounds like it might not be true. But, a few years ago I handed my stepson a USB flash drive with some files on it, he plugged it into his laptop and the very first thing he did was launch Google Chrome and then not have any clue what to do to access the files (it was a Windows laptop).
I will cast my vote for mobile websites over apps on phones. For personal choice reasons I have always had a "budget" phone with less memory and storage (and less cost) than a flagship phone. I also kept them running for years.
At the end of the cycle I can barely run the base phone let alone the menagerie of apps the world would like me to run.
I have opted out of app only service such as a Loyalty programs that forced me to transfer point from a partner only if I installed an app on my phone. They have enough info on me from purchase, they don't need more. (I even offer my card to strangers in the grocery cash if they did not have the loyalty card so they would get a discount and I would get a list of products I never buy in my loyalty list. Its a small, willful act of rebellion )
I decided to operate on a older budget phone for a while when my phone died outside of my planned budget and timeline for replacing it. By far the greatest problem was managing storage space. Except for core productivity apps, if a website option wasn't offered I was never going to be one of their users.
> I will cast my vote for mobile websites over apps on phones. For personal choice reasons I have always had a "budget" phone with less memory and storage (and less cost) than a flagship phone. I also kept them running for years.
Then, unfortunately, apps are a better choice for such phones (unless the app itself is just a thin webview wrapper). These days too many websites would fry a budget phone.
Obligatory: The Performance Inequality Gap https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-...
I also find that because the web version is worse in order to push you to download the app, it is a good way to not get sucked into endlessly scrolling. Get in, do what you need, and get out because of bad experience.
The sad reality is people _want_ apps and the people paying for web/apps to be built also want apps (even before we talk about tracking/ad-blocking reasons).
I too love the web, but throughout my career the idea of web-first/web-only has been DOA. There is some level of perceived prestige from having an app.
I've told this story countless times but on multiple occasions I've written cross-platform apps using web technology. Throughout the development process, I have urged or even begged the stakeholders to try out the web-based version on their phone. It's almost identical. You just see the browser chrome in the web version. And yet it's not until I provide native builds that some people will even bother to look at.
I provide web interfaces as part of the package but I could probably skip that and no one would bat an eye (I won't though, it's practically free to do that alongside the native apps and I prefer it).
There are a handful of things you can only do, or only do well, in an app so I do understand that argument. Also, I find some PWA-advocates to clearly not be living in reality: "You can do X in a PWA" - only if you hate yourself and enjoy silly limitations that clients do not and will not understand or care about ("Just make it work, an app can do this!").
> The sad reality is people _want_ apps
I went to a gas station and they had someone offering to pay customers if they'd install their app. Discount gas for X months. No one seemed interested.
People do want apps for things they do quite often, but that's mostly social media or video games. The hassle of install and account setup simply exceeds the benefit of rarely used apps.
Why is it sad to want an app?
I've more than once had a company reply to a bug report about their website, "did you try using the app instead." To which I usually reply, "why would I trust your site with direct access to my phone when you can't make a website that works correctly?"
That's just my thinking... I try not to install apps most of the time, I don't want them to have access or even the greater chance at breaking security/isolation. On a similar vein, I still can't believe that LinkedIn didn't get permanently banned from Apple and Google stores when they broke security to spy on emails.
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 app is actually a pretty big decision.
And if the only option is an app, then I'm not interested in your product / store / company.
If the app can be replaced by a website the app is useless. The web is not as powerful as an app and you will miss out on emerging tech. Facebook doesn't actually need an app, but I can not unlock my door, tap to pay, or connect to a specific selection of speakers in my home on a website.
100% of the emerging tech you listed either allows for a hacking / warrant / data leakage risk or is else so decadent I don't know how to respond. I don't want any of it.
Then all your interactions on the computer in your pocket that is more powerful than the computers that took us to the moon are just a bunch of JSON and REST calls. I will locally map out my home in 3D for renovations while you let social media dictate how you use your computer.
I am with you here.. there is actually name for why companies do this. They are not pushing app because it is better, but because browser tab cannot lock you in.
Mapped it out here if curious - https://vectree.io/c/enshittification-how-digital-platforms-...
Those are valid arguments but I like apps better, for other reasons. Mostly security.
