At AutoTempest we resisted making an app for years, because anything that a hypothetical app could do, we could do with the website. And in my opinion, when searching for cars, it's more convenient to be in your browser where you can easily open new tabs, bookmark results, etc.

And for years, it was our most requested feature, by far. 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. Finally we relented and released one, and very quickly around half our mobile traffic moved to the app without us really trying to nudge people at all.

People just really like apps! I think it suits our mental model of different tools for different uses. We've also found that app users are much more engaged than website users, but of course much of that will be selection bias. Still, I can see how having your app on someone's home screen could provide a significant boost to retention, compared to a website they're liable to forget. For us now, that's the main benefit we see. Certainly don't use any additional data, though I won't argue that other companies don't.

>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.

> 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".

It wasn't that long ago that when you used the mobile internet, you would be getting a "fake version" of the site that could render speedily, despite the limited speed of 2G networks.

First it was all about WML[0], which would be processed by a proxy that would deliver the file in a binary format that would be smaller.

And even when mobile phones that could access proper HTML content hit the market, it was often still accessed through the use of an accelerator proxy[1] which would optimize the page (stripping unnecessary parts) that you were trying to access so that it could be downloaded faster.

These technologies are still in use in some places, as I understand it. But it's generally not necessary nowadays for locations with access to 3G or better.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_accelerator

heck, if I use the mobile version of facebook I still get a fake site that won't open direct messages, pushing me to install the messenger app instead. with the desktop version the messages open without any issues.

Exactly, web apps are superior in most ways to mobile apps for the user experience, but only if vendors support the web and stop actively trying to make it like apps are the better option.

The preference for apps is a learned behavior, not something fundamental. The vast majority of people with real understanding would prefer the web

I couldn't agree more. If vendors decided to give the web development the resources it deserves, the experience would turn out vastly superior for the users: no apps to download (browser is usually bundled), well standardized consistent interface where you know what a control does and how does it look like, more control on security and safety, and a lot less resources consumption. Unfortunately heavy advertising, catchy effects, colorful interfaces, and not caring for the web side, convinced most users that the apps approach is the best one, while it's actually the other way around. Apps also give vendors a tool to more easily infiltrate users devices and grab much of their personal data so I guess the motivation to change that is less than nil.

There isn't just Apple, there's also Google which is a big promoter of PWA's, and in fact they popularized the term. PWA's just never took off.

> There isn't just Apple, there's also Google which is a big promoter of PWA's, and in fact they popularized the term.

Google is the primary champion of PWAs, they have a vested interest in its success. The reason I focused on Apple is because its actions are one of a profit-maximizing gatekeeper actively defending its most lucrative business against an existential threat that is PWA. Every bug, every delayed feature, and every artificial limitation imposed on PWAs on iOS is a calculated strategic move in this defense of its walled garden that makes maximum taxation possible.

>PWA's just never took off.

That's just the lazy manufactured and false narrative that I've already thoroughly debunked. I'm not going to repeat it, since you would just ignore it again.

I use PWAs for my home websites (things like calendars and thermostat) running on tablets. They're a bit awkward, or I'm just ignorant of The Correct Way. I have to set metadata in a file for some reason I don't understand (most importantly, it must have a dedicated icon to display because ???). Then whenever tablet is restarted, I have to tap the website icon to launch it, then push up from bottom of screen to top and hold it up to bring up whatever Android calls the app manager, and then I tap and hold the window of my app and tap to pin it. -and if Android decides to reboot for whatever reason, I must do this again.

-But it's less pain than trying to turn a generic Android tablet into something more like a kiosk, best I can tell (there are third-party apps that do this, which survives reboots, I'm led to believe, but I'd rather not mess with third-party stuff). I previously made Android apps in Java for the tablets, and while I enjoyed the fragment system it uses, the permissions handling was always a nightmare whenever I wanted to do something neat or experimental -- TTS and mic listening in a PWA makes me much less frustrated than trying to do it via native app (which seems backwards to me), and I can still use the website on any non-Android device.

Isn't the Mac way a good thing though? For example everything on Windows is moving to web apps where I feel they can load just as many trackers onto you eg https://www.theverge.com/news/710509/whatsapp-windows-app-we...

Whereas on Mac, Meta are keeping their native app presumably because they can't be in the Mac app store with just a web wrapper

But maybe I've just got the exact delusion youre talking about in that I view the app as having more functionality. Maybe they need to free web apps to be on a level playing field as you say

> many trackers

A native app has access to OS information for the same kind of fingerprinting as with browsers, except with more bits of information. The reason, for example, iOS has the “ask app not to track” button is because the tracking could still happen, even more comprehensively than in a browser. Not exactly sure about macOS but I don’t see why it would be different.

Meta is keeping their apps as native presumably because native apps make better spyware. I think they literally do not have any other reason; if web apps made better spyware, Meta would push people to use their web apps, simple as. Meta is a spyware company. Technical decisions about deploying/developing their spyware will be informed primarily by their desire to make it more effective as such.

Most apps on Mac are not on the App Store

You download a DMG file or something, then you drag and drop some icon into your “applications” folder

It is kind of dumb. I haven’t seen any graphical package manage interface to handle this.

The App Store is the graphical package manager interface. Or in the case of apps that haven't published, the Finder/Applications folder itself. It makes a lot of sense, similar to the way GoboLinux stashed packages in its new world filesystem hierarchy. One folder, one package.

You do not need a new filesystem hierarchy for it. I have a "one folder one package" kind of setup (among others), e.g. packages are at ~/.local/pkg and I have them symlinked from there to ~/.local. It works for many programs. I use "zpkg", but you could use "GNU stow", too.

new to mac and when i dis this the first time i was "wtf is this made for children"

but I understand more. Its more a folder oriented system. kind of

Its fine, it just has the quirk that sharing folders sucks and you have to put it in a container so it’s a single file.

> 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.

If web apps were any good, we'd see a plethora of them on Android. There are none (or very, very, very few).

If web apps were any good, nothing Apple "gatekeeps" would prevent you from building an amazing web app for iOS. The things Apple "gatekeeps" (such as mobile push) would not prevent you from making a smooth fast web app.

And yet here we are.

> if regulators do a proper job and allow web apps to compete on a level playing field

They already are competing on a level playing field. It's not "lack of NFC" or "lack of Bluetooth" or "lack of <another moving goalpost>" that prevent you from having good web apps.

>If web apps were any good, we'd see a plethora of them on Android. There are none (or very, very, very few).

This statement alone is evidence that you didn't understand the crux of the issue. You are also confusing cause and effect. I clearly explained the root causes for that. The reason there are not more web apps is not that they aren't "good" - what does that even mean? what is the criterion for "good" here? If you say that it's because they lack certain features, then you confirmed my point that it's due to active sabotage and denial of equal rights. Be specific, why are they not "good"? There wouldn't be coincidentally a mysterious opposing force that actively prevents developers from improving those aspects, right?

>There are none (or very, very, very few).

X (Twitter) - has PWA

Pinterest - has PWA

Spotify - has PWA

Uber - Hybrid

Starbucks - has PWA

Again, you're confusing cause and effect. It's like actively sabotaging a runner and saying: "See? that runner sucks!!" - Yeah because that runner is being actively sabotaged. You're completely ignoring all the evidence and simply claiming that they are unpopular because they are not "good" when in reality they are unpopular because they have been sabotaged to prevent them from challenging the gatekeeper's taxation funnels.

>If web apps were any good, nothing Apple "gatekeeps" would prevent you from building an amazing web app for iOS. The things Apple "gatekeeps" (such as mobile push) would not prevent you from making a smooth fast web app.

That's not even a coherent argument. Gatekeepers can sabotage competitors in many subtle ways to make the user experience subpar, it's not a 1-dimensional game where only feature parity can be weaponized. It's clear that you are actively refusing to understand the points being made. There is also documented evidence that Apple consistently engaged in practices that made any competing platform a worse experience. Gatekeepers have a conflict of interest and they consistently act in a manner that makes that bias glaring. Gatekeepers are also not morons, they know that it doesn't take much to introduce artificial friction while also maintaining plausible deniability. e.g. see court documents where Apple's engineers admit that they strategically use "scare screens" and that their managers would "definitely like that".

