This isn't about the app being unfinished, it's about Google deliberately half-assing support for open standards. They want you to be stuck in their calendar ecosystem so they make sure there's more friction adding a calendar from outside than adding someone else's Google calendar.
And this is why I usually say, I will look at it when I am in front of my computer again for most things, side from a free does where I mainly am reading.
Most YouTubers still have sponsor sections on their videos so you probably do see some ads. Also why not pay for YouTube premium to remove the ads while still supporting the creators?
If you want to support the creators is through affiliate marketing by buying whatever they're selling, or by subscribing to them on Patreon – they earn next to nothing from YouTube.
I found that installing facebook dot com to my Home Screen on iOS works acceptably. Lets me check in on things every now and then and still be confident they’re very limited in what they can track.
Messenger doesn’t work but luckily I rarely if ever use it.
When I got a new phone about a year ago, I decided that I wouldn't be installing any traditional social media apps (Tusky doesn't count) and that I'd use the web when "necessary". This has been a very successful experiment and resulted in me looking at Instagram _maybe_ once per week.
When I rejoined X at the start of this year I consciously decided not to install the app on my phone. It's addicting enough in the web browser on my laptop.
So I have zero social media networks on my phone and, looking at everyone around me who does, I'm very pleased with this decision.
X won't even let me register an account without downloading the stupid app. Then I download it and it just says something isn't right and refuses to let me register the account anyway. Probably thinks I'm a bot.
It's probably better this way. Hopefully bots will kill off social media before even more countries decide to ban it.
I just finished making a social application (for skateboarding) with the express intent of making it fully featured/pleasant to use on mobile simply as web app, without login or installation.
Web is such a powerful platform and so many people still treat their web applications like they're just interactive documents. I think the most bothersome thing on mobile web is if an application has shifting framing ("chrome") when you pan around, like you're looking at a PDF.
Let me know, but I developed it almost entirely focused on iPhone SE as a target to give myself the most claustrophobic possible experience, and I think that helped guide a lot of the decisions.
At this point the barrier for me to install an app is pretty high. If you're going to needlessly gate certain functions behind an app that work on a desktop browser (or could work in-browser), then I just won't use those functions. If by extension that degrades the value I get from your site, then I just won't use the site, and I won't be contributing to ADU stats you promote to advertisers.
Every single company has turned this into a situation where I cannot trust your apps with privacy or security, and the risk and hassle isn't worth the install.
Theres a gym I work out at, and that I have been going to for nearly a year now, and they have an app you can use to check in, schedule classes, whatever. I don't actually know because I never downloaded the app, I just use my phone number to check in every time I go. I don't want more apps on my phone, not for the gym, not for fast food, maybe my bank and the apps I need to communicate with friends and family, but the majority of it is pointless bloat they push on you for no good reason.
I’m living in peak appification at my gym. It’s one of those 24x7 places and an app is required to unlock the door. I find it amusing that part of the installation process requires me to deny always-on location sharing - why would I need the app to know my location when I’m not at the door?
You should find it insulting that they are likely selling that location data, not even to the highest bidder, but to a data broker that resells that data to anyone that will buy it for any price they'll pay.
Yes, this is standard practice in the app industry. I guarantee every app outside of f-droid that has location access is tracking you 24/7 and selling the log.
The flip side is: I have an Audioguide app with reams of fancy of AI features. Even a basic non-AI one is we use GPS in the background to auto-trigger when you approach certain checkpoints on your tour, and we don't want you staring or constantly manually fiddling with the phone when you're on a tour (stuff just not possible in Web apps).
I get it, "I'm just traveling, why do I need to download an app which will be useless when I'm done traveling". Just delete it then, takes two steps!
Our reviews between our Web App and iOS app are like 2 sigma apart.
The issue is that people often forget to uninstall these apps almost all the time. Apps like Delta, Southwest etc. are the perfect candidate for this.
We require something similar to ephemeral apps that exist only for a limited period and automatically get deleted later. If the OS could provide such a feature by default, it would be a blessing.
However, this again contradicts the commercial interests of many companies and services, so Android and iOS
will likely never implement it.
Appclips in iOS are a decent shot at that. But require it to be under 15MB, which is really hard to hit, especially if you use RN, but we'll be dumping RN to make this happen as a next step.
>>The issue is that people often forget to uninstall these apps almost all the time
Fundamentally though, iOS will auto-offload the unused apps for you (you won't get any notifications). For all intents and purposes, it is an ephemeral app already.
When it comes to airline tickets I've been able to check in to a flight through a web page and then add the boarding pass to my Google Wallet without having to install that airline's app before. I'm pretty sure Apple has had some similar kind of a workflow but I wouldn't know for sure.
My android phone will put apps into "deep sleep" and remove all their permissions if I haven't opened it in a month or so. I just toss travel apps into a folder in my launcher and they are there if I need them but become just a consumer of drive space on their own.