When I use, say, the Signal app:
- I can audit it, download it or even compile it myself from sources
- Once I have installed it, Signal doesn't get to change it "in my back"
- As a result, I don't need to trust Signal for the end-to-end encryption, which is the whole point of end-to-end encryption.
When I use a webapp, say ProtonMail:
- Every time I load the webapp, it is downloaded from the Proton servers. Even if I once stop to audit it, next time I load it, it may totally be a different codebase (that e.g. adds a backdoor, potentially just for me, and just this one time).
- I need to trust that Proton doesn't inject a backdoor to extract my key, then end-to-end encryption is useless. I could also trust Proton to not read my emails, right?
- If a webapp is served by a CDN, I have to trust that the CDN doesn't tamper with it. Actually Meta has an extension made for verifying that for WhatsApp Web. The extension is a bulky way to make sure that you loaded what Meta wanted you to load (i.e. that Cloudflare did not tamper with it), but it DOES NOT ensure that Meta did not inject a backdoor just for you, just this time.
I asked the same question a few years ago, and the answer I arrived at is that the app has, by default, more permissions (not only technical but also conventional) to collect data, send push notifications, and otherwise harass the user.
iOS apps have to request permission from user to send push and for basically every other problematic permission.
I'm only familiar with Android, and it bothers me that I cannot exert complete sandbox control over every app.
I think I should be able to completely cut it off from the network and/or local storage; prevent it from running even though it is installed; and prevent it from having any personalizing information about me, my movements, my network connectivity status or patterns, my device usage (i.e. screen on versus locked, any proxy like battery state of charge), etc.
I am very reluctant to install apps because I see that the platform is designed for needs and a mindset that is not my own. I do not see it as essential or preferable that an app be able to monetize my usage or really gather any telemetry at all.
Sometimes apps lack the features of the web versions. For example, I wanted to translate a document on Android. When I was trying to open Google translator website, the system was redirecting me to the app. Unfortunately, I couldn't see document translation feature in this app. Could still open the website in incognito mode. This is really maddening me.
Strava is an example where to enjoy all the features of the platform you have to use the app for some and the browser for others. Neither has all of them.
While I sympathize with the author, and feel the same way, I think Apple/Google have some blame here. They make certain simple things only possible in the apps, because the APIs are not exposed via the web.
Notifications is a big obvious one. Not sure if they've changed it since I last looked into it, but having an app installed was the only way to send a notification to someone for a long time.
> having an app installed was the only way to send a notification
that used to be true, especially on ios. but web push has existed there for a while now for home screen web apps.
so that explains some of the history... doesn't really excuse today's habit of shipping the web as a second-class client.
Do people allow website notifications? One argument I have heard raised in favour of mobile apps is that people are more likely to give an app notification permission.
Nah: https://www.magicbell.com/blog/using-push-notifications-in-p...
Reg. Notifications:
Isnt there are similar feature in iOS browser as in Firefox these "desktop notifications" that some webpages request?
Apple still doesnt give you the right dimensions for a page that switches between portrait and landscape.
That's one of the main reasons to not install an app. Extremely few apps are able to limit their notifications to actually transactional events. As soon as they have the capability they start spamming away.
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.
> some web UIs nowadays are so bad and the app so good that I'm not sure this always holds true.
This is by design to force you install the app. Most of these days, I just treat it as a signal to neither use the app nor the website.
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 mobile app doesn't have all these issues.
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.
I'm especially angry that if you go to reddit.com in a mobile browser, it will sometimes fully block you from certain subreddits (not just NSFW ones) and tell you that you can only access it from the app. Meanwhile, you can easily visit the exact same subreddit by typing old.reddit.com/r/whatever. The outright lying bothers me so much. I refuse to be desensitized to lying just because everyone is lying all the time; it's still really wrong, and they really should be ashamed of themselves.
reddit browser behavior got me into using frontends for various sites, such as redlib dot privacyredirect dot com
there are surprisingly many of them for pretty much every social media website.
