Do not download the app, use the website

>We had instructions for how to pin the site to your home screen, and would explain to users how the website does everything an app can do. Still, constant requests for an app.

This is the result of the inconsistent user experience to which gatekeepers like Apple have been actively contributing through active sabotage of web apps, such that all profitable apps can be more effectively and reliably taxed through Apple's App Store.

The manufactured perception of the general public then became that web apps are not "real apps" despite offering the exact same features. They have been dragged down by the subtle artificial friction that makes the UX feel subpar.

This reminds me of my own experience of mobile websites when they first emerged. I thought that the desktop version of a website is the "real website" i.e. that there is only one static original website and that its mobile version was some fake substitute, so I always activated the option "show desktop version". Then I learned about responsive web design and it clicked for me. I predict that a similar epiphany will occur among casuals once the active sabotage of web apps stops due to regulations reigning in the anti-competitive business practices of gatekeepers.

I'm sure that some people will still prefer "native" apps for whatever reason. However, if regulators do a proper job and allow web apps to compete on a level playing field, then a lay person wouldn't even be able to differentiate between them. This is even the case today where some developers simply wrap their web app in a WebView and ship it as a "native" app.

Most people don't know how to use a computer well. Most people are just slightly above computer-illiterate. They were introduced to phones which have apps. Now in their minds that's how everything must be. Anything else induces fear into their minds.

While technically competent people might go:

"Oh neat, I don't even need to install an app, if I just put the website icon onto my home screen."

Most users are like: "Oh my god noooo! Not another way to do something! Aaaaa I cannot cope!" and panic.

> People just really like apps!

I would say people really hate websites on mobile. The browsers are horrible, the pages are slow and oftentimes broken in some way. You get all these popups everywhere, ads are much more intrusive. It's just bad experience, so of course people would prefer app for something they use.

I avoid the browser on mobile as much as possible and I don't remember ever having a good time using it.

I remember when ChatGPT was released. I talked about it to a friend who is not technical. She said "oh wow, I really need to try it". She later said "I couldn't find the app in my AppStore".

I kept saying they had a website and why would you need an app. She couldn't understand what I was saying.

Seems like indeed the general public really likes apps and even thinks you can't do so many things in the browser.

> People just really like apps!

This is it. I’ve worked on plenty of projects that have web/iOS/Android, and the reason for offering native apps has always been user demand. All of this “spy on the user” crap literally never even comes up in conversation. We don’t care at all. We care about native apps because users care about native apps.

Thank you for this extensive analysis. In my country now's the phase that every shop, even small one, wants me to download an app (for the client identification purposes). And tbh one thing is making an app for people who want it, another is requiring an app. Those "loyalty card" apps all weigh at least 100MB because of the browser bundled inside, and they are too heavy for my phone. I mitigated it using catima, an open source loyalty card wallet, but some of the app creators started to generate time based codes, so it's no longer a viable solution for me in those cases, and I started suspecting those apps do more than showing a code

This is a very interesting, but it doesn't explain why companies push so hard to download their apps. It's even contradictory: since it seems users want apps so much, there should be no need to push them.

My wife is one of these people. We couldn't be more different in that regard. I loathe apps and generally only install them when there's no alternative. She seems to either not understand or trust websites, and wants an app.

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Every time I grab her phone I get dizzy and lost from the hundreds of apps. When she grabs mine, she wonders how I accomplish anything at all.

A lot of native apps are just wrappers around a JS context with a few bridges into native APIs and they are pure data grabs.

Reddit always asks you to use its native app, for example. Why the fuck would I care so much about Reddit that I want it outside of my browser? Same goes for any other website.

It is just the app producers forcing you. Like AliExpress, the app is just the website (it does not even respect the default text size), but only the app allows you to do reviews. Some only give you rebates if you install their spyware. Many do not support notifications for no obvious reason. IMHO we need more user scripts to fix some of those stupidities.

Most apps, these days, seem to be “hybrid,” where they use a system like Ionic or React. These systems usually slap on some considerable libraries.

I understand why, but I’m not a fan of hybrid apps. I like to do native, which results in much smaller, faster, and more efficient apps. It’s just not as cost-effective, if you want to support multiple platforms.

However, native apps aren’t automatically well-behaved ones. In fact, they usually have access to even more tools for eroding privacy or user agency.

Good behavior is up to the app developers, and that doesn’t seem to be much of a priority, these days.

I am particularly incensed by governments that require citizens use apps to access their digital services.