Deep sleep is a great option. Archive is a couple steps beyond that, it essentially makes it equal to the app being uninstalled, at the cost of a bit of a disk space.
What really grinds my gears is when the app is a _broken_ version of the website. I find the app really expects you to be on the happy path in a way the website does not.
Uhaul is a great example of this. The app looks a little better on mobile, but if don’t make an account and search by reservation ID, all features related to things like extending a reservation time are nonfunctional. I have to go to the mobile site which looks bad and has poor navigation, trying to hijack my session and redirect me to the app, but at least it works.
UHaul is the only app I've ever encountered that is less efficient than talking to a human being behind a counter. I have tried multiple times to pick up a reservation via the app and it has taken so long or failed at some point that I had to walk into the store anyway.
And it wants a photo of my license EVERY GODDAMN TIME. And no I can't store a photo of my license on my phone and just upload it - it has to take a photo directly. And boy does it not like to take photos in bright sunlight. You know, when I'm outside in a parking lot beside a white truck.
Their scheduling software is also blatantly broken. I understand the difficulty in monitoring a large distributed fleet, but their software loves to say trucks are unavailable where a quick phone call reveals they can accommodate the exact request.
That's funny, I've NEVER, not even once, encountered ANY app from any company, in any business, that is easier or more efficient than talking to a human being behind a counter. (So long as the human behind the counter is not also hamstrung by dreadful Indian crapware...)
Seriously, like most people, I have dozens of apps on my phone, forced on me by various needs. The ONLY one that makes anything easier or better is my password manager, which I have to have to safely keep and lookup the logins and passwords for all the damn apps...
The car rental desk at airports is one of the worst customer experiences I've ever seen. It's sometimes worse than what seems possible. It's sometimes bad in ways that don't even make sense.
I dunno. It's so hard to get a plain ordinary brewed coffee at Dunkin these days, the kind of coffee I used to get there back in the 1980s. On the app I could actually pick one out, in person I'm likely to have a teenager give me something else and then have a nervous breakdown when I point out the one thing I care about on their digital signs: "If we get your order wrong we'll re-do it"
I pretty much exclusively drink black coffee or plain espresso and I’ve yet to encounter any issues getting it.
I have seen lots of complaints and memes to this effect, but never has it been my lived experience. I’ve also never had an issue with politely saying “excuse me, I actually ordered X and I got Y by mistake.” No nervous breakdown at all
I grew up in New Hampshire where it is almost as much as a religion as it in Massachusetts. We had one in Ithaca for a short time when I was in grad school which didn't last very long, I remember sitting there while a schizophrenic woman told me that the mob ran absolutely everything in New York, it was closed a long time, then a Thai restaurant moved in and then, decades later, a Dunkin moved in next door.
Early on I learned that the P&C supermarket made better donuts so when a dunkin opened across the street I wasn't so interested. And of course Dunkin used to be known for good coffee but now you can find good coffee anyhwhere except for a Starbucks and Collegetown Bagels.
> What really grinds my gears is when the app is a _broken_ version of the website. I find the app really expects you to be on the happy path in a way the website does not.
100% same. So many apps are just a WebView vessel for Crashlytics and Sentry and Dog knows how much more tracking. (My phone is always VPNed into my home network which has DNS-level ad and tracker blocking. This doesn't cover all the bases though.)
Some, like Home Depot, have websites that are terrible and battery-draining enough to make the app nominally useful by comparison.
>Some, like Home Depot, have websites that are terrible and battery-draining enough to make the app nominally useful by comparison.
I don't take this as a signal to install the app. It is a signal to avoid the store. They clearly don't feel like they need to work to gain your business, and instead take it for granted. You can see this indicated by their actions - they clearly feel that it is more profitable to inconvenience you for a token amount of tracking data than to serve your needs. Why continue to use them?
There are a lot of businesses that have a semi-captive hold on a market. Like a recent example was I drove my daughter and I to a stage play, and to pay for street parking I had to install an app, make an account, and add a credit card. A thing that should have been scan the QR code and click one button to mobile pay became a five minute ordeal.
In theory we could have gotten back in the car and looked for parking elsewhere but the curtain was in 30 minutes and who's to say they didn't have a contract with the city that covered all the parking?
Overall a very hostile experience and I was annoyed about how little I felt I had a choice in it.
Just don’t pay. I stopped paying for street parking a long time ago (around the time they started insisting on apps). You get a ticket once and awhile but it all works out.
Mail in a check a few times a year and park whenever you want.
Valid, though I expect this being down the block from the festival theatre, it probably was being actively patrolled. I was a bit shaken by a prominent sign threatening a $400 fine for illegal parking, though having just checked the website for the City of Stratford, it looks like the standard municipal parking ticket is $40 if paid promptly, so the $400 fine was probably specific to parking in the theatre's dropoff zone or fire access or something.
All that say, I think you're probably right... next time instead of using my phone to install and sign up for a parking app, I'll just use it to check what the fine is and wipe hands on pants.