Their mobile app sucks too. They just killed /r/all recently.
you can launch it from a comment linking to r/All (with a as upper case) iirc. How long that'll still be available, I have no clue, but I like to imagine the devs who work on reddit realise how braindead of a decision removing it is but have to please the shareholders by removing any obvious access of it
I think they took the wrong signal from the people avoiding the default feed since it's filled with days-old posts you've already seen from subs you haven't joined.
you mean like in a way of "defending" the user from using the website and just go right away to the app?:)
Not really, more like "just pick whatever works, both usually suck"
If it's really "by design" then you are saying they have a staff of web developers who are told, "No, no, no... all that quality work you're capable of--don't do it. Here are some JIRA tickets to make the web site shitty and slow and eat the user's battery. Go implement them and make everything worse!"
What kind of sad, self-loathing software developer sits down and says "OK boss, whatever you say, boss, gonna go make it bad now..." I mean, I know to a lot of people, it's just a 9-5 and you do what your boss says, and "pride in your work" is not really a thing anymore, but come on. Who gets even a shred of satisfaction doing this?
I think a better explanation is just incompetence.
It's usually done in such small portions the developers don't know exactly what they're doing. That, or they've become so numb to it to not really care
Alternatively, they could just make the web UI good.
This isn't an alternative for the user (the person you're replying to).
I can't think of a web app that really feels like a (good) native one. For example, I would never use Google Calendar as a web app / Google Maps as a web app as they're far inferior IMHO
I used Home Assistant as a web app for years before deciding to download the companion app instead to give it access to my phone's sensors.
I used to care a lot about app designs feeling "native" but when I actually took inventory of the apps I use, I came to the conclusion that all app developers (including Apple and Google themselves) will force their own designs and theming into every app. The only exception seems to be coming from a bunch of open-source apps that don't have branding concerns to worry about.
With the realisation that most apps look and navigate must as bad as their website equivalent, I found it much easier to use web apps.
TurboTax, for all its faults is one of those where the desktop app is better than the webapp they keep pushing.
Unless it’s required (Starlink) or something I check often (not much this day), I don’t use the app version. I prefer grabbing my laptop and use the web version. But best is when there’s an API available so I can write my own tools.
My analog is something along the lines of "please build a small room in your house, closet-sized at first, but with enough room to grow to twice that as we add features, so we can give you the best possible temperature and weather information. Also, we need access to your full contacts so you can share how you feel about the weather more easily, with just a push! Also also, we need a hot microphone in your closet, so you can shop our umbrella store by just talking to our AI assistant! Also also also, your privacy is important to us."
It only needs to be "an app" if it is using hardware to do it's main job. There is never another reason to make it an app.
How much of the native app push is to bypass ad blockers? If you’re just using a browser plugin like AdGuard or uBO it can’t block in a dedicated app unless you replace it with AGH or PiHole, can’t help but wonder if that plays a role as well
The cookie/session isolation is underrated. Half the reason services push you to the app is because the mobile browser experience for juggling multiple web apps is genuinely bad — not because the web can't do it, but because nobody's made it comfortable. I got annoyed enough to put together a small webview manager that keeps a few web apps in tabs with separate cookies: https://github.com/theoden8/webspace_app (yes, it's written in flutter)
I've been running a video game collection site for years. The number one request I get from people is to build an app. I've worked so hard on making the mobile version of the site to be just as functional as the desktop version, and I don't really understand why people want an app over just using the web version. I sometimes wonder if I should just do it to see if I'm missing out on market share, but I don't really want to have to maintain two different user interfaces.
Similar situation here.
My take on it is that frequent users perceive apps as desktop launchers/shortcuts.
They don't care about the difference between app and web, per se, but the bookmarking situation in mobile browsers is awful (desktop too, honestly), and an app presents a convenient launcher for the service/site/data they want.
Adding a springboard launcher for a PWA is easy but still apparently more frictional than installing an app.
building and maintaining a simple webview app might be easier than you think.
if you ever end up making one im very very curious about how much market share that would gain
You could add features to make it a PWA and explain to users how to save it t their desktop. I used ProtonMail for years that way (I do not have a smartphone anymore, so no longer do so).
The restaurant QR menu situation is peak 'we installed an app for the app' energy. I scanned a code expecting a menu and instead got a Play Store redirect. Just let me see the food.
