And the app is just a glorified website (Electron app).
download our app
Nah
delete account...
Literally me
This piece has no real point. No hidden info, no resolution, no exposé, no call-to-arms really.
It's just "there are way too many apps", which we already knew.
What a weak article.
Yeah. The Atlantic kinda sucks.
It used to be a sort of second-rate New Yorker, except now The New Yorker is a second-rate New Yorker.
Harper's is still decent though. It's pretty much how it's been for years.
This is partly corporate greed and partly a failure of the Web. A website should be all you need. You shouldn't need a separate app for every little thing.
If all I'm doing is looking at your catalog, it should work in a mobile browser. That way if I - a Tarheel - find myself in the midwest, I can go "does Menards have 1/4-20 hanger bolts?"
I'll install an app if it runs mainly on my phone, like a media player or a calculator or maybe even a file viewer. Mobile games...that ship has sunk, frankly.
It's not a failure of the web, it's a failure of corporations to accept their place as just a tab in my browser. It's also easier to track users, exploit vulnerabilities, etc. from within a mobile app.
Also, push notifications. Most things could be done from a browser, but corpos have to have their push notifications.
It doesn't matter if you're the guy who turns every notification off and manages all those... 9/10 people won't.
A huge number of apps these days are web sites compiled into an app, and it shows. For example, an app should be able to remember your address and payment information without signing into an account, yet so many don't. Almost like they want to force you into signing up. Why might that be?
Just give me a mobile web page if you're going to do that shit.
I have an app for my sprinkler system and it's a fucking nightmare. Not only is it basically just a web API, it's so transparently just a glorified browser with access to exactly one site that frequently my phone thinks that app will work for whatever else I'm trying to open.
Document? Sprinkler app. Web Page? Sprinkler app. Installing from a source other than Google? Oh you better believe the sprinkler app can do that.
Doing anything takes longer to load than it would take me to walk from anywhere on my property to the fucking box and hit whatever button I need to hit.
It frequently forgets what I entered for preferences. I can tell it a week ahead what days I want it to skip but if I do that more than 24 hours on advance I might as well not have done it at all.
Oh you want to make a payment online? Let your sprinklers do that for you. YouTube video? Sprinkler app. YouTube video about fixing your fucking sprinkler system? Sprinkler app.
Apparently the one thing it can't do is effectively manage my water usage. It's ONE job
Document? Sprinkler app. Web Page? Sprinkler app. Installing from a source other than Google? Oh you better believe the sprinkler app can do that.
Android apps tell the system which URLs they can open. If you click a Google Maps link, it can prompt you to open it in the Google Maps app. It sounds like whoever created the sprinkler app misconfigured the app and it's saying that it can open all URLs, not just the URLs it cares about. They probably read a tutorial about how to make a webview in Android and didn't know what they were doing :)
Almost certainly. If the guy who was making yandere simulator was tasked with a sprinkler app, it wouldn't be much worse than it currently is.
I don't know shit about fuck when it comes to programming, but I know bad programming when I see it.
shit that's amazing
Just give me a mobile web page if you’re going to do that shit.
There's some apps that just load a site, but the site refuses to load if you load it in a regular browser? Why?? Spoofing the user-agent would probably work around that, but I haven't tried.
What they mean is iPhones have pitiful storage levels for the huge amount of money they cost
Just yesterday, Mrs. Warp Core was trying to enroll with an online service. The self-service email confirmation link refused to function correctly in Firefox on a desktop operating system (Windows in this case). It worked flawlessly on Firefox+iOS. Said link also shuttled the user straight off to the phone app.
I'll add that nearly ever other aspect of their public facing web, including the online chat support, worked flawlessly everywhere I tried it. This all just reeked of hostile design.
When asked about why this is, I simply said:
The browser provides good security and choice for the user. Apps provide good security and control for the vendor.
Used get my haircut at one of those "no appointment needed" haircut chains. Then they got an app, and every time I went it was "Why aren't you using the app? You need to use the app. Next time use the app. Download the app on your phone. It's gonna be an hour wait because you didn't use the app."
Now I just go to a local place.
I wish sites that do have PWAs would stop funneling people towards their app.
Especially Patreon, where patronages started using their app would be 30% more expensive for their users than patronages started through their website because of the Apple (and probably Google) tax. Patreon is aware of this tax but keeps advertising their fucking stupid app! You have a Progressive Web App that's works perfectly! Stop it! Get some help!
Twitter had some great outcomes when they rolled out their PWA: https://web.dev/case-studies/twitter
Twitter Lite is now the fastest, least expensive, and most reliable way to use Twitter. The web app rivals the performance of our native apps but requires less than 3% of the device storage space compared to Twitter for Android.
65% increase in pages per session
75% increase in Tweets sent
20% decrease in bounce rate
yet they kept pushing their native apps, probably because they can collect more data through them. The web is way more sandboxed than regular apps.
That's less an endorsement of PWAs and more a condemnation of how garbage the native app always was.
I have never encounteted a PWA that works better than a website OR an app - this from users actual usability viewpoint. They are a cancer, that sits right in between the worst of both worlds.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