It's definitely a case where I see the value of the Asia-style super apps, where you just attach transactions like this to LINE or Grab or whatever, and everyone knows what to do with it.
The only thing remotely comparable in Toronto might be if Presto (payment app for multiple transit agencies in GTHA) took on parking payment, but the Presto network now supports just tapping a credit card so I don't know how many people would be getting cards or using the app for that either.
Avoiding HD is basically impossible here in the US if you own a home. It's either them, Lowe's or, if you're lucky, some third party mom and pop that will have an even shittier website and probably not what youre looking for.
I'm also interested. I use tailscale and there is supposed to be a way to configure it to use my pihole DNS, but there is something in Android that prevents that. I think I have to set a custom DNS on the phone.
My setup is similar: A server at home runs Unbound for recursive DNS, filtered by Hagezi's blacklists. The phone (running GrapheneOS) consumes the DNS service through a Wireguard tunnel. This is 100% self-hosted and does not rely on Tailscale or a third-party DNS service. All the mobile carrier or WiFi hotspot used sees is a single encrypted connection to the server.
I absolutely love this. I thought Tailscale was necessary to establish that kind of wireguard tunnel. Would you have a link to a tutorial or write-up on how you got this set up?
RethinkDNS does everything for me. You're tied to their DNS server if you want to use the in-app interface to make changes to the blocklists in use, but that's not a hard requirement. As a bonus, it also supports actual VPNs (wireguard, http connect, and socks proxy). If you don't care to micro-manage it, trackercontrol is also pretty good. There's other apps as well, like personalDNSfilter.
In this setup you're explaining, the phone is doing all the work though right? Filtering DNS and sending traffic to a wireguard VPN, is all done on the phone.
But it's not tunnelling traffic to a desktop station which then processes that traffic like its own (filters DNS as set up on the desktop, and forwards traffic through the same VPN that is set up on the desktop). Am I getting this right?
Not OP, but with DNS ad blocking like pi-hole you need to be aware that any "normies" living with you will hate it. DNS blockers silently break any kind of "sponsored links" in search results and a lot of the links in email marketing, and most people use those frequently. They don't take kindly to being told they're doing it wrong and have to change their browsing habits for benefits they don't perceive.
Pi-hole let's you define different groups with different ad blocking policies. Then you can define which dhcp ips go in each group. Works very well. The "normies" won't even notice
I have a Firewalla. They run a WireGuard proxy (sort of like a DERP in Tailscale), so I use that. It actually works more often than Tailscale somehow, and since it's just WG, it works perfectly with my GL.iNet travel hotspots. Firewalla also has ad blocking baked in with less restrictive blacklists, so that's what I use.
Before I got the FW, I used Tailscale and AdGuard Home.
If you use Android, honestly try Fdroid. It's great. I mean there are obviously huge gaps, you're not going to find banking apps, and there's going to be less polish in a lot of cases. BUT NONE OF THE APPS ARE EVIL.
Fdroid harbors the paradise we imagined in the early days where we just had these little computers in our pockets and didn't have to worry that everything on them was drowning in ads, scams and surveillance.
So if I do think I might want or need an app I immediately go and check on Fdroid. I can install apps from there without fear. If Fdroid doesn't have what I need, most likely I'm just tapping out. I won't use my phone. I barely use it these days when I'm not on the go anyway.
On Android, especially the most recent versions, the archive functionality for apps has been a lifesaver. It basically packs apps into a specific format, keeps their entire state, and stores it on the disk. This also completely stops the app from running in the background and any other functionality that we don't need.
When we need to access the app again, we just have to restore it, which actually downloads the app and puts the app data back into it. It brings us back to exactly where we were before.
I do this to a lot of my apps these days, and it works very well. When we look at it, apps are nothing but a logged-in state for services that makes it easy to access them. On a typical web browser, you would have to keep logging in every now and then. Apps have a more persistent logged-in session that sometimes lasts forever as well.
A particularly worrying trend that keeps spreading is the one of restricting significant amounts of (often non-financial) functionality to the apps only, gated behind your phone passing device integrity checks, in what seems to be a poorly thought out attempt at blocking all forms of scraping and automation (AI or not). The worst offender right now is probably Twitter, which alongside the recent Nitter cease-and-desist now appears to require client integrity on all logged out access.
If you're going to needlessly gate certain functions behind an app that work on a desktop browser (or could work in-browser), then I just won't use those functions.
Amusingly, I know of a very large hospital chain that has it the other way around.
The app version is the most limited. Mobile web has some more options. But if you want everything, that's desktop only.
Except for scheduled ordering from the coffee shops or placing in-patient meal orders. Those require an app. Except with the meal app, you get more menu choices from the web version.
I am the same, the sad reality is that companies don't (really) aim to change our (old folk tech peoples) behavior, they are aiming to make a new normal for the next generation of consumers.
Many HN users probably share this distaste for apps that should be websites, but I don't think this is true for the general population.
In addition to choosing not to use needless apps, some HN users here might have the opportunity for a stronger vote: refuse to (or at very least push back on) develop an app that could be a website.