>They already are competing on a level playing field. It's not "lack of NFC" or "lack of Bluetooth" or "lack of <another moving goalpost>" that prevent you from having good web apps.

That's factually incorrect. As previously stated, it's not just a 1-dimensional form of sabotage where only feature parity is being weaponized but any form of artificially introduced friction, while being able to maintain plausible deniability - any of that will get the job done of shutting down any threat to the gatekeeper's taxation funnel. Furthermore, as open-web-advocacy.org states:

- #AppleBrowserBan Apple's ban of third party browsers on iOS is deeply anti-competitive, starves the Safari/WebKit team of funding and has stalled innovation for the past 10 years and prevented Web Apps from taking off on mobile. (https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban...)

-Deep System Integration

Web Apps need to become just Apps. Apps built with the free and open web need equal treatment and integration. Closed and heavily taxed proprietary ecosystems should not receive any preference.

- Web App Equality

All artifical barriers placed by gatekeepers must be removed. Web Apps if allowed can offer equivalent functionality with greater privacy and security for demanding use-cases.

> Web Apps need to become just Apps. Apps built with the free and open web need equal treatment and integration. Closed and heavily taxed proprietary ecosystems should not receive any preference.

That basically already exists on the desktop in the form of Electron apps. Those apps are universally hated because of it.

Web technology is not suitable for making applications. It was designed to format text documents and that's all it's really good at. That's why we have the web-framework-of-the-week problem, everyone is desperately trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Web apps are janky, fragile and feel out of place on every OS. It's a 'one size fits no one' solution.

>That basically already exists on the desktop in the form of Electron apps. Those apps are universally hated because of it.

Discord and Visual Studio Code are among the most popular apps on mac, those are electron apps. None of that is relevant to the core issue either way. It's not up to Apple to decide any of that, that's what the market and regulators are for. Apple uses and pushes self-serving and false narratives as pretext to engage in anti-competitive business practices.

>Web technology is not suitable for making applications. It was designed to format text documents and that's all it's really good at.

That statement might have been true in 1995, but today it's categorically false.

> Web apps are janky, fragile and feel out of place on every OS. It's a 'one size fits no one' solution.

I've already debunked this manufactured, reductionist and false narrative above.

You really haven't. You are up and down this thread saying these things, but you haven't already proven them or even addressed them.

You have points, I agree that web technology is well suited in 2025 to make interactive applications. I agree that web apps are being held back from expressing their true potential. And while Electron is largely skewered for being bloated and heavy, the web can be fast and fluid.

But you haven't proven that web apps don't feel janky, fragile, and out of place. Because they just factually do. The native UI elements of each OS that you can tap into from the web is limited, and not enough to create the same UI in a WebView that you can in a native Swift app, for instance. You of course can coerce the web into imitating any appearance you care to recreate, but it won't look that way by default, and it'll now look even more starkly out of place on every other platform besides the single one you targeted. This is all an intentional aspect of the web as a cross-platform platform.

The web's internet-native status means a bad internet connection or a brief crossing through a dead zone will kill almost any web app. Yes, there's strategies around this with web workers nowadays, but those are quite complex to implement for even simple applications and often aren't worth the effort to do anything more than pop up a branded "you're offline" page. An app can be completely cut off from the internet, it doesn't have that base assumption of network connectivity and isn't built from the ground up from network-based parts.

I already responded to any of your points that are relevant to the core discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44694037

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44692287

For the rest refer to https://whatpwacando.today

You still haven't. The whole point of my comment is that you haven't, and I brought up specific points that remain un-addressed by any of your comments in your thread, despite your insistence. Linking to comments that largely consist of the next layer of "I already addressed your points elsewhere!" is not a response. The world exists beyond Apple, and "Apple decrees it" is not a sufficient to explain much of your claims.

If you don't care to engage with the substance of my points, fine, nobody is owed discussion, but this style of conversation is deeply unproductive and I believe even you are losing track of what you have and haven't said.

>You have points, I agree that web technology is well suited in 2025 to make interactive applications. I agree that web apps are being held back from expressing their true potential. And while Electron is largely skewered for being bloated and heavy, the web can be fast and fluid.

The main topic originated through OP's "why some users demand a 'native' app when the web app should be enough" for which I provided explanations as to why web apps haven't lived up to their potential i.e. conflict of interest and the corresponding sabotage by a gatekeeper in contrast to the manufactured narrative of "they are unpopular because they suck". That's a false narrative which I've explained in many comments:

- "A Progressive Web App, if allowed to reach its full, un-sabotaged potential, is the technological manifestation of the Digital Markets Act's goals. So it would be utterly absurd for Apple to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into fighting the DMA, just to let PWAs pass which achieves the exact same goals."

- "The reason I focused on Apple is because its actions are one of a profit-maximizing gatekeeper actively defending its most lucrative business against an existential threat that is PWA. Every bug, every delayed feature, and every artificial limitation imposed on PWAs on iOS is a calculated strategic move in this defense of its walled garden that makes maximum taxation possible."

Since you've stated that "I agree that web apps are being held back from expressing their true potential" you confirmed my thesis. That's why I stated: "I already responded to any of your points that are RELEVANT to the CORE DISCUSSION"

>But you haven't proven that web apps don't feel janky, fragile, and out of place.

That's not even part of the core issue and it has still been explained in my post anyway, which you even confirmed by saying "I agree that web apps are being held back from expressing their true potential" and is also expressed here:

- Apple's ban of third party browsers on iOS is deeply anti-competitive, STARVES the Safari/WebKit team of funding and has STALLED innovation for the past 10 YEARS and PREVENTED Web Apps from taking off on mobile. (https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban...)

-Deep System Integration

Web Apps need to become just Apps. Apps built with the free and open web need equal treatment and integration. Closed and heavily taxed proprietary ecosystems should not receive any preference.

- Web App Equality

All artificial barriers placed by gatekeepers must be removed. Web Apps if allowed can offer equivalent functionality with greater privacy and security for demanding use-cases.

These are all factors that have already been mentioned and they fix all the real issues that are not the product of active sabotage.

Furthermore, I'm using many web apps like Discord and Visual Studio Code and they do not feel janky, fragile or out of place, that's your subjective perception. And even if that were an objective fact, which they are not, it would still not be relevant to the core discussion since they are not inherent to the technology but product-management related trade-offs that can be improved and fixed.

>The web's internet-native status means a bad internet connection or a brief crossing through a dead zone will kill almost any web app. Yes, there's strategies around this with web workers nowadays, but those are quite complex to implement for even simple applications and often aren't worth the effort to do anything more than pop up a branded "you're offline" page.

Your first claim is just factually wrong, but you admit that in the following statement which contains another claim that is also wrong. Those are exactly the kind of problems that PWAs solve and the user experience in that regard has been steadily improving (see also https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first )

>An app can be completely cut off from the internet, it doesn't have that base assumption of network connectivity and isn't built from the ground up from network-based parts.

That's just straight up nonsense. Any native or web app that relies on internet connectivity will be equally affected. Any native or web app developed with a local-first or local-only approach will work perfectly fine without internet. You clearly have outdated knowledge on the matter. (see https://whatpwacando.today)

So I really had addressed your points that were relevant to the core issue, but you just wanted to nitpick details that had already been partially or fully addressed and are also insignificant in the bigger picture of the topic and technological progress in general. Those ones you listed are based on your subjective experience, your outdated knowledge on the tech or simply a transitory state of software that can be easily improved since they are not an inherent technological limitation.

Ah, yes, the conversation gets quite tidy and easy for you to manage if you slather everything with a layer of "that's subjective!" "that's not core!" "that's not true in a complex edge case that's inconvenient for multi-page PWAs to set up and is largely if not entirely unused for anything but branded 'no connection' pages out in the wild!"

I largely agree with you, dude. You yourself briefly recognize that and appear to try to hold that against me for some reason. But your blindness to what you consider non-core or what you consider a subjective non-issue will make you a less effective advocate.