Especially so in the EU, where on one hand they're annoyed at big tech, and on the other they're forcing citizens to be customers. Even services which are web-based rely on an app for login authentication.

:-) be nice to margarine. It can be used to better your health. Because it's not butter, it can be supplemented with vitamins and minerals and can be used to lower cholesterol. But, I get your point.

Funny cause I was just thinking about the tradeoff of "internal wasm app" vs "internal native app".

The former has convenient distribution, but worse performance and other limitations.

The latter can be tricky to keep updated, ensure the environment is the same for everyone and/or cross-platform differences, etc., but significantly better/faster.

But both binaries about the same size. Assuming using something like sokol or SDL3.

and don't forget imdb and airbnb, who absolutely _need_ the latest ios to work

It's such a basic interaction, yet so many apps disable it

The "download app" notifications on reddit are like some kind of art project to maximimally annoy you. Probably the worst offender is facebook where they have what can only be called an intentionally broken mobile website - the idea of losing the person's name if you edit a comment, the page deciding to reload you back to the main page if you switch tabs to research something or the post box clearing out if you switch focus, the comment box being nearly impossible to navigate through with the cursor, these are all profoundly egregious bugs that have been there for years.

Basically if you intend it to do something more substantive than comment a series of emojis, they have a bunch of bugs that block you.

I'm guessing someone has made the calculation that being terrible in these ways are more profitable.

Maybe people doom scroll more if the content is vapid?

I'd love to see the user stories. "Brenda is a 52 year old professional who likes commenting "Happy Birthday" to AI generated images of people with cakes. She loves multilevel marketing and buying stuff on Temu. Her husband Greg, reposts memes programmatically generated by content farms using LLMs and topic trackers"

Also uhh the default search engine in mobile Safari. Just Google searching gives you a half-page notice to install the app. If you have the app, it's a half-page notice to use the app. And guess what's inside the app, a website.

And a big thumbs down to Google Maps, that when presenting a location on the web, that's already being shown, it will cover it with a pop-up heavily steering the user to download the app.

I believe that's done based on user-agent header; but it shouldn't be surprising that the UA on a mobile browser is the hardest to change, showing once again that users' control of their computing devices is extremely important. With the appropriate UA, imgur will just give you the raw image data directly.

I hate Imgur. Even with the app installed I find it doesn’t work well. I don’t understand why people use it — does it just work for them in a way it doesn’t for me, or are they more tolerant of its terrible usability?

Imgur is particularly infuriating because it was initially touted as an alternative to the shitty image-sharing sites of the day (photobucket and the like) - one that would let you just link to an image without any bullshit. Now it's completely unusable.

The worst for me is when you open Google Maps in the browser and the appears with the blue continue button. If you click it, it opens the iOS store page. If you then move back to your browser it re-opens and focuses the iOS store page one more time.

the imgur website is one of THE shittiest ever made. Just try it on mobile or without ad blocks. They can't even play a gif properly.

Which bank is that where you can’t log into their website from PC or mobile?

The author is not contesting that the app experience is better. Yeah, the web experience is worse -- because the product people are treating the entire web presence as a _marketing surface_ for the app. So, the web version is basically an ad for the app. This is true of Reddit, Yelp, and others. How could it not be worse?

It's too bad because it's not like the web is incapable of providing a beautiful ux for those products. But then so why do you think these companies employ massive teams of devs, for Android, and then again for iOS, reimplementing their functionality on every platform? All that to provide you with that sweet extra smooth native "feel", 2% nicer than the web could do? No, it's not for you...

Mobile apps are so limited compared to an actual web browser's interface. The reddit mobile app only lets you view one topic/conversation at a time. Same with the IMDB app; it's impossible to do any research, like comparing actors or movies, using the IMDB mobile app because the flows are all captive and there's very limited ways to navigate between the resources. With a browser, I can open up multiple sets of content at once. So many mobile apps are just fixed views and offer no compelling interface for anything but the extremely limited way they want (force) you to use their app. The fact that a browser allows multiple tabs and can do bookmarking makes up for (works around) the relatively lack luster interfaces both website and mobile apps have.

The reason I believe the web experience is inferior is because companies put more resources into apps at the expense of the web.

Apps break often. They need a lot of support. Everything must be constantly updated. You never know when Samsung or Apple will push an update that breaks things because of some esoteric policy shift or setting change.

But the web? If you do it right, maintenence is much easier. If things do break: users can try different browsers or devices to get around instead of being bricked.