The worst offenders are services that literally work fine in mobile Safari but pop a banner saying 'for the best experience download our app' covering half the screen. The web version is already the app, you just painted a door on the wall.
> The restaurant QR menu situation is peak 'we installed an app for the app' energy. I scanned a code expecting a menu and instead got a Play Store redirect. Just let me see the food.
Now you've triggered me lol. At that point I'll ask for a physical menu, and leave if they don't have one. And no, I'm not going to look at my friend's phone. It's ridiculous!
I'm a huge supporter of the open web. However this issue was decided 16 year ago. If you recall the first push on smartphones were "web apps". Those sucked. The bottom line is that native apps provide a better user experience and that is why they became prevalent 16 years ago.
I feel the same. Take the Telegram app as an example: it's so slick, responsive. Even a simple button click doesn't work well on the web due to the long response time between clicking and seeing a response.
Additionally, apps allow for good offline functionality (for times when you're not near a cell tower), which I feel is important even with ubiquitous internet access in the 1st world.
The solution I feel is to have better sandboxing functionality in mobile Operating Systems.
I would be fine having an app for everything if:
1. Phone storage wasn't paid at an absurdly premium price. Sometimes the option with just higher storage may be $300 more.
2. High speed Internet was available cheaply everywhere.
If I'm in a town in the middle of nowhere. I'm not going to use my expensive data plan (because in the US mobile data is extremely expensive compared to EU) To download a 500Mb app that will take 5 minutes to download because the Internet is slow just to pay for parking
For some reason, app sizes seem to have exploded, but especially on iPhones. Maybe it's the fact cheap Androids are still being used but I was surprised to find out how many 50MB Android apps were in 200MB iPhone apps.
When it took ages to download the same app to my work iPhone as I was downloading to my normal Android I thought there was something wrong with the iPhone at first, but it was literally spending five times the data to download what seemed to be an identical app.
There's something to be said for downloading a 50MiB app to save yourself from downloading 1MiB every time you pull out the website, but with modern app sizes, things are getting ridiculous.
Folding phones are the big/small screen compromise. One you fold, nobody goes back.
The samsung fold7 in particular is the same thickness/weight as slab phones, but unfolds to become a tablet. Please don't vote if you haven't held one. The compromise is cost, durability (dust, water), some battery life & some camera. Huge gains in productivity and night-to-day difference consuming video and photos. Google Maps FTW.
> durability (dust, water)
Not just dust and water but folding screens are plastic with a mohs hardness of 2-3, as opposed to normal phones with glass screens which are a 6-7 hardness. I like having phones that can't be permanently damaged by pressing my fingernail a little hard into it.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hgg4YEdPak&t=140s
Another example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uS90jakOuw&t=107s
I also can trivially replace the screen on my regular phone at home, whereas I'd have to get a folding phone professionally repaired for many hundreds of dollars.
Still runs the kneecapped mobile os
I will not download them on a train, I will not download them on a plane, I will not download them in a box, I will not download them with Firefox. I will not download them Sam I am.
On one hand, I don’t know why startups make apps. It requires more devs and keeping everything at parity is tough with desktop, iOS, android, mobile web. Seems pragmatic to just simplify and use web.
But on the other hand, I’d love to pay you $0.99 if it meant I could get an ad free version of your little widget and I’m not sure how to do that easily with web
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 do the same with discord. Idk why the app is so huge
I find it so annoying that certain apps update every single time I open them. Why can’t they build something more stable?
Like you touched on, they're just trying to get you to make a small commitment to being in their walled garden and then they add on a bunch of other things
Agree with the article. I’m increasingly jaded by the state of the web.
Something that has been happening for a long time on iOS Safari that I only recently realized: pinch to zoom on sites like Reddit, instagram, shopping sites, and many others cause what I’m calling “website seizures.” Where I try to zoom in and half the time the page reloads completely or triggers a reload but ends up throwing an error.
Ouch! Netscape 4.7 reloaded...
I don't understand it from the app developers point of view. Having to pay app store cuts over basic card processing fees. I understand the appeal of access to a market, like selling on eBay gets you eyeballs. But once you have a customer using their app, what does the app give you that a PWA doesn't unless you need access to specific sensors / file system access patterns etc?