I'm not going to go through it point by point because I can't. You ignored and hand-waved away the things I care about and was interested in discussing for a hand-wavy future that doesn't exist and we have no clear path to. We don't have deep system integration. We don't have native UI elements on the web. We don't have many things, and while Electron is clearly suitable for many purposes, it is not the web platform and is part of what's keeping it from reaching its full potential. The web's incredibly lightweight, flexible, and powerful! But we can't talk about the problems and work to get a better future if we just ignore them.

> That basically already exists on the desktop in the form of Electron apps. Those apps are universally hated because of it.

I hate a few apps on desktop because they're web apps. Because those specific apps should _not_ be webapps. Other webapps I hate on the desktop _because they use electron_ and maintain yet another browser engine running constantly on my PC--not because they choose to write their UI in HTML and CSS. I don't need 15 browsers running on my computer. Give me a native stub for the taskbar and whatever other functionality is needed, and if you _must_ use HTML then render it in whatever browser I feel like opening the app in. I've got several programs that do this, and they're the best of the bunch (Intel driver assistant, cfosspeed) as they don't have an entire chrome process stack running all the time just in case you maybe want to open their interface (I almost never do).

I understand where you're coming from, but then I think about my daily work.

All of my documents, my spreadsheets, email, chat, and video calling is all done from my browser. I keep Emacs open for scratch just because I can't quit Emacs and I have a terminal open to run some servers. And this has been my working model for at least the last five to six years.

What's remarkable about it is that web apps are doing almost all of the heavy lifting of my work every day. I thought this was worth noting in the context of your comment that web technology is not suitable for making applications.

> Those apps are universally hated because of it.

Maybe they are hated by nerds on reddit and hackernews.

I gather most people are just using the apps and have no idea how they’re built.

> I gather most people are just using the apps and have no idea how they’re built.

They may have no idea how they are built, but they do notice how janky and out of place they are. Take for example Microsoft Teams, have you ever met anyone who actually likes that app? It's insane that a simple chat app uses well over a gigabyte of RAM.

It's absurd that one of the biggest software companies in the world can't seem to produce a sleek, native app. It's purely a cost saving measure. They decided mediocrity is good enough for them and they get away with it because the people making the purchase decisions are not the people who have to use it daily.

Teams is one of the worst apps I ever had the misfortune to use. But that is no fault of electron. Slack was built with electron and it's night and day difference to Teams.

I hate teams as much as anyone but it seems a bit reductive to call it a simple chat app. It certainly doesn't need to take 1GB of RAM, but it's more complex than say, AIM or IRC are.

> one of the biggest software companies in the world can't seem to produce a sleek, native app

For their own operating system that they own the APIs and development tools for, no less!

> I gather most people are just using the apps and have no idea how they’re built.

Because people who develop these only care about one thing: ease of development. They couldn't care less about what users say, and if they cared they wouldn't understand users, because users don't use terms like "latency", or "startup time", or "lag".

Do you have any idea of the software development cost? You may care about your users all you want, maintaining web app and its desktop native counterparts (would you like distinct windows/linux/macos versions?) may be completely unaffordable.

> If you say that [PWAs] lack certain features, then you confirmed my point that it's due to active sabotage and denial of equal rights

How does that follow?

More generally, do you have any sources for your repeated claims of intentional sabotage? You make accusations of ignoring evidence but you have provided none - unless you're saying that apple has already poisoned the well and anything they do is suspect.

All of your questions have already been answered above, but you clearly didn't have much interest in reading it. I will still elaborate more so you don't even have the chance to delude yourself into thinking that you have any point whatsoever.

Apple has a 10/10 vested interest in the kneecapping of PWAs - why?

A Progressive Web App, if allowed to reach its full, un-sabotaged potential, is the technological manifestation of the Digital Markets Act's goals. So it would be utterly absurd for Apple to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into fighting the DMA, just to let PWAs pass which achieves the exact same goals.

Many of the DMA's mandates are an existential threat to Apple's business model and the PWA is the DMA in disguise:

- DMA mandates Apple to allow alternative App Stores & sideloading i.e. Force Apple to end its monopoly on app distribution. PWAs are sideloading by nature. A user "installs" a PWA directly from the web. The browser is the app store. The open web is the distribution platform. This completely bypasses the App Store.

- DMA mandates Apple to allow alternative payment systems. Forcing Apple to let developers use their own payment processors and avoid the 15-30% commission. PWAs use Open Web payments. It can use Stripe, PayPal, or any other payment processor with standard web APIs. Apple gets a 0% cut.

- DMA mandates Apple to increase Developer & User Choice. Give developers the freedom to choose their tools and give users the freedom to choose their apps without being locked in. PWAs are the epitome of choice. They are built with the most universal, open technologies on earth (HTML, CSS, JS). They are cross-platform by default and free users from being locked into a single company's hardware/software ecosystem.

Why would Apple have ANY interest in nurturing a technology that would voluntarily subject them to the very conditions they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying and legal fees to fight against?

The answer is: They wouldn't and they don't.

Apple's actions are not those of a company with simply "low interest". They are the actions of a profit-maximizing gatekeeper actively defending its most lucrative business against an existential threat. Every bug, every delayed feature, and every artificial limitation imposed on PWAs on iOS is a calculated strategic move in this defense. The brief, hostile removal of PWA functionality in the EU was not an outlier, it was Apple showing its true face when it thought it could get away with it.

> This statement alone is evidence that you didn't understand the crux of the issue.

I do

> You are also confusing cause and effect.

I don't

> I clearly explained the root causes for that.

You didn't. You went on a rant about "public perception" and your own experience building mobile web sites.

> If you say that it's because they lack certain features, then you confirmed my point that it's due to active sabotage and denial of equal rights.

See. Again with the rant.

> Be specific, why are they not "good"?

E.g. Reddit's mobile web site loads every post in 3+ seconds. And reloads the full page when you click on a subtree in the comments.

When you scroll through Twitter, it will just randomly load a bunch of stuff and replace your content losing your scroll position. Same with going back from a tweet to the timeline.

Most websites take multiple seconds to display text-only information with broken layouts, layout shifts, and multiple loading states.

To quote myself from 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34517503

--- start quote ---

Features HN developers think are missing from the web to deliver an experience "as polished as a native app": notifications, prompt banners, link interception, Chrome-only non-standards like bluetooth etc.

Features actual users think are missing from the web to deliver an experience "as polished as a native app": actual native-like experience: responsiveness, smooth animations, polished usable and accesible controls, maintaining scroll position and location in the app, fast scrolling through large lists, no loading states for the simplest actions...

I mean, people people keep bringing up Twitter's objectively bad web app as an example of one of the best PWA apps... Have these people never seen an actual native app?

--- end quote ---

> There wouldn't be coincidentally a mysterious opposing force that actively prevents developers from improving those aspects, right?

There is no such entity. Besides, Google invested hundreds of millions of dollars into PWAs, and there are still so few that people can point to even on Android.

> X (formerly Twitter) - has PWA

Yup.

We have really complex web applications like Photopea.

They work fine performance-wise. The example of Reddit’s website being shit is just pointing out that Reddit’s website is shit.

Google maps web applications also works really well. Both Photopea and Google Maps are far more complex than reddit.

At this point I am sure reddit’s website is shit so people are forced to use their app so they can track users better. Not because of some underlying limitation of web technologies.

ht>> I clearly explained the root causes for that.

>You didn't. You went on a rant about "public perception" and your own experience building mobile web sites.

I have no time to engage in your shallow kind of tit for tat, where I do all of the work and you simply respond with infantile one word responses with zero elaboration or outright denial, misrepresentation or just repetition of already debunked narratives. I will still briefly debunk the parts where you put in at least some minor effort of trying to substantiate.

For a more elaborate analysis:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44694037

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44692287

>> Be specific, why are they not "good"? > E.g. Reddit's mobile web site loads every post in 3+ seconds. And reloads the full page when you click on a subtree in the comments. When you scroll through Twitter, it will just randomly load a bunch of stuff and replace your content losing your scroll position. Same with going back from a tweet to the timeline. Most websites take multiple seconds to display text-only information with broken layouts, layout shifts, and multiple loading states.

