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)
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 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.
There seems to be a disconnect between some developers and the younger folks.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The reason I mention social media is all the apps operate the same way: the user swipes up or down, left or right, double taps and moves on. A website or blog or interactive content requires interaction, it requires thinking, it requires the possibility of a mistake. Those things make most users never click more than once on a website. Once a website goes beyond the first page most users leave.
It's really weird how folks are conditioned to do the least amount of effort in everything and then we complain when things are confusing. Convenience is a disease.
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
Yes! My zoomer girlfriend tuned her phone to be work ready. Unless she has to, she'd be working on the phone. I would never do that. To me the phone is uncomfortable. To her, it's the small, comfortable thing she knows better than the computer.
There is still no better interface than the command line.
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.
But if the question in the context of a phone is app-vs-web, then the analog on a PC is program-vs-web.
Which is interesting, I think.
Someone might download an app on their phone to accomplish a specific task instead of use a browser on that same phone, and that trend seems to be increasingly in favor of dedicated apps.
But on the PC side, it appears to be going the other way: Prior to the introduction of things like Sir Tim Berners-Lee's WWW and ubiquitous always-on Internet, most tasks on a PC were done with dedicated, local programs. That has changed.
Nowadays, we have things like whole office suites (pick any of them) and featureful CAD systems (like Onshape) that run quite well within a browser. POP and IMAP used to rule the day, and now we use Gmail in a browser. So on the PC, the longer trend seems to be more in favor of platform-independent web-based things instead of dedicated programs.
So, it seems that the two market segments -- while functionally similar -- are moving in opposite directions.
(I don't have an axe to grind here. I just think it's fun to think about these things.)
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.
There you go.
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.
* 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)
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.
But this may be on purpose by Bank of America.
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.
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?)
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...
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.
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.
for me, this is signal that i wasn't supposed to be visiting that resource in the first place
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.
That's already the norm.
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).
It's kinda there. You just need to connect with adb and then use chrome://inspect. It's actually a really nice feature and I've used it quite a bit over the past two years.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/remote-debugging/...
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.
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.
Isnt there are similar feature in iOS browser as in Firefox these "desktop notifications" that some webpages request?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it's somewhat misguided, but companies gonna company.
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.
Even native apps that were built with cross-platform frameworks feel a bit "off" sometimes.
Did you read the article? One of the author's main points is this is a deliberate result by vendors.
- 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.
- They 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.
If I'm paying for your service, you should not be degrading my experience using UX anti-patterns in any way, for any reason.
NYT is one of the worst offenders.
I do agree that this seems to be exception rather than the rule - so having both is actually nice IMHO.
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.
For local apps, I'll firewall it: on mobile I use rethinkdns and trackercontrol to block unnecessary network calls; on desktop I'll mostly just deal with it (I have an extensive hosts file), but that doesn't mean everything).
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.
if you ever end up making one im very very curious about how much market share that would gain
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.
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 )
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-...
Mapped it out here if curious - https://vectree.io/c/enshittification-how-digital-platforms-...
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 can just use the web version instead and skip all that, along with the memory usage (for the most part).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even then, there's a good chance that web a API exists for the required hardware, so it still doesn't need to be an app.
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.”
But that's just the technical reality of what can be implemented on web vs. native because you are within an ephemeral browser tab and have all the restrictions that come with that.
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.
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!
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.
Also the fact that people here would rather have their info stored in the cloud vs local on device is interesting.
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.
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
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.
This standard of every random website having an app and poorly managing cache and storage needs to stop. My mom can't begin to even understand how to fix it, and worse, she didn't even recognize half the apps I mentioned to her, which probably means she mindlessly clicked install on a bunch of random websites.
We do not need more app bloat on our devices, especially if they are just thin wrappers over your web app.
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.
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.
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
But for me the main issues with "you need our app" BS is that they don't give you the apk but tell you to download it from the Google Play Store. They don't give you the source for the apk as well, as if it's such a huge trade secret how some shitty API works. The worst offenders ask for all the attestation shit (unrooted phone and so on). That's what's wrong with apps vs sites, not just the format itself. We should fight for FOSS apks with no attestation if companies want to invest so heavily in apps.
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.
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.
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.
The same has been going on with radio and podcasts for a while: e.g., the BBC, or my newspaper, wants me to install their app to listen to their streams or podcasts, while I much rather concentrate all my listening in one central radio or podcast app for all my sources. Note that a system for paid-only podcast subscriptions via generic podcast apps actually exists, but I've never used it since no podcast maker I listen to actually uses it.
Furthermore, to say platform owners don't care about offending such users would be an understatement: platform owners likely want to actively repel such users. Why serve someone who neither pays a fee nor agrees to be shown ads?
When Chrome started supporting PWAs you couldn't bookmark the content at all. They seem to have fixed that now.
I have ditched a ton of apps, from Youtube, to X, Discord and what not.
Apps is the biggest trap, it grants techs full access to your device, unless you are running GrapheneOS of course.
Web version works just fine, faster, it is not bloated like the app and won't drain your battery since there is no app running in the background.
The only app I still have is Instagram when I wanna upload a video to my car account because they refuse to do that via browser.
If I place expects me to download an app to order, I am eating elsewhere.
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.
Every time I try to load a PWA on my phone from my dev laptop, it breaks after a few weeks (days?) for no obvious reason. I investigated this for a bit but eventually gave up and went the electron/wrapper app route.
If we can find a real fix for this stupid issue, I would be more than happy to focus on PWAs.
But on a keyboard I type hella fast.
Now, I also hate creating account after account, having all these applications needing to be installed with ads in them that I can't block or some permissions that I don't think it needs. F that.
This also means you don't have to be running this week's android version to use it, with all the increased surveillance consequences that implies.
But, as the article states, people who are actually paying attention are a small minority and an acceptable collateral damage to user numbers.
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.
Luckily there is choice :)
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
I have found app-only experiences that cover looking for a job, looking for a house, doing accounting/personal finances.
How can you even stay organized or do any meaningful data entry on a phone?
For the large majority of users, phones are THE primary (if not only) device for their interaction with the internet. You can complain "them-lazy-brainrotting-GenZs" but some people don't have a choice. There are plenty of countries where a smartphone is the cheapest internet enabled device that a person can afford.
Secondly, the UX for "web browsing" on the phone is strictly worse compared to (well-made) apps. In fact, apps are the reason for the explosion in popularity of smartphones. And also the reason only android and iphone have survived the OS race (see windows phone and linux phones). So — much to my own disappointment — it does make sense for companies to treat mobile (app) users as first class citizens. You need to understand that you are not the target user anymore. And, yes it sucks.
That said, it does not justify the gradual enshittification, dark patterns and dopamine hacking that have been normalized in modern apps.
Or it's full of annoying popups to use the app, looking at you, Google.
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.
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.
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.
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.
WASM should be able to handle it now, I suppose.
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.
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?!
At this point, the only apps on my phone are bank apps. Even that is something I'm trying to get rid off.
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.
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.
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.
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?