As an app developer it comes down to the full access to phone APIs and the smoothest app experience. The more biased opinion is rooted in preference for the native language over web languages. And I recognize this is an opinion that is self-preservation in nature but it is what it is.
But I'll also say some apps don't really need to be apps (like ordering food from one specific store) but I won't complain about having those apps if it is a convenience.
The vast majority of apps come from companies where the app developer has little to no say in how things work. Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, Uber, Ebay, Shein, etc are certainly not paying Apple 30% for purchases made inside the app. They also operate at a scale where they get bulk rates from MC/Visa on processing fees.
For years, Apple has muffled PWAs under a pillow. No one knows that you can add them to your homescreen or how that unlocks the possibility of getting push notifications. You also lose any stored data when you go from Safari to an homescreen web app.
How do you add them? I am using https://actualbudget.org as a Safari page, and it works surprisingly well when "off network" - but a button on the home screen would be nicer.
I guess this is by intention since with a PWA you would have "near app experience" but for free?
I recently switched for m the developer mindset of build websites for everything to make apps if I can. My logic is that an app never needs to go back and forth with me, it's something the user can have without me managing hosting and constantly having a relationship with the user.
Don't you need a certain level of convincing for the average person to use a PWA?
Lock-in - and not even some evil thing; just if you're used to using the eBay app you're less likely to go somewhere else.
I think it's somewhat misguided, but companies gonna company.
Stop asking me for access to my contacts, microphone, location, or permission to send me 5 kinds of useless notifications.
This also skips over with some hand waving that a lot of mobile app uses cases simply can’t be replicated with web sites. Take gps or smart home control as two easy of the top of my head example the author skipped too.
Also the fact that people here would rather have their info stored in the cloud vs local on device is interesting.
I do mention cases where the browser model doesn't work, like accessing Lidar sensors. Just didn't want to bloat the post with too many examples. But I totally agree with you on this front: not everything can be done as a PWA.
I wish there was a version of this website that was simpler, more educated and that I could show to the "normies" who own business and insist on asking me to download their app (I'm looking at you, TKD school!). This one is too aimed at the cooks.
We're all here debating the friction of downloading apps versus the convenience of the mobile web, but we might be missing the bigger picture. Both are UI-heavy paradigms designed for humans to click things. In a few years, we won't care if a service has a slick React app or a native iOS build. We’ll just tell our AI agents: 'Book that flight' or 'Fix my billing issue,' and they’ll talk to the APIs directly. The era of 'interfaces for humans' is peaking; the era of 'headless services for agents' is just beginning. Interfaces are becoming a legacy tax.
Explanation and summarization without visual interactables is so much harder to do. A person can talk to an interface but I don't know how many people would like natural language back.
Maybe. You’ll need to overcome DoorDash not wanting to give up the UI as a chance to upsell services.
There is also the lack of support for bookmarks. I value the ability to reach a part I am interested in quickly.
When Chrome started supporting PWAs you couldn't bookmark the content at all. They seem to have fixed that now.
Yes, the TC is right and I completely agree, but we all know the reason for forcing users to install an app: retention, ARPU and other metrics grow for this audience, and push notifications also help with that.
My Google Chrome app is by far the most used app on my phone. If you catch me at a random moment on my phone, chances are I'm on Chrome.
Sometimes the mobile app experience is better than the mobile browser for me, though. Examples are Twitter, Spotify, Upwork, Google Keep Notes.
If I'm on my computer I don't even download the apps, I just use the browser. It just feels more convenient.
I haven't thought much about why they all feel good on my laptop browser while some apps offer better experience on mobile.
Edit: It's also why I keep procrastinating on getting into mobile app development. I just generally prefer web experience. With some exceptions as already stated here.
I take back my comment on Twitter being better on mobile apps. I just tried it on my mobile browser and it doesn't have that stupid bug (feature?) where you leave the detail page of a tweet and the app automatically takes you to the top and you miss where you were initially.
ios Native App > web app > android app > anything made with a cross platform toolkit like react native or flutter.
I would much prefer a really well-crafted ios Native App with extensive attention to detail than anything, even a web app made with similar detail (in most cases). And also ios apps are far more likely to receive that level of attention than just about anything else.