Those are some specific apps that have bad implementations, not an inherent limitation of the technology, so it's irrelevant to the bigger picture. I asked you for the specific technology. That's like me saying "Give me a specific reason why electric cars will never be a viable technology as you claimed" then you respond with "This specific brand has an electric car with this specific issue". It's such a transparent strategy of deliberately missing the point.

> --- start quote ---

Features HN developers think are missing from the web to deliver an experience ... --- end quote ---

All of those are issues that have already been fixed, so I don't get why you would bring up your severely outdated comment. It also contains aspects for which I clearly explained why and who is to blame for those.

>There is no such entity. Besides, Google invested hundreds of millions of dollars into PWAs, and there are still so few that people can point to even on Android.

I already responded to this in many different comments:

"Google is the primary champion of PWAs, they have a vested interest in its success. The reason I focused on Apple is because its actions are one of a profit-maximizing gatekeeper actively defending its most lucrative business against an existential threat that is PWA. Every bug, every delayed feature, and every artificial limitation imposed on PWAs on iOS is a calculated strategic move in this defense of its walled garden that makes maximum taxation possible."

> If web apps were any good, we'd see a plethora of them on Android. There are none (or very, very, very few).

Android also benefits immensely from the store revenue, it's not called a duopoly for no reason.

> 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 refuse to use Facebook's app. It's been years, I don't remember why, don't ask me.

Their web app is fundamentally broken in half a dozen ways, and has been for years. A couple examples (not all):

If you are in the middle of typing a comment and switch to another app, when you come back, it will reload the display, losing your comment.

Video shorts load in a way that hides the video after about two seconds. Editing the URL to remove the parameters fixes this.

The layout of comments/posts often breaks, forcing me to switch to "ask for desktop version" to make one feature work, then switch back to "mobile version" to make another feature work. Neither is completely functional.

As I said, there are more. As I said, I don't even remember why I rejected their app, but at this point, if they can't make a mobile web site, why would I trust them to make an app?

>If you are in the middle of typing a comment and switch to another app, when you come back, it will reload the display, losing your comment.

This is the rule for a lot of apps and mobile websites now. I don't understand why - we have so much RAM available - but they love to refresh whether there's a reason to or not. And even if there's a reason not to. I can't count the number of times I've tapped on a tab that has a minature version of all the information I want, only for it to be replaced by a loading screen or 404.

A while ago I noticed my battery usage had gone way up. It was because any time I was distracted from my phone (or lost internet connection on a train), I would just leave the display on. Locking the phone meant that I'd lose whatever context I had.

It's probably refreshing because iOS is aggressive about killing websockets, even if you only backgrounded safari for a few seconds. And it's easier to do a reload than determine which messages were missed. It's hard to even tell if the websocket is dead since it just stays open but is unable to receive / send messages.

Or at least this was my experience working on a mobile PWA a few years ago. I don't even own an apple device, it's just the ios bugs were always the most painful / memorable.

> I don't understand why - we have so much RAM available

It’s not even that. There are APIs to persist state beyond app termination. Even if your app gets killed due to memory pressure, it should continue where it left off.

Why are people still using Meta's products? Their products are among the most unbelievably user-hostile things I come across on the web; I wonder why there hasn't been a revolt yet against them

Companies intentionally make their web experiences worse because they can track you better in apps. Even if the trackers are technically the same, even somewhat savvy people using blockers or browser protections generally don't use them on their phones.

This. I dislike most mobile websites as much as I hate the mobile apps. So to pick my poison, I have a formula.

- Banking: Install it on a different android profile because my websites forces me to use the App one way or the other anyway.

- If the site uses an existing open protocol to interact (IndieWeb, Fediverse, etc), use a non-browser/non-electron app that can handle multiple instances of such protocols.

- If not, and it has PWA, is responsive, and I use it at least twice a day, use the PWA (so far I have one).

- If it does not have PWA, but have has nice responsive layout, Firefox Android with uBlock Origin (I use Iornfox).

- For everything else, if I'm outside without a laptop, whine, complain, and use the website in the mobile browser, enable desktop mode if it has a crappy UI.

- If I'm not outside, browse it from my laptop.

I honestly hate PWAs. Last time I tried it, I realized I couldn't open a link in a new tab. Some people tried to make me use the PWA instead of browsing the website, but to me, it just makes my life harder.

On desktop you can, but it opens the tab in the browser.

right, and the problem is that even if you have a good site on mobile it is sitting in the browser, the gateway to all the awful site experiences, to get to your good site people may go through a bunch of crap. Thus they would rather have an app.

The problem is not just to make your site mobile friendly, it is also that the rest of the web isn't.

> You get all these popups everywhere, ads are much more intrusive.

I've literally never had that problem. Firefox Mobile + uBlock Origin eliminates ads.

That works well on Android, but on iOS not so much I think? Also, those damn cookie banners in EU.

Many of those things are true in general, but fwiw I think we've done a decent job making the site fast and usable on mobile. It's comparable to the app in most ways, but many still prefer that.

Thats because you don't use mobile firefox with ublock origin (on android). I very much prefer sites for stuff I do, they provide 100% of same experience, with one exception - can't easily block ads in apps.

Thus mobile is often even a better experience.

I think this is a much more accurate characterization, especially in AutoTempest's case. Their experience on mobile has always been slow and glitchy. I'm not sure what makes their web "app" so heavy, but it's very noticeable.

Can you share details? Or feel free to email me directly, nathan at autotempest. I'd like to learn more about your device, browser, and search criteria so we can try and reproduce what you described.

Mostly that's because devs want to drive people to the app, where they can track you a lot better, so they make their mobile sites shitty on purpose. Plenty of mobile apps are just webapps anyway under the hood. There's absolutely no reason for a mobile site to be massively worse than the app unless the devs want it that way.

I hate everything on mobile. The apps are badly put together. The web sites are crap.

I think Apple's core apps that ship with iOS are about the only things that don't annoy me. They work offline and disconnected for days at a time quite happily and generally work as intended. No one else seems to bother with that and rather ships some fat web turd instead that works occasionally and forces you to sign in all the time.

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.

You come off like a dick, but it's really true.

I saw a tweet where some Zoomer was roasting an "Elder Millenial" for switching devices from a mobile phone to a desktop when making a big purchase (airline tickets? I forget).

I didn't feel like wading into that argument (what's the point? like spitting in a campfire), but... yeah.

Some folks say that we are regressing wrt technological proficiency, but it's really just that more people use technology than they used to. Regression to the mean, maybe? Is that the right expression?

This may not be relevant to the tweet, but big purchases can involve price discrimination, so making the same purchase from a different device/browser/location could get a better price.

Using a website instead of an app isn't signaling some particularly strong computer literacy. Not that it matters - the web, both mobile and general, has been neutered so much over the years that webpages are just as useless, locked down experience siloes as apps; really the main difference in practice is the icon experience and how unobtrusive surveillance is :).

> Using a website instead of an app isn't signaling some particularly strong computer literacy.

I am not claiming it is. But it is different from what some people got introduced to. That's enough already to strike fear.

But what do you mean with websites have been neutered? Didn't HTML, CSS, and JS only got more capabilities over time?

> Didn't HTML, CSS, and JS only got more capabilities over time?

They did, but almost all of them are just there so serve developers, to enable them to build even more sophisticated interactive billboards. The web serves marketing and advertising. So do apps, but the web does it better in many ways.

What I meant by websites being neutered, is along the dimension of empowering users. Webapps as tools that provide functionality and play well with others. Composability, interoperability, end-user authonomy. Those are anathema to modern web.

And as I said, apps ain't better. It's really "pick your poison", whether you want to be fighting with your browser sandbox, or with your OS sandbox - and half of the things you need sit on the server-side anyway, out of your reach.

Most people can’t explain the difference between a website and an app, to them the web browser is just a more confusing construct with additional overheads (tabs/links etc).

This is an unnecessarily rude and reductive take. Tons of people without your exalted computer science background are perfectly competent and comfortable with using computers “well”.

Their mental model of how they LIKE to use them is different from yours though - and that should be ok instead of arousing angst.