I am the same way but sadly I think average people seem to be the opposite. I’ve seen people asked to do something on some site and their instinct is to go straight to the App Store and search the site there vs using their web browser.
The problem is that my bank is starting to do this, and for things I actually use. I am considering changing banks because of this, but it's a big step.
Yeah, so many sites bug me to install their app just to read their web page. I'm not going to install every app, so just make the website usable. LinkedIn, Instagram, too many others to list them all. I'd rather not use them at all than install their app.
I also have the assumption that apps are shoddily coded. Whenever I go to the App Store I am looking for a specific app because my assumption is that a random app I find is going to be useless and this goes 10x if the app is promoted with paid advertisement. Personally I wish the app store was like the way Google's home page was in 1999 -- the search functionality is the only thing I care about and they hide it in the middle of a lot of not-so-distracting fluff because I don't have the slightest interest in it.
Interesting. I limit myself to apps from zapstore.dev and I enjoy playing with new apps. The issue with most commercial / mainstream apps for me is that they're riddled with ads, engagement nonsense, lack quality, often use ugly per default frameworks, force sign-up before use, request all sorts of permissions or come bundled with SDKs I don't trust.
If you intend to have a broad userbase, you must prioritize mobile apps. The general public prefers them. I don't like it, but that's the current landscape.
> At this point the barrier for me to install an app is pretty high.
For me, the bar hasn't moved: I will not install any app that isn't a general purpose, open source utility. If something cannot be done in the browser, I will do without it.
Spotify comes to mind immediately. Of all things, they wall off your saved music - premium doesn't matter. There is literally no reason to prevent web app users from accessing what is essentially just another playlist, other than to coerce the native app adoption.
I used to feel similarly but recently i started defaulting to installing apps more, and it's been way better for my quality of life lol. They just tend to work way better. There are some exceptions though, usually for apps that have ads that make them too annoying to use or that require you to have an account that I don't want to create / don't want to sign in with. E.g. youtube, reddit
Then you have other sites/companies that go the opposite way: having functionality that is App-only.
As an extreme example: my health insurance provider in Spain (Alan) is app-only. They don’t even have a website one can use. It is maddening for those of us who always prefer desktop over mobile.
Definitely annoying to have random features not work in app. This "subscribe to event" feature for example.
More implicit in this post seems to be an argument against apps entirely, which I cannot agree with. He doesn't exactly say this but it points there.
- never establishes a need or true advantage to an app. does briefly acknowledge apps can do something unique things but then immediately undercuts it. positions Google etc. motivation as wanting to occupy your home screen, dont trust you to use bookmarks, etc.
- says he has experience building phone apps and knows the pain of updating across so many devices and says solutions converge on basically re-implementing web browsers (which I think is a large leap)
So when he says
>If you want an app, fine. Do it. Just finish the job please!
I dont really believe him. From his perspective, why is an app ever necessary? To me it's obvious because I absolutely do not want to use Google Calendar in a phone browser. Primarily because the UI on an app is optimized for the phone. And at that point it feels like imperfect feature parity is just the normal problem of releasing the "same" thing many times.
The title also seems to be pointing to a sort of equivocation where you say a group of People say X, and then blame a Person 1for contradicting X by saying Y. Except We've never established that Person 1 was in the group of People saying X. You see this a lot on reddit, hackernews as well. "Oh, many people in the comment section said said Y before now user123 is saying X thats a contradiction."
Having said all that, the blog is labeled "rant" and I can respect that a lot of the purpose is to blow off steam.
I recently decided to use my google calendar to track my mood, as part of my CBT therapy.
What baffles me is that, there's no way in the web app to assign a default calendar for new events. When I create a new event on the web, I have to scroll through all the calendars that I have and choose the one that I want every time. Meanwhile, in the mobile app, I can simply tap on a new block, the event window appears, and the selected calendar defaults to what I used for my last added event.
I think the bigger issue there is that you're trusting Google with your health data. Surely there's an offline calendar app that could help you track it just as well. Anyway, I hope you benefit from the therapy regardless of how you decide to track it.
It's not irrational if you know that the insurance company has mispriced your policy, and filing a claim won't be more trouble than it's worth.
Getting a contents policy in a safe neighborhood where you know that there's little risk is likely not a good deal. Getting a contents policy when you've learned that your neighbors are getting into hard drugs is probably a good deal.
Paying $19/mo for third-party full coverage + theft on your $1,000 mobile phone is probably not a good deal even if you know you are high risk, for the simple reason that at $19, they game must be that they will find any reason to refuse to pay, and will give you a poorly refurbished phone for your troubles if you make them honor the insurance.
It made even sadder by the fact that often the "app" is more or less just webview.
More and more I'm giving up on apps, and online self-servicing as the structures and scope of what either one can do is increasing narrowing. It's much much easier to just call these days (fortunately AI answering the phone is still not prevalent). Customer service will obviously inform you that "You can just our self-service solutions in the future", even if you literately just called in because you can't due to inflexibility and options you don't understand.