> a really well-crafted ios Native App with extensive attention to detail Which seems to becoming a rare thing
I've got an old-ish phone, so in most cases, I can't download your app even if I wanted to. You deliberately set your minimum iOS deployment version to be higher than what my phone can even install. So I have to go to your web site or just stop doing business with your ass. Just because your developers decided that developing for older phones is too hard to figure out, or it takes too much effort, and they'd rather just cut us off.
I think the blame is on Apple here, you can't support older devices even if you wanted to. (And it's the same on Android)
You can support older devices, but admittedly Apple does not make it super easy to find. The easy "happy path" in Xcode is to only support the most recent OS versions.
iirc even then there's a minimum that xcode will still deploy to. The only way to have an app work on older versions than that is to not update it at all
The Politico website on Android has this issue. Can't login so can't read articles. Had to download app, but would prefer web page.
I at times wonder if my life would be easier if I were not so stubborn and just installed every app suggested along the way.
It’s a little tough these days. With AI and scraping, running an open webapp/website is now more expensive than ever before. My friends and I have launched a product in the last few months and decided to focus on mobile first and wait to develop a webapp simply because we couldn’t feel we could optimize the costs of open webapp while we have so few resources.
How expensive can it be?
I just randomly looked at Railway and for $20 a month you get a whole lot. I've hosted many a web project (successful personal projects and enterprise projects alike) and I don't see a large barrier to entry on "hosting a website" here.
Blocking AI scrapers and crawlers is not a huge ordeal. Planning for a unicorn before just putting a product up isn't the way to go.
https://railway.com/pricing
> Blocking AI scrapers and crawlers is not a huge ordeal.
If you have content they want, then it is a huge ordeal. You can pay some one like CloudFlare to take care of it for you, but if you can't or won't make a deal with those types of companies, it's going to take up a significant chunk of your time.
Before AI I regularly consumed a larger international news aggregator ran by a single person.
Then with ChatGPT he had to enshittify his website with all these cloudflare capture stuff, making the site leeesssssssss fun to use; when complaining he mailed me that AI scrapers are slashing his servers
I trust the chrome sandbox and security more than a desktop or phone app.
This is especially true for dev tools. Engineers already have 20 browser tabs open with dashboards, CI/CD, docs, and logs. The last thing anyone wants is another Electron app eating RAM in the background. The best tools meet you where you already are.
An app could offer a more stable identifier compared to an in-browser guest session which might have its cookies cleared.
My gripe is how iOS allows these companies to constantly bug us to use their stupid apps. I ended up installing the NYTimes app, not because I use it, but just to shut it up. I switched to duck duck go because I was sick of being bugged to install chrome. How many times do I need to say no?
So that's how she feels about me?
I have it the other way around. I want local first app. Don’t want everything in the cloud apps.
Luckily there is choice :)
I take this to be mainly about cloud services that can/could just as well be used in the browser instead, and where installing the app doesn't really allow you to meaningfully use it offline anyway. It's largely orthogonal to the question of local apps vs cloud services.
I wish PWAs were more of a thing. That is actually what I'd use instead of installing a company app.
The author touches on this in the last section, but I'd reframe this a different way. The natural conclusion for a company who wants to funnel you to the app is, "the web version is a-OK? Let's make the web version worse."
I'd rather see this framed as, "if you don't have a high functioning web version, I don't need to use your service." Gimping my preferred medium will lose me as a customer. If enough people draw that line, "enshittifying" your web app should hurt your metrics, not help. That way maintaining a good web version is looked at as a long-term necessity, not a top of funnel.
If the elevator was invented today, use of it would require an app which demands access to one’s contacts and microphone, and has a rating of 1.4 stars.
Anecdotally had the axios maintainer used the Zoom desktop app, he'd be used to seeing the "Open this link in the app" prompt on the call page and less likely to fall for the scam upon not seeing the same prompt when following the phishing link. I think there's some value in having the app installed for the extra validation.
It's a waste of resources too. I've seen startups waste soooooo much time and effort on simple native apps that could trivially be webviews, it's tragic.
Still holding my breath for the app that puts up a dialog on every launch asking "would you like to try our web version?"
Preach your truth, brother!