Why do you think people have to be "computer illiterate" to prefer apps? That’s pretty narrow, and obviously just an explanation you came up with to fit your mental model.

I just find apps more practical and convenient than websites in a browser most of the time, on my phone.

If you read my comment with more attention to detail, you will see, that I did not claim, that one has to be computer illiterate to prefer apps.

But aside from that, even if I had claimed that, it wouldn't imply, that anyone preferring an app must be computer illiterate.

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.

Devs are usually disconnected from the average user's experience. I too used to be the same.

Weren't PMs supposed to fix this problem?

The dev's ambassador to the common man.

> She couldn't understand what I was saying

I don’t buy this for one second. The web is well known, and well understood - I’ve never run into anyone, in any age group, with any level of education, who wouldn’t understand what a website is.

Either you’re being overly dramatic and exaggerating here, or you had a very difficult time pronouncing the words you were intending to say.

You might be surprised. I can assure you it happened. And my friend is a 35yo physiotherapist who uses a website on a daily basis to manage her appointments. I guess what was confusing to her was the fact that it was not just a "simple" website where you would find information (blogs, Wikipedia, whatever). It was something where you would say something and it would respond dynamically. As a software engineer, we know there's no difference. It's just a few POST endpoints anyway. For a user without technical background? The way I described it sounded like it should be an app.

Now, you would say that these people (35yo) used to use Facebook (and maybe Google meet) and such on desktop. So they should know that many things can be achieved through a browser. But it seems like when thinking about mobile, people think differently. A website that "does something" other than displaying information (which is a weird and blurry definition) must be an app. I'm absolutely sure my friend has never thought it could be possible to use Facebook on through her mobile browser. If you access something with your mobile, it must be through an app.

No, a lot of non-technical people don't know the difference.

My friend was trying to explain an app to me. How everyone at his work was amazed at how well it worked compared to their Salesforce solution that they were forced to use.

The app? A website. Not even a web application. It was just a brochure type web catalog that allowed them to show their customer the brands and products they sold.

Other's I've told about ChatGPT or Claude, have trouble finding it. They go into the App Store and search for the apps. They are inundated non-official versions. All with similar titles. Some stop, some install the wrong versions.

It’s not a given that “web page” has any particular meaning to people who don’t own a computer or laptop. Even people with only a cell phone, many don’t browse the web on mobile. Is the google sign in screen that pops up on a google tv a webpage, is not a question a lot of people can answer with confidence.

> 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.

I think this is probably more true than not in terms of proportion of apps that offer a native client interface to an existing web service, but I don't think it's true for Reddit or other large companies who's primary business is selling advertising and data.

If that’s the case, why do so many websites try to push you into using the app even if you have no problem with using the website?

People just don't like bloated JS heavy websites

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.

Businesses want you to use their app for a few reasons: it’s stickier because they can start sending you push notifications right away without even signing in/making an account, they get their logo right on your home screen, there are expedited login methods available like FaceID, they bypass most normal ad blocking so they can show users ads but also get much more reliable telemetry, they get access to APIs that allow them to request/slurp additional user data like your contacts list, persistent location services, and camera roll metadata, plus they can access a broader set of system APIs for fingerprinting purposes (even if against the ToS).

Then there’s a measurement element where app installs became an important KPI around the time ad blocking became more popular and interfered with detailed website engagement tracking, creating a self-fulfilling kind of thing.

On top of this I think another factor is that many websites are in terrible shape, super bloated by ten thousand tracking pixels and third party snippets added willy nilly by marketing teams using Tag Manager, so apps benefit from gatekeeping that bloat to a degree.

When most people want mobile apps, it makes no sense to develop a mobile website with feature parity for the handful of people that will use it.

They are potentially operationally cheaper. Answering a few API requests is cheaper than sending the same HTML over and over and over again.

The cost is minimal. It also needs to be offset against the cost of maintaining both unless you go app only. Some app seems to wrap a web view anyway.

“On the web you can open multiple tabs” - Interesting how people categorise things as only possible with browser. You can design experience in app to allow having multiple searches or whatever user needs multiple tabs for.

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.

Your wife probably just wants a smooth user experience and an app delivers on that. Apps have a clear way of installing and onboarding.

I discovered that all our self hosted applications were easily adopted after I added SSO. My wife just wants one account to rule them all.

I got her accustomed to installing web apps by adding all the links in a shared note. She clicks the link, pins the site and uses SSO to log in. Easy.

> Your wife probably just wants a smooth user experience and an app delivers on that. Apps have a clear way of installing and onboarding.

To a certain extent, I fall in this camp. With privacy in general.

Without dedicating my life to it I won't be able to beat the system I live in, so why not just accept it and take what I can from it?

At the last company I worked for we wanted to shut down our app to save expenses. The idea being that most people would just the website if we removed the app. It seems like you didn't gain anything by making an app, you just created more expenses and complexity.

but did the idea pan out? did the users switch to the website or did you lose em?

Well don't leave us hanging! We need the anecdata!

Thank you for trying to resist app-insanity. It really sucks that my doctor's office tries to get me to use one. No, I don't want to download an app for the one time I need it each year. Just make a freaking website. There are some exceptions like a calculator app that is completely offline.

Interesting. Why do you think so many websites try to foist apps on you if people will voluntarily download them anyway?

My guess would be that it's because (as the above poster says) "app users are much more engaged than website users" and only "half our" moved without nudging - the sites would like more engagement from all users.

That said, the harder you "nudge" me, the more I want to avoid the app and the whole business. Especially if you have any other dark patterns - I will assume you want me to download your app just so you can abuse me better.

My wife and daughter seem to be very receptive to dark patterns. It's about education and understanding but you also need to care. They don't. Alas.

Because they don't accept their website is not worth an app. Most of that long tail of businesses has a transactional relationship with users, who by very nature would ideally want to think about them as little as possible and only for the short moment of actual transaction.

In short: I do install apps of main platforms and physical shops I frequent. It's usually vastly better than a website, even if it just wraps a webview. But I don't want to install an app for every site I visit, for the same reason I don't want to go on a date with every stranger that smiles at me when I pass them by on the street.

Yeah, as others have said, I'm guessing it's primarily for the enhanced engagement and retention. And come to think of it, I've experienced it myself in reverse, in that social media is much easier to ignore when the app icon isn't right there on your home screen.

Apps have the ability to send notifications, web apps meanwhile have to deal with a pesky browser that prompts you to provide explicit consent for them to do that.

The ones that do are usually the ones that know people will be reluctant to download.

Maybe OP offers some really valuable products?

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

Mobile apps do not bundle a browser. They use Chrome/Android System WebView on Android or WKWebView on iOS. Capacitor is one project that lets you build on top of installed browser engines, unlike Electron, which bundles Chrome.

A new Capacitor app has a size of 3-5 MB at most.

If such a simple app has 100 MB, they bundle shit like Facebook SDK and such.

What about just using PWABuilder? Sure maybe it's not as nice an experience as a native app, but the savings on costs and time with having 1 product mean you can do way more innovation elsewhere

Proper native apps simply have better UX.

Of course it’s possible to mess that up, but the default is superior.

I would say using the web"app" give a better user experience since you always have the latest version without the need for updates. Only if offline use is possible an app would be necesarry.

I don't really know or care whether I'm using the latest version of anything. To care about that, I would first of all need to be aware that I'm not using the latest version.

By the latest I also lean the lost secure and patched version of an app. You should care.

There's no reason a website should be more up to date than an app. Could just as well be the other way around.

You need to update the app on your device. That's automated for a lot of users but not all. A web app should be maintained by the developers and should be updated to the latest stable version at all times. A web app shouldn't depend on your OS either so it would also run on OS'es that aren't supported anymore.

That's fair, but the number of people who don't have automatic app updates is clearly miniscule, not really relevant for this consideration.

I do grant that web is likely more up to date. But only because they can ship immediately, without the app store review process. Technically web could also be slower to release, nothing guarantees web freshness.

The question is - did you notice users uptick when adding an app, or just some web users moved to it?

Mostly it was just moving from mobile web. I think it it is contributing somewhat to long term growth as well, but that's more difficult to determine amongst other factors.

