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)

* 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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 )

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.

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!").

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

I do agree that this seems to be exception rather than the rule - so having both is actually nice IMHO.

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.

I can just use the web version instead and skip all that, along with the memory usage (for the most part).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Also the fact that people here would rather have their info stored in the cloud vs local on device is interesting.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

Luckily there is choice :)

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.

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

Or it's full of annoying popups to use the app, looking at you, Google.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44689059

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?