Obligatory Dennis Reynolds / It's Always Sunny... thoughts on this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzb355qT8RI
I honestly don't mind downloading apps for things I use all the time so long as the app isn't a nightmare. It's when I am having a single interaction with a brand (such as buying my wife a gift) and I'm bombarded with "it's better in the app" that drives me nuts.
I realize that I am perhaps not the target demographic of this app-centric culture; but, I cannot count the number of times in a week that I utter the phrase, "no, I don't want to download your app" as I try to accomplish what should be a simple task.
You're not my target audience
Can the "app" just load the mobile website. Then everyone is happy?
I'm okay with downloading your app provided it's actually good and does something substantially better than a website could do. I'm talking seamless mobile UI, use of mobile features like gps or nfc, or easier/better security and authentication.
However, I don't want your bloated or minimum effort dog-shit app just to watch a movie on a plane, browse a site like Reddit, order a pizza, read a news article/blog, or shop at your specific online store. I will begrudgingly download it if I must, but I'll hate you for it.
Last year the same idea made it to the front page [0]. I understand that the apps can be faster, or easier to use. But that's intentional. Developers are deliberately making the web experience worst to force you to use the app. The reason is they have control over the experience in the apps. For example, blocking ads on the apps is much harder, and they can extract things like your contacts, GPS data, and run in the background.
At this point, the only apps on my phone are bank apps. Even that is something I'm trying to get rid off.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44689059
Tougher adblocking is the best argument I’ve heard.
It depends. The parking app example is an example of an app I want, for so many reasons
Can't we run Android inside a browser these days?
WASM should be able to handle it now, I suppose.
App developers are not living up to the expectations and needs that these services have in our lives. MyQ for example, is a Garage Door opener . It’s a key. It needs to meet the responsiveness and reliability expectations of a key. Instead, the app is slow, the buttons often freeze , the app logs itself out without notifying you – so in the most urgent situation you don’t have access to open your door.
Even some of the better ones don’t take themselves seriously. Buggy, hostile UIs , slow.
Honestly I don’t believe most of the producers are even using their own apps. I’m able to discover critical bugs within 2 minutes using nearly any app.
I won’t use your web app. The app version has better performance, lower memory usage, is more idiomatic and looks better.
Somehow the one feature I need to use is the one feature broken on the website... every time.
If a website disrespects "request desktop site" and still tries to force you into an app... ugh.
Had this happen yesterday when someone sent me a link to something on AllTrails. If the service was good and the website was usable, I might have even considered getting the app for offline features. Not anymore - screw companies that do this.
Why though?
If only 1% of your user base is accessing your maps through the website, you aren’t going to keep supporting it.
I described my own attitude, obviously companies are going to do what they want.
In this case, AllTrails has a perfectly functional website which they allow users to access from computer web browsers, but they force mobile phones (even when in "request desktop site" mode) to redirect to the app. If a site breaks in that mode it's on the user - I'm specifically requesting to get access to something they already provide and being denied.
This is especially egregious given how many "apps" are just websites in a wrapper anyway.
I think that sucks, and I'm entitled to my opinion. Now get off my lawn.
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.
Yes you will download the app because we will not offer a web version.
No, in that case I won't do business with you.
Unfortunately you won't be able to submit any expenses then, because the company uses this other company who only offers an app for accounting.
I got the entire idea from the title, no need for the article 's body.
And when I started reading I got bored after a few paragraphs since, again, I already got the idea.
Do we really need more than a title for these articles?
I actually enjoy having mobile apps for lots of use cases – travel, news, entertainment, utility bills, banking. I have probably around 100 apps on my iPhone right now and I'm fine with this number.
There are 2 things though that make me dislike mobile apps.
First, regularly logging me out. It's so frustrating, especially if the app does not support biometric login. I have a password manager, so I can log in rather quickly, but I just want to be logged in for months.
Second, webviews, I just can't understand mobile apps that render part of their content inside webviews. Like, either commit to having a proper native mobile experience or just let me use your website. One of the more annoying cases for me personally is NBA app. I'm searching for some stat, I open their website in a browser, it redirects me to the app, the app opens and then renders the same web page in a web view. What's even the point?!