Doesn't an app allow for caching which makes the whole experience much more responsive?

I think antifingerprinting means that browsers are constantly re-loading and rerendering tons and tons of resources. The web is much much slower than it could be in theory. If you have an siloed app then you don't need to worry about that and can reuse everything. You open a new tab and nearly everything displays instantly (except the different car or whatever you're displaying)

This would also decrease your network bandwidth load. So a win for you and your customers

I cannot agree more and this has always been a pet peeve of mine.

Most native apps are some half gig large where even the heaviest website is a few mb. They dont let you highlight text and have other bizarre design choices. Even worse, they request importing contacts list which isnt even an option on the web.

Native apps could be butter but more often than not they are like margarine. Smooth, oily, and not good for you.

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.

Reddit is one of the cases where a native app makes sense. Some of the 3rd party Reddit apps were great.

But I'll eat my hat before I'll install Reddit's own app. Reddit killing off 3rd party apps is why I post here and not there.

How does an app for Reddit make sense? It’s an image and text platform. There’s no weird hardware apis required.

Native apps make sense when you need to tap in to platform specific features like the Lidar api and such. They don’t make any sense for most websites.

The 3rd party Reddit apps made an effort to be more 'native', and actually used native UI elements to make rendering and interactions faster than the web page could.

WAAAAAY too often the 1st party native app is exactly what the other poster said: a browser context with access to some local native API's in order to hoover more data about the user. It is rare that a first-party app actually has some effort put into it to be a quality app. Is in fact so rare, that the sites that actually put in the effort suffer because folks can't believe that a native app for a site could actually be better or worth it.

I think the parent's point was that an app for reddit only makes sense because they deliberately don't add the features you like to the mobile site. There's no reason those features couldn't work perfectly well in a browser, they just choose not to (and to kill off third party apps).

If Figma runs perfectly well in a web browser, Reddit can do the same. It was built for and evolved almost entirely within the browser, like many other Internet forums. Pure data grab.

Reddit runs well IMO if you go to old.reddit.com. The mobile site is borderline useless, presumably intentionally.

According to Reddit's "Staff Platform Engineer (Web Platform Team)":

--- start quote ---

Old Reddit has the advantage of being pretty much static non-interactive content. No video, tiny thumbnails, and barely any JS or styling. Some people like this and some don't, but the end result is a very lean website that performs well out of the box.

https://x.com/jimsimon_/status/1841087335414280571

Suffice to say, I'm on the frontend perf team and we're acutely aware of these problems

https://x.com/jimsimon_/status/1841092341991403974

--- end quote ---

This was in October 2024.

Which is of course a bunch of bullshit when you consider that Reddit's backend returns most data in under 400ms, and it takes Reddit frontend 3+ seconds to render it

It could be that they are just incompetent.

Figma shows what it is possible to do in a browser, but the cost of doing so is basically prohibitive. The level of persistence and technical nous needed to stand it up are on par with getting a first-person shooter running at an interactive frame rate on a 286 -- they basically reimplemented a browser within the browser.

I’ve worked on teams that made complex production web apps with a tiny tiny fraction of Reddit’s cash flow.

Figma is sort of an Apollo Project among webshit, isn't it? IIRC they did rather extreme amount of R&D to make the webapp performant in spite of the web as a platform. Great that they did, and I hope their insights will keep trickling down to everyone else - but I don't think they're currently an example anyone can actually follow.

It’s great, but it’s not Apollo-level anything. Most games are far more interactively and visually complex. Apples to oranges with UX and interaction problems to solve, but certainly not depth and complexity. I’ve certainly experienced bugs in Reddit’s interface before — there seems to be this idea that they have to be so risk averse that they can’t do anything significant— I’ll bet you a pizza that their official app which implements all the features that people really want to use is made with JS/HTML on the back end anyway.

They’re not indifferent to browsers (less data mineable contexts) so much as actively hostile. For the past few years some things I have to add “-reddit” to my Google searches, because they killed i.reddit.com, which was the only useable, fast, non-complete-shit mobile site they have ever built. Their old. subdomain isn’t really readable in a cell phone.

Their new version is incredibly slow, moves me to sub-pages trying to expand comment threads (very disruptive if I saw something in the Google preview snippet and want to control F to it, but whatever comment that was literally isn’t loaded), and sometimes outright fails to load. now I can’t/wont use it.

So screw reddit, it’s a glorified q&a site, with sub forums run by fedora neckbeards, that’s gotten uppity and chosen to be hostile to users. And for some reason Google hasn’t just downranked it to death. The other day there was a thread complaining that their AI responses are reducing websites clicks. I hope that it is very damaging to reddit.

There are extensions that redirect to old.reddit.com with mobile friendly CSS.

> make rendering and interactions faster than the web page could.

McMaster-Carr begs to differ. Hell even old.reddit is pretty snappy (but deliberately shittily rendered on mobile). Websites can be fast if you don't stuff them with bullshit or degrade then on purpose to drive traffic to the app.

Right -- their website is a great example of a great web app. Their web site is brilliantly organized. But their revenue comes from sales of their products, not harvesting user data, so they have little need to add all the extra jank.

But if they had a native app (do they?) I imagine they would have the wherewithal to build the app natively, with the same stellar navigation of their website, and maybe some native-only features? Imagine if you could use the 3d sensor + camera of an iPhone, and point it at an assembly, and the app would identify the parts it could, and you could order with one click, or integrate with a local ERP or other systems...

Simply because native UI is faster and more functional and better integrated and better thought out than anything webdevs of any company can put together even if they cared to do it well. Sites like Reddit, or platforms like Slack or Discord, are perfect use cases for native clients, because there's a lot of space to make them better and more streamlined than the webapp.

Unfortunately, that only ever happens when some third party gets involved, and rarely survives long - but the experience, however brief, is glorious. See: RIF ("Reddit is Fun") on Android; Ripcord (Slack/Discord client) on Windows.

It’s a website for showing text and pictures. I know I’m being a bit reductive, but there is absolutely no reason why reddits functionality couldn’t be extremely performant in a browser. In fact the Reddit mobile site actually is very snappy, it’s just full of nagware trying to push you on to the app.

They would seamlessly in the background pre-cache all the articles and images coming up in your feed so if you had intermittent connections like on the subway, you could browse nearly[0] unaffected.

[0] Unfortunately, the app I used in the before-time did not implement queuing for submitting comments/posts so that functionality was broken while you were between stations, and videos weren't cached.

Web apps can do that too with service workers, it is just a bit of a pain in the ass.

And if you ever push a service worker with a bug, then you make the browser permanently unable to display the site unless the user knows how to manually remove the service worker. I've seen it happen on Gmail.

The main reason they make sense is that no matter which version of real reddit you use it's got irritating behaviors. But a browser based better reddit wrapper could easily also make sense.

There isn't even a need for JavaScript for reddit though it does seem to require it. I posted this without JavaScript enabled so it obviously would be fine for reddit too. Using an app for reddit doesn't make any sense to me at all. Banking apps make sense, they are doing some crazy device finger-printing to avoid id theft. But when the goal is to convey information use html and css. If you are taking payments then yeah maybe some JS. If it is a game, try wasm. Apps are for things that need access to hardware that the browser doesn't allow, which these days is a short list.

Reddit is in full in AI data hoarding mode. Try to load their website with fingerprinting entirely mitigated and you'll be greeted by impossible are you a robot validation

If you’re on a VPN it straight up blocks you with no captcha until you log in.

>fingerprinting entirely mitigated

This is an interest of mine, but I’m still fingerprinted per a recent comment. May I ask:

How?

> a game, try wasm

On iOS? Waste of time for anything but simple 2d games.

That is in context of Reddit being Reddit. It kept screwing with its mobile site for years (now it's FUBAR btw), so third-party apps were the only sane way to use it on mobile. Even Reddit’s official app used to be a decent third party app - Alien Blue. Then Reddit bought it and made it pathetic. That’s why people used third party reddit apps.

On desktop, the browser’s always been the best way to use Reddit — as long as old.reddit still works. If you are on a non-Safari browser, there's also RES.