Also "you can manage it from your phone" is not the sales pitch it once was, because it's no longer the entire truth. You can in fact ONLY manage it from your phone. If whatever you're selling requires an app, chances are that I'm not buying and if it's a service, I will seek out your store or staff and make them do it for me.
My ISP removed the ability to manage your network with a browser. Not over the cloud -- they stripped the admin panel from their firmware and require you to use the app. The app is filled with dark patterns that try to get you to use their firewall and their tracking and enable their public Wi-Fi hotspot and not do port forwarding or DNS configuration or separate SSIDs or etc. Also, every few weeks it decides it's outdated and blocks you from doing anything until you update from the app store. Also, every time you open it there's an annoying loading screen with an advertisement. And all throughout the app, everywhere you go there are advertisements for tertiary purchases and offers. Like, yeah, I get that the app needs to exist for these fancy special stupid animations of the router with the waves coming off of it, yeah I see the wifi coming off of the router with all the buttons around it, showing all the things I can do with it, and then I scroll right past that and have to go down to the equipment details and then go into the advanced settings to even configure any of the stuff I actually want to configure about my network ever. And yeah, I know it's the super duper app with all the special services, I know I can get superduper mobile phone line and also TV and cable and also free Peacock streaming service! with the purchase of whatever, and also, did I know that fiber speeds are now being offered but not in my area? Did I know that other areas benefit from up to 2 gigabit speeds?! I better check now to see if my area qualifies! (It doesn't, I made an FCC complaint about it and they responded to tell me it might happen eventually and it hasn't happened)
Literally bought new networking gear from Ubiquiti because of this crap, and could not be happier with it. Only problem is the ISP literally blocks any modem that's their stupid combo router modem Internet-of-Shit cloud-connected hardware-as-a-service garbage. Modem works for a few hours, then the line goes suddenly dead (even to their own router) until I've called them and gotten told that my modem is faulty even though it was working fine until they cut the line, etc. so I have to deal with still having their router in front of my own gear
It’s a shame the web was so slow to adapt to this new mobile world. When it all started things like offline capabilities were very difficult to do on the web and native development felt necessary. These days the web can actually do a lot… but it’s too late. People expect to find something in the App Store, pinning a web site to their Home Screen is just not something they know they can do. So a lot of people waste an enormous amount of money on three different implementations for, often, simple CRUD operations.
I believe it is more nefarious than that. The web strived for mobile native parity but web standards committees are mostly headed by delegates of companies like google and apple; the same companies that have an interest in crippling native web features to push users to their app stores, where they can extract money via fees. PWAs on iOS are a good example of how this kind of gate-keeping looks like
I miss the mobile-versions of websites for low-bandwidth connections (the ones that started with "m."). They were lightning fast, even on slow networks, and were laser-focused on top-of-funnel user activities. Facebook's implementation was extremely solid (when I used them). Messaging worked as well until they gated that behind full Facebook.
Hah. I was trying to buy something on the BestBuy website. I’m not sure what kinda of bitcoin miner they’re running on that site, but it repeatedly manages to crash the tab as I was trying to browse. I had to eventually just download the app.
The solution is for companies to stop half-assing multiple things, and instead whole ass one thing.
It's impossible though. There actually isn't a single company alive that's capable of doing something like that, because it would require a decision maker to say "instead of these two things I want just one thing" and the second that happens it will be the end of the world.
I've had an issue where, when clicking a "locations" link on a web site, Google Maps "permanently" added a bunch of locations to my map. This was quite unexpected on my part.
(I think it was for a chain or churches or a similar civic organization)
IE, I think someone made a group of locations in Google Maps, and then for the "Locations" link on their website, just linked to the group of locations in Google Maps. In the browser, this works fine, but on mobile, Google Maps just imports the link to my account without asking.
The author said it perself, "the greatest minds of our generation" working at Google, so those jagged edges are surely by design, and it's the rational most efficient solution in a economy of attention where the line between the product and the user is blurred.
In some cases it's just because the userbase using the web on their phone instead of the app is incredibly small and it's not worth funding feature parity. It can be difficult to distinguish this case from more hostile takes like reddit and Twitter.
Reddit has started putting up a paywall of sorts to block mobile web users, saying that instead, users should install the app. old.reddit.com remains as an ugly workaround.
The whole thing is nuts:
1. All of reddit's content is UGC. They write literally nothing themselves. There's a strong argument that everything there written by unpaid users should be considered a public good.
2. Tech companies are now, ostensibly, aware of value of having users who engage intentionally instead of compulsively. Mobile apps, with their notifications etc., encourage compulsion. Websites less so.
It will be an interesting reckoning when the polity wakes up to the idea that as social media companies don't pay for the content, they should have no right to restrict access to it. LLMs likewise wouldn't work at all without the petabytes of data they either got for free from users or purloined, and so the argument for their weights being public goods is similar.
old.reddit was the only tolerable interface but it is now login-walled too. God forbid you post any comments that deviate even slightly from the Reddit consensus or you will soon find yourself IP-blocked. That’s barely an exaggeration.