I think it's best to ignore this kind of user feedback and focus on the users who really want the service or product and are willing download an app if necessary or use the web version if necessary. Popular opinions on apps/web and desktop/mobile change every few years. I remember when Facebook became deeply unpopular and was afraid of going under because they didn't manage to provide a native app.
Because of the walled gardens, duplication of efforts, and waste of resources I'd personally favor if apps died out but that is never going to happen because they always have better platform integration.
This indeed is annoying. Burn it down. This year is the year of moving away from services pushing this nonsense. I am looking at you PayPal.
Do you really think developers are going through the hellish pain of dealing with Google and Apple for no reason? Real world users prefer and expect apps as opposed to web versions for many product categories.
I'm not going to download an app for every company I do business with. It's as simple as that.
I'm not going to download an app to order food from your restaurant. I'm not going to download an app to operate an appliance. I'm not going to download an app to get a discount on a beverage at your convenience store.
I don't care about your stupid rewards system for trying to get a reasonable price on overpriced items. I'm not downloading an app for it.
There are many people who download every app they do business with without hesitation. It's crazy. I can't imagine how many apps these people have on their phones.
I use Twitter/X on web because the iOS so bad.
Turns out if you use brave on iOS it auto-blocks all the ads too.
See also https://idiallo.com/blog/dont-download-apps
I think app stores are getting restrictive and their next attack would be on PWA because that's one loophole in their walled garden where they need to extract 30% cut. Only a matter of time.
As for me, I would be mostly relying on PWAs.
Being a smaller company, try pushing an app to production on Android. Good luck with that.
I like apps, much better then web version experience
We should blame Apple for creating incentives that let it take a 30% cut from apps. I don't know why governments, especially foreign governments, allow Apple app store to operate in their countries.
Agreed, if you have a website I'll just use that.
Preach brother
gmail on mobile is particularly insidious in this context.
I don't get apps. Apart from Audible, I don't have any installed and don't use any. I've never enjoyed using smartphones to do anything.
Many many people are downloading the apps, and this is pushing a lot of younger people into apps-first over native web experiences.
I think we should call on Apple and Google to make web apps/sites a more first-class experience, rather than ask app developers to stop going where the people are.
The whole premise doesn't make much sense (to me) if the app doesn't have an inherent benefit over a website. Don't tell me that all the app first people would rather have a web wrapped app for every website they visit? Seems to be more of a "we can get more metrics out of app users than website users" thing so they intentionally break the mobile website to aggressively push an app. #LinkedIn #Facebook
PWAs are dead.
PWAs make little sense at this point as most apps are useless without an active internet connection. You can't cache Uber ride searches, Amazon product listings or food delivery options.
The web version being ok is a sign of the degradation of the desktop experience more than it is a sign of the capabilities of the web.
One very egregious example: Moovit
Even with mobile FF and adblock their mobile website is completely unusable. Now ask me if I'm happy to download ther app if their website is a complete POS like that
The desktop website works "fine" for the most part though
The government is supposed to be pushing for web as the default.
This sentiment will probably resonate with a lot of people here. I literally won’t use a service if they try to force me onto their app..
It's already been beaten into acceptance that I have to use the Ticketmaster app (shockingly awful) or Dice app (not quite as bad but still sucks) to get into a lot of music venues in Boston.
But at one club they wanted me to install another app just to check my coat. I elected to hide it under a some furniture instead lol
Yes and now I use AI to build any website which locks me into their workflow and run it locally how I choose!
what's funnier is that this could have been written 10 years ago and the situation was the exact same
apps function more so as a checkbox for investors to take an organization seriously, as well as for the founder to self aggrandize and feel like their own app store presence means something. for devs it is functionally a make-work program.
HI THERE REDDIT
The only reason they want you to download their app is to farm more data about you. They will push you to huge extent just to collect more data.
To share an egregious example, Mercury (which is a great bank) sent KYC notice literally saying "we noticed you use app outside of declared locations" for one of my friends companies. And yes they push their app hard.
Is this what hacker news has become? screeds from jaded boomers?
dozens of apps on the smartphone is gross. an indicator for me of an elderly / technically illiterate smartphone user is the presence of a ton of apps, most of which were used long ago and seldomly.
sounds like somebody who's never had to park in multiple cities