Same goes for many other sites. Like HN — it’s fine on mobile browser unless I bump the font size, then it pretty much breaks. But I’m not installing an HN app for something the mobile usage time share is barely 5–10%.

We’ve forgotten what an “app” was

I too switched from Reddit to HN during the API protests of '23. But I always browsed through old.reddit anyway, I never used the third party apps. I'm aware of names like RIF and that everyone said they were great, but what was great about them?

Better features, less ads, smoother experience and in the case of Apollo—the one I used—it just looked much better.

So apart from the ad blocker, that's ... features, smoother, better. What?

Edit: I'm not trying to be rude (it comes naturally). But you just explained "great" as "better, with more". I guess smooth might mean faster, which might be because it isn't doing ads and tracking. It seems to come back to third-party being the crucial difference, and "app" not mattering.

UI/UX is not that tricky. Caring about your users is the hard part usually.

Third party clients could be webapps, too, of course.

Apps can bypass websecurity (CORS fetch), that allows for third party clients for example on video platforms using their internal APIs.

I don't think the reddit clients work this way though.

Caching and loading times mostly.

I'm on old.reddit.com too and I use the mobile app (including the 3rd party ones back when they existed) for one primary reason: Two windows I can quickly switch back and forth on. On my phone I use Reddit to look up things. I can have a Reddit thread on one window and a Google search on the other and go back and forth. In a browser switching tabs back and forth is painful, often reloading pages, losing the spot in the browser, having this url bar and top bar taking up tons of screen space.

I imagine it depends on how you use it. I came to Reddit late and never got into the old interface. I commented a lot on technical subreddits and didn't do much with the doomscrolling ones.

I used Boost. Its ads were not intrusive (and I despise ads) and the UI was written with a small touchscreen in mind. If not for my distaste for phone keyboards, I'd say it was a better experience than the website on a desktop.

Would it be possible for a mobile browser to have a better experience? I don't know. I value my sanity too much to do web development. But Reddit was absolutely determined to make its mobile site unusable and the official Reddit app had a bad reputation (and I wouldn't give those bastards the satisfaction after being nagged so much to install it), so a 3rd party app was the only reasonable solution.

I hold phones sideways, then I forget that it's weird to do. People like apps (and mobile versions of sites) because of human hand anatomy, I guess.

That's because reddit on mobile browser sucks ass (feels like it's intentionally made to suck) even more so than its native app.

I don't think being nativr is what made 3rd party apps great

> Some of the 3rd party Reddit apps were great.

Because they were competently designed. But you could put that same design into a web page and it would work fine.

Redreader is still around as a good 3rd party app.

Some of the third party apps were quite good, certainly better than the reddit mobile site, but that's mostly because the reddit mobile site is just so deliberately awful.

There aren't really any major technical reasons why the mobile site couldn't be as good.

That was part of the 3rd party app purge. Before then, the 3rd party apps could see NSFW content just fine.

I use HN+Tildes instead. I left a couple years before the API fiasco because I was sick of the ragebait and toxic culture.

This is so funny. For me, it was as if the "monkey's paw" had played me.

Back in the early 2000s, I loved desktop applications. My thinking was that there's no way a web app could do what a desktop application could. I loathed slow, proprietary, online-requiring, HTML based web apps .

25 years have passed, and now we DO have some "native" device apps... but they are just HTML web elements bubdled in a freaking custom browser.

Edit: anyone remember the "PortableApps" wave? I loved having that in a usb drive.

You never experienced the horror that is XAML. Not HTML, not native control either, it’s a weird middle ground of platform lock-in that you couldn’t escape until recently.

What I miss are the days where one could Win32 call a window up, and it looked like every other. Not sugar for me and none for thee.

I cut my teeth programming GUIs, I still like making GUIs - immediate mode guis, event based guis, animated guis and informational guis. I left front-end web dev when every 6 months there was a new framework, a new new, and everyone dropped everything for it. I understand why React ate the world at the time but it’s gotten to the point where it’s no longer standards driven, its ecosystem driven, and even then it’s leaking.

What I love about these hybrid apps though is that from Apache Cordova (PhoneGap) onwards, they’ve all looked really really good. Proving that a normal user can’t tell the difference. Which makes solo-dev or small-dev dev easier. Go with what you know. No need to learn flutter, or SwiftUI, or Kotlin.

Svelte’s been pretty great in terms of “just use web standards where it makes sense” so far.

The most annoying thing is repeat questions ( reddit, linkedin, facebook, ... ). If I already told the site 10 times that I don't want to use the mobile app, stop asking me. That's even worse than cookie consent banners, at least those stay away

Your comment got me a bit curious and so I spent time playing around creating a simple Android app using webView for my personal website and got it working, the only permission I added was INTERNET. So what's the next level of awfulness - do I add additional permissions and then additional information can be presented to my website server, or would I actually have to implement an additional path to collect the kind of info these apps are trying for?

Speaking of apps that are just wrappers around websites – it’s possible to do that in just 50 kb: https://f-droid.org/packages/us.spotco.maps

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.

If it's not a game or a large company's app, it's probably a web view app. At my company I work on the website, and we have an app that is essentially just a bunch of web views of the website. Why we need an app I don't know. I suppose people are just used to apps more than they are websites, which makes me sad.

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.

Why tha hell am I required to use a locked down american device to access my public services in Europe? This is not ok.

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.

I totally agree. So many sites nag me to use an app, nope, your website is perfect, I don't need your code running on my device 24/7.

:-) 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.

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

What makes margarine not "good for you?"

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

> where even the heaviest website is a few mb

Not nowadays they aren't.

And haven't been for at least a decade!

500MB average seems like a gross exaggeration. I agree apps are oversize but I have maybe 2 native apps on mobile that are so large.

Average, yes, probably an exaggeration. Some apps

iOS:

    wechat:          740meg
    gmail:           672
    google chat:     585
    uber:            582
    tiktok:          572
    headspace:       498
    instagram:       467
    doulingo:        462
    bank of america: 456
    capital one:     435
    expedia:         412
    linkedin:        402
    doordash:        392
    google:          379
    facebook:        365
    unitied airlines:355
    chase:           352
    google photos:   348
    line:            346
    amex:            339
    google maps:     336
    youtube:         329
    booking.com:     320
    citi:            319
    amazon music:    317
    snapchat:        316
    lyft:            307
    wells fargo:     292
    strava:          283
    twitch:          279
    rotten tomatoes: 262
    airbnb:          254
    youtube music:   245
    whatsapp:        239
    mlb:             220
    discord:         212
    tinder:          202

of course Apple doesn't list the size of their own apps like Apple Maps, Photos, Music, etc...

I am quite surprised at a few apps I know are just a webpage, because I can to go to the webpage and see it's exactly the same, are still 40meg to 80meg. I'd expect them be able to be as small as a few K. Open a webview, navigate to https://mycompany.com. The end

> of course Apple doesn't list the size of their own apps like Apple Maps, Photos, Music, etc...

You can find that in the phone storage settings:

    iOS:           12 G
    Keynote:      498 M
    Numbers:      482 M
    Pages:        455 M
    Clips:        213 M
    Maps:          81 M
    Watch:         70 M
    Find My:       60 M
    Music:         38 M
    iTunes U:      35 M
    Support:       34 M
    Podcasts:      32 M
    Books:         31 M
    iCloud Drive:  30 M
    Freeform:      19 M
    Fitness:       18 M
    Notes:         17 M
    Journal:       15 M
    Home:          10 M
    App Store:      8 M
    Weather:        8 M
    Mail:           7 M
    Files:          4 M
    Health:         3 M
    Measure:        3 M
    Voice Memos:    3 M
    Calendar:       2 M
    Clock:          2 M
    Safari:         2 M
    Shortcuts:      2 M
    Translate:      2 M
    TV:             2 M
    Calculator:     1 M
    Facetime:       1 M
    iTunes Store:   1 M
    Tips:           1 M
    Wallet:       934 K
    Messages:     860 K
    Photos:       791 K
    Compass:      712 K
    Camera:       635 K
    Contacts:     598 K
    Phone:        570 K
    Magnifier:    516 K
    Passwords:    213 K

There's also an "Apple Inc." listing, which appears to be "shared" between a lot of their apps which clocks in at 204M

My takeaway from having gone through the list and compared to the various 3rd party apps:

1) Apps can absolutely be smaller. Plenty of stuff in the <200MB range including things like Signal, OBD Fusion and Infuse

2) Games are often big, but there's a surprising number of "simple" apps that are larger than some of the games

3) The largest apps seem to be from companies that you would expect to be doing the most tracking of your data

4) Apple's first party app sizes probably explain a little about why they weren't in a hurry to upgrade storage sizes

> Maps: 81 M

Is MapKit considered iOS or Maps?