I use LineageOS with MicroG and decided probably 5 years ago to just use PWAs instead of apps for any online service and grab whatever other utilities I might need from Obtanium or F-Droid. Also the experience on my Thinkphone is the exact same as it was on my Pixel XL 2.
I know not everyone can do this, and some PWAs are downright terrible if they work at all, but for my usecase it has been great.
I sell stuff ocassionaly on a "local" platform called MercadoLibre (like, I could afford a new handlebar for my bicycle so I could sell there the old one). Mercadolibre kind of wants to be the argentinian Amazon, even lobbying in the argentinian government so they will ban similar platforms from other countries. With time, MercadoLibre has become incredibly hostile and greedy for us small sellers, while favoring corpos.
They charge you 25% for each sale you do via their platform, but the latest thing they did was to force you to "identify" you are you via a website where they track your face features and scan your ID "because of security". Yeah, that sounds good, so I did that in 2021.
They asked this again last year because of reasons. But this time they won't let you use a regular web browser: they forced you to do this via their app. No matter how much you try, it will always fail citing "compatibility issues" or "errors". I tried to complain but their customer support is incredibly shitty, if you even manage how to find to contact them.
But oh surprise, their "app" is just a web wrapper.
I bet they had to change identity verification providers so that's why you have to re-validate again.
It's a shame there's no alternative to Meli. I'm shopping around for a macbook and I would much rather have a marketplace with verified identities and profiles than the shady whatsapp groups and contacts I'm finding.
If your app can be implemented in React Native with no developer pain, it should just be a website.
Native is a much better experience than mobile websites when you actually use the features and power of these fairly advanced computers we carry around in our pockets.
In Google's defense, they weren't the ones that championed the "everything must be an app" movement. My memory of the 2010s is that Google (and while they were relevant, Palm) pushed cross-platform web apps, but Apple ran a successful marketing campaign to convince everyone that everything on mobile must be a native app for reasons[1]. So we end up with a walled garden of native apps that must be approved by and pay a tax too the company that makes the OS.
The result is that instead of building one app that works on all platforms, software companies need to build three apps: Web, iOS, and Android. I'm sympathetic to why most software companies (including my own) choose to just build a web app wrapped in a native wrapper. If a company does decide to build a totally separate iOS app, I dunno, it seems reasonable not to build support for every single niche feature that the web app has. I'm not sure I get the outrage here, especially since Google has a long track record of preferring web apps to native.
[1]The "reasons" primarily are that Apple refused to support PWAs, hamstrung mobile Safari, and refused to allow third-party browsers. So while it's true that native apps can offer a better experience than mobile web apps, that's mostly just because Apple artificially restricts web apps.
Oh don't, I remember being at a Google PWA Conference where they showed a world where you walked up to a coffee machine which served you a website over some local Bluetooth beacons, you asked for a coffee and it made it. It was such a hopeful concept looking back.
So in the future, when you have those three versions you need to build, its starting to make sense to have the mobile version be the full functionality version. Although, I guess it would be crazy to go to a link on your computer and be told it only works on mobile.
Guy has a problem with a Google service on a Google Pixel phone running a Google made, almost 20 year old operating system that controls >70% of the global market. Alongside a web that has overwhelmingly been defined by Google. This is one situation where Google utterly owns 100% of the space.
HN's take -- Clearly this is Apple's fault.
ROFL. I mean, this is beyond parody at this point.
Yep. The pro-"web" faction's dominance inside Google died a long time ago.
When I started working there (2012) L&S were already openly pushing "mobile first" and then later even "mobile only" because they saw it (mobile adoption) as existential threat to advertising revenue and worried that us engineers had a desktop bias that was going to set them back. I worked on several products where the PMs saw the web as a hindrance not a goal. e.g. I worked on Google WiFi and there was never an out-of-box experience or administration story for it for browser. Us SWEs asked for it, said we'd build it even, and the PMs and leadership level said no.
Google makes a browser, but a large part of the company is openly hostile to the open web at this point.
Even Apple, before caving in, didn't want apps. On the original iPhone there was no SDK, Jobs' "sweet solution" to expanding functionality was web apps pinned to the home screen.
Everyone complained, loudly, and they caved in and launched the app store.
The complaints at the time were entirely valid. The state of web development for mobile was pretty dire. HTML 5 wasn't released until 22 January 2008. People wanted to build apps for iOS in XCode. Nothing else would have been acceptable.
IMHO the web community dug their own grave here. WAP/WML and whatever it was the Japanese phones used was a better starting point than HTML etc as they'd already solved a lot the big problems around mobile developement. They were not perfect and support was terrible but they were much more focused on the problem of mobile app development than the "everything is the same nail" approach of HTML.