I can't be the only one who _never _ updates software on my phone until I absolutely have to. Everything is so brittle. I'm sick of being gaslit that apps make that better. Despite it's own horrible implementations, the web is far more stable.

With exception to Reddit, I generally prefer apps to sites because mobile process management is considerably nicer than browser tab management.

App processes are sorted in order of most recent use, keeping the most relevant ones at hand, and those that aren’t used for a while just silently go away without much fuss.

In comparison browser tabs aren’t organized unless the user does that themselves, and so with each web app tab management overhead increases. Some browsers have an idle tab auto-close feature, but that closes the wrong tab (usually a page with info pertinent to something I’m working on) quite often. “Installing” PWAs can be an ok-ish workaround, but the problem there is that a lot of sites don’t have the little bit of manifest magic that makes saving to home screen “install” a PWA instead of just opening a browser tab.

>The native app experience for every app noted in the article is better and smoother than the mobile web version, in my opinion. Lots of people hate Electron apps, which suggests to me that my preference for native apps isn’t unique.

I want native programs on my PC, and fewer apps on my phone.

I get all my apps from F-Droid. If I need to use Steam chat or view the menu at Taco Bell, mobile website it is. I am not gonna put their proprietary software on my phone. This also brings up another interesting difference. There is no desktop program for Taco Bell, that would be super weird. I think other comments already addressed that, but a lot of mobile apps are basically just the website.

A game like Luanti or some sort of Tetris is something I'd want native in both places (desktop and mobile). Games in browsers are a mess.

> The native app experience for every app noted in the article is better and smoother than the mobile web version

I've found it to be the opposite. Perhaps if you're heavily involved on Reddit, LinkedIn, etc., then it's more convenient. But I only go to those sites via a search link. Why would I want to spend time and effort installing the app, just to see the same content I just landed on?

It's a huge red flag when websites push their app so intrusively. It means the app has little value and will be just as bad or worse when you use it.

Tbh, the web won the application platform mostly because it's a standard. Everybody knows html, css and a little JS.

On the other hand, for mobile apps, there is still a device-specific mentality.

Imagine web apps being built with a different flavor for all the major browsers...

I hope that the same level of standardization comes to mobile apps too with the option to use more device-specific features on top of the generic UI.

That's partially by design. Apple makes it a pain to make proper PWA's, and companies with websites make extremely intrusive elements to ruin the mobile website in order drive to the app. Which is easier to monetize and harder to adblock, I imagine. Some places outright disable the mobile view for the app.

More simply, I don't need an app for every website I visit. a bookmark is much more lightweight than downloading yet another app to clutter my drawer.

Quora has been known for its dark patterns. At one point they didnt't show you a page if you clicked a link to it within their site and prompted to login, though if you copy paste the page link to a new tab it opened.

They've never had my trust, and never will.

>app icons are just "advertisement"

You wouldn't believe the volume of actual advertisements that show up as push notifications on my wife's phone

Totally with you on this. Every extra app feels like mental clutter

I also hate obligatory mobile apps, especially when they’re linked to hardware: At the battery company I work for - pilaenergy - we’re aware that our hardware may well outlive our software, so we’re providing a mobile app that’s accessible over an WiFi access point or over your local WiFi, as well as the traditional mobile apps. This way - the software comes bundled with the hardware and can’t be sunset. Something that has long been an issue with IoT products.

Just don't collect any data. Having an app doesn't mean you need to collect any data.

Why not create a simple app with a webview so your users are happy? I can't imagine that would take more than a couple hours of work. Google can be burdensome but that's only if you require things like payment and data collection in the app which a webview doesn't need. Otherwise, it's probably less than an hour of work per year to maintain.

Appdwang seems to be inspired by the German initiative, I found after clicking around there.

It's a good initiative, and I hope (non-tech) people realize more about this.

I have never liked notifications on iOS so I can't say for sure but I do know that on Android it's been possible to disable certain types of notifications or demote the urgency for at least 5 years now.

Whether or not most people are aware of this ability is another question, I guess.

You can get push notifications to your phone from a website through the browser, even when that website isn't still open.

But presumably developers have more control over app notification look & feel vs browser notifications?

On Android/Graphene, I recommend permanently turning on do not disturb and adding apps to the allowlist. Opt in to notifications, rather than opting out.

> Say you order food online — you’d want a notification to update you, instead of having to manually refresh a webpage

Browsers have a notification feature where websites can send you notifications, and it's usually enabled by default.

It's free advertising. Almost every time you use your phone, you see their logo. That's dozens of free impressions per day per person.