No idea, those are the numbers as reported in the settings app. I would assume it's part of the OS since it's a framework for other apps to tap into mapping functionality. For comparison Sygic is 324 MB. Waze is 170 MB, Tom Tom is 251 MB, Magic Earth is 135 MB and OSM And is 238 MB

> uber: 582

Not to defend Uber, but there was a post here some time ago where one engineer explained why it's so large (sadly can't find it anymore): it's due to a lot of different implementations for different markets (some masks may have slight differences in different countries) and their choise to re-implement the masks multiple times.

A few different UIs don't justify hundreds of extra megabytes. We just collectively stopped caring.

UI definitions should add very little storage space. Different images and videos might add a lot.

I thought these couldn't possibly be right and you must be including their storage and cache usage, but I'm seeing similar reported on my iPhone. Rounded to the nearest megabyte.

   Gmail: 612mb
   Facebook: 359mb
   YouTube: 303mb
   Amex: 365mb

I'm still skeptical (or just hopeful?) that there's some storage accounting bug here, and it's including caches. I'm not in a place to plug it into Xcode right now, maybe someone else can check the actual IPAs?

edit: also, I do see Apple's own apps in mine. Music reports 39mb; Photos 791kB (lol?)

Amex being 300mb is genuinely hilarious. What does that app even do?

Probably doing CHIA in the background. ;)

its including cache + data files not just an 'APP'

my youtube is literally 10gb because I use it a lot, doesnt mean youtube is "bloated" or "heavy"

I am leaving out the "data" figure in my counts. As I said, I think there's a bug/misrepresentation in the figures shown in iOS settings.

they use react native maybe

On Android, is the Gmail app actually a PWA? Saying this as Google tried to push PWA hard, but it doesn’t seem like they do it for their own stuff.

Now I understand why those 128 GB get full so quick.

Chase Mobile for iOS is 350MB; far from 500, but still baffling why an app would need to be that large just to show me some numbers.

Capital One is 435MB...

Garmin Connect is 518MB for some stupid reason, while Strava is half that and Gaia GPS (great app), is under 100.

Almost certainly has to do with how the app is built. Most thoughtfully built native SDK (UIKit, etc) apps clock in well under the 100MB mark, often under half or a quarter that.

Bloat like that is usually due to unnecessarily convoluted tech stacks pulling in a list of dependencies that goes out to Mars and back, or for globally targeted apps sometimes it’s translations for everything in the app for hundreds of different languages.

"clock in well under the 100MB mark"

But this is still incredibly ridiculously comically gross. The fact that we can afford it these days is an irrelevant seperate thing. These numbers are just unjustifiable for what most apps actually do.

Yeah, especially if I can make a desktop app under 10 MB with the same functionality and features (obviously non-Electron).

I mean, it scales with complexity. Naturally, well-made native SDK apps bumping up against 100MB are more likely to be highly functional, while simple apps are very small.

For a couple examples pulled from my TestFlight list, there’s a social media site reader app that’s 7.6MB and a text editor that’s 697KB. Those sizes aren’t the least bit unreasonable.

What are these you are listing?

Whats the business case to invest in building these well and as small as possible?

Heck, if you are a world business and the app isn't your core value prop, whats your case for investing anything more than the bare minimum in creating your app?

Yeah but the native SDK sucks and isn't cross-platform, I don't blame anyone for not using it

UIKit is fine, good even, SwiftUI isn’t fully baked yet, Android Framework definitely sucks, and Jetpack Compose is decent but needs work. Both platforms have at least one SDK that’s good to use, and personally I’d take them over fighting the extra layer of issues something like RN adds on top of the native issues that devs will encounter regardless of the SDK used.

Cross platform frameworks really aren’t the magic wand they’re sold as.

Cross-platform is very much not a magic wand, but it's still often easier than building the same thing in two different native SDKs, and I can see why people do it.

Disagree about UIKit, mainly cause of Autolayout, unless it's gotten reworked in the past 8 years. When I started using RN, I had zero web experience, and still it was way quicker to set up a basic UI than in the UIKit stuff I'd been doing for years. And for all that setup, Autolayout doesn't even seem to future-proof your stuff that well. An abandoned ObjC iPhone app I wrote in high school using C-style macros for layout worked perfectly fine on the newer screen sizes that broke most other apps.

I thought maybe I was stupid, but the other iPhone devs I worked with constantly had problems with Autolayout. Maybe a real expert iPhone dev won't, but it shouldn't take that.

The thing about UIKit is that you really need to forget about the drag and drop UI editor (XIBs and storyboards). They make everything including autolayout much more painful than they need to be.

Pure code UIKit using autolayout’s anchors API is quite serviceable, and if you follow recommendations (use safe area and keyboard constraints! They exist for a reason) reasonably futureproof. The iOS apps I’ve worked on have needed very little change year to year for quite some time at this point.

That's true, though some will tell you the opposite. But even then, the pure code autolayout seemed a lot harder to use than HTML/CSS. The fact that so many people got it that wrong says something. Like yeah a desktop website might break on mobile, but I'm talking about a mobile screen just getting slightly longer or something.

Gaia used to be so great and I used it every day but it’s really hard to support Outside.

Yes, the Outside aspect is annoying. Did you switch to another app?

Is it? You can't easily tell with iOS apps because the container might be that big, but the app on your phone is a fraction of that. The container might contain multiple versions.

The UK's new electronic visa application form app is over 200MB and it is literally only a 3 page application form. Program efficiency at its finest!

> If you've ever opened Reddit, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or practically any popular service on your phone's web browser, you've likely encountered it.

Another website that asks to Get The App is https://imgur.com/ , every time you open a link to just view that image you instantly got asked to Get The App. It's really annoying!

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"

Reddit used to have a really excellent mobile experience at i.reddit.com. It was a minimalist fast-loading mobile-first formatted version of the website. Unfortunately they shut it down not too long ago.

I personally really like the old.reddit.com experience on my phone. Everything works surprisingly well. Sure you have to zoom in and scroll around and I know some people hate zooming in but it's never bothered me.

I personally can't stand apps that stop me from zooming in on things.

My sister complains about the information density of old Reddit being too high but that's exactly what I like about it!

I'm one of those people that dislike having to zoom and (importantly) pan around on a 2D canvas.

I miss Apollo.

That was the day I stopped reading reddit.

A recent mobile web A/B test on Reddit will tell you when opening a link that the subreddit has not “been reviewed” and blocks access unless you open on the app or login.

They’re this close to just 100% shutting down the mobile web version.

And it literally blocks users from using messenger in the mobile browser, I need to ask for desktop website

Websites shouldn’t know if you’re on desktop because they are clearly gonna abuse that bit of information.

Web browsers were designed by naive, pre surveillance capitalism developers

I feel the same way about reddit. Modals are bigger than the page with unclickable buttons.

Profile/settings icon/button is rendered half way or fully out of the page.

Chat feature is completely unusable

I really think Reddit did it as a rebrand. It's somehow 20 years old and still gets teenagers.

Social media almost always skews older as it ages, beyond the natural pace of time.

AOL became mostly seniors as did Facebook and Yahoo. Reddit has not only shaken off most of the aging legacy users but had also captured a new generation of effectively children.

I personally don't like what they've done but it's worked.

The younger users view it as an app with a website as opposed to a website with an app

Unfortunately they have a major problem that is going to hit them soon: they rely on volunteer moderators to run the site for them, and the young people aren't doing it.