Even to this day the UX experience of web apps in HTML/Javascript/CSS is subpar to native apps and I say that as someone who spends their day developing such web apps. You can only put so much lipstick on the pig.
> [1]The "reasons" primarily are that Apple refused to support PWAs, hamstrung mobile Safari, and refused to allow third-party browsers. So while it's true that native apps can offer a better experience than mobile web apps, that's mostly just because Apple artificially restricts web apps.
This is disingenuous. Quoting Steve Jobs himself:
> We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
> This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.
Originally about Adobe's Flash, but can apply with no editing (!) to Google Chrome :)
Hence Jobs’ rationale for providing native SDKs for iOS development. It wasn’t about any third-party libraries per se, it was about wanting the native SDKs to be the principal way to deliver experiences on the platform. I’m not entirely sure it was borne out by history, but that was his reasoning at least.
Google Earth ia a fantastic computer program (which is being retired June 2027; stupid IMHO); Alphabet, Inc., wants you to instead "use the in-browser version of earth.google.com for a better experience."
When I attempt to load earth.google.com it is total dogshit, just a terrible all-around experience (with glitches and an additional layer of obfuscation between map and browsing: a 3rd-party web browser).
My RTX5070Ti renders everything so beautifully within the Google Earth program – smooth and fully-3D everything.
The only reasoning I can muster is that it's harder to embed advertisements/tracking within the program (compared to the website interface); but when I cannot use the application anymore, I will no longer use Google Earth (entirely) – which is unfortunate because it is a fantastic resource (I have a computer dedicated almost-entirely to Google Earth tasks; it is the only machine in my office that can contact Google servers).
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 13.2 ms ] threadYes we're solving an app problem with another app, but just highlighting that is a solution for the ads.
Messenger doesn’t work but luckily I rarely if ever use it.
So I have zero social media networks on my phone and, looking at everyone around me who does, I'm very pleased with this decision.
It's probably better this way. Hopefully bots will kill off social media before even more countries decide to ban it.
They're digital drugs
Web is such a powerful platform and so many people still treat their web applications like they're just interactive documents. I think the most bothersome thing on mobile web is if an application has shifting framing ("chrome") when you pan around, like you're looking at a PDF.
https://skatanica.com
Let me know, but I developed it almost entirely focused on iPhone SE as a target to give myself the most claustrophobic possible experience, and I think that helped guide a lot of the decisions.
Every single company has turned this into a situation where I cannot trust your apps with privacy or security, and the risk and hassle isn't worth the install.
You should find it insulting that they are likely selling that location data, not even to the highest bidder, but to a data broker that resells that data to anyone that will buy it for any price they'll pay.
I get it, "I'm just traveling, why do I need to download an app which will be useless when I'm done traveling". Just delete it then, takes two steps!
Our reviews between our Web App and iOS app are like 2 sigma apart.
Please just put placards on your exhibits, then I can take as long ( or as quickly ) as I need to digest the info.
People can then use their phone to translate into other languages, if needed.
That describes silicon valley tech culture to a tee.
>>The issue is that people often forget to uninstall these apps almost all the time
Fundamentally though, iOS will auto-offload the unused apps for you (you won't get any notifications). For all intents and purposes, it is an ephemeral app already.
Uhaul is a great example of this. The app looks a little better on mobile, but if don’t make an account and search by reservation ID, all features related to things like extending a reservation time are nonfunctional. I have to go to the mobile site which looks bad and has poor navigation, trying to hijack my session and redirect me to the app, but at least it works.
And it wants a photo of my license EVERY GODDAMN TIME. And no I can't store a photo of my license on my phone and just upload it - it has to take a photo directly. And boy does it not like to take photos in bright sunlight. You know, when I'm outside in a parking lot beside a white truck.
Seriously, like most people, I have dozens of apps on my phone, forced on me by various needs. The ONLY one that makes anything easier or better is my password manager, which I have to have to safely keep and lookup the logins and passwords for all the damn apps...
I have seen lots of complaints and memes to this effect, but never has it been my lived experience. I’ve also never had an issue with politely saying “excuse me, I actually ordered X and I got Y by mistake.” No nervous breakdown at all
(Starbucks, too. They just discontinued the little protein box with hard-boiled eggs in favor of yet another one with cheese.)
I grew up in New Hampshire where it is almost as much as a religion as it in Massachusetts. We had one in Ithaca for a short time when I was in grad school which didn't last very long, I remember sitting there while a schizophrenic woman told me that the mob ran absolutely everything in New York, it was closed a long time, then a Thai restaurant moved in and then, decades later, a Dunkin moved in next door.
Early on I learned that the P&C supermarket made better donuts so when a dunkin opened across the street I wasn't so interested. And of course Dunkin used to be known for good coffee but now you can find good coffee anyhwhere except for a Starbucks and Collegetown Bagels.
That's what the linked article is all about.
Some, like Home Depot, have websites that are terrible and battery-draining enough to make the app nominally useful by comparison.
I don't take this as a signal to install the app. It is a signal to avoid the store. They clearly don't feel like they need to work to gain your business, and instead take it for granted. You can see this indicated by their actions - they clearly feel that it is more profitable to inconvenience you for a token amount of tracking data than to serve your needs. Why continue to use them?
In theory we could have gotten back in the car and looked for parking elsewhere but the curtain was in 30 minutes and who's to say they didn't have a contract with the city that covered all the parking?
Overall a very hostile experience and I was annoyed about how little I felt I had a choice in it.
Mail in a check a few times a year and park whenever you want.
All that say, I think you're probably right... next time instead of using my phone to install and sign up for a parking app, I'll just use it to check what the fine is and wipe hands on pants.
The worst part is not that, but.. _which is the app for this area?_
The only thing remotely comparable in Toronto might be if Presto (payment app for multiple transit agencies in GTHA) took on parking payment, but the Presto network now supports just tapping a credit card so I don't know how many people would be getting cards or using the app for that either.
But generally you're right.
I've been looking to do this setup. Would you share a few details of which tools you've used?
But it's not tunnelling traffic to a desktop station which then processes that traffic like its own (filters DNS as set up on the desktop, and forwards traffic through the same VPN that is set up on the desktop). Am I getting this right?
But this: >My phone is always VPNed into my home network which has DNS-level ad and tracker blocking. This doesn't cover all the bases though.
Is a great idea for a fun weekend project. Any tips, good practices or things to watch out for when setting it up?
Or you can just throw a couple bucks at something like nextdns and not have to use the VPN bit for mobile DNS ad block
I use both
Before I got the FW, I used Tailscale and AdGuard Home.
Fdroid harbors the paradise we imagined in the early days where we just had these little computers in our pockets and didn't have to worry that everything on them was drowning in ads, scams and surveillance.
So if I do think I might want or need an app I immediately go and check on Fdroid. I can install apps from there without fear. If Fdroid doesn't have what I need, most likely I'm just tapping out. I won't use my phone. I barely use it these days when I'm not on the go anyway.
When we need to access the app again, we just have to restore it, which actually downloads the app and puts the app data back into it. It brings us back to exactly where we were before.
I do this to a lot of my apps these days, and it works very well. When we look at it, apps are nothing but a logged-in state for services that makes it easy to access them. On a typical web browser, you would have to keep logging in every now and then. Apps have a more persistent logged-in session that sometimes lasts forever as well.
I try to never use apps anyway, because adblocking on them is hard or impossible (which is the reason they exist in the first place).
Amusingly, I know of a very large hospital chain that has it the other way around.
The app version is the most limited. Mobile web has some more options. But if you want everything, that's desktop only.
Except for scheduled ordering from the coffee shops or placing in-patient meal orders. Those require an app. Except with the meal app, you get more menu choices from the web version.
Modern tech is a mess.
In addition to choosing not to use needless apps, some HN users here might have the opportunity for a stronger vote: refuse to (or at very least push back on) develop an app that could be a website.
Which is pushing me to not use them at all.
For me, the bar hasn't moved: I will not install any app that isn't a general purpose, open source utility. If something cannot be done in the browser, I will do without it.
More implicit in this post seems to be an argument against apps entirely, which I cannot agree with. He doesn't exactly say this but it points there.
So when he says I dont really believe him. From his perspective, why is an app ever necessary? To me it's obvious because I absolutely do not want to use Google Calendar in a phone browser. Primarily because the UI on an app is optimized for the phone. And at that point it feels like imperfect feature parity is just the normal problem of releasing the "same" thing many times.The title also seems to be pointing to a sort of equivocation where you say a group of People say X, and then blame a Person 1for contradicting X by saying Y. Except We've never established that Person 1 was in the group of People saying X. You see this a lot on reddit, hackernews as well. "Oh, many people in the comment section said said Y before now user123 is saying X thats a contradiction."
Having said all that, the blog is labeled "rant" and I can respect that a lot of the purpose is to blow off steam.
What baffles me is that, there's no way in the web app to assign a default calendar for new events. When I create a new event on the web, I have to scroll through all the calendars that I have and choose the one that I want every time. Meanwhile, in the mobile app, I can simply tap on a new block, the event window appears, and the selected calendar defaults to what I used for my last added event.
Getting a contents policy in a safe neighborhood where you know that there's little risk is likely not a good deal. Getting a contents policy when you've learned that your neighbors are getting into hard drugs is probably a good deal.
Paying $19/mo for third-party full coverage + theft on your $1,000 mobile phone is probably not a good deal even if you know you are high risk, for the simple reason that at $19, they game must be that they will find any reason to refuse to pay, and will give you a poorly refurbished phone for your troubles if you make them honor the insurance.
More and more I'm giving up on apps, and online self-servicing as the structures and scope of what either one can do is increasing narrowing. It's much much easier to just call these days (fortunately AI answering the phone is still not prevalent). Customer service will obviously inform you that "You can just our self-service solutions in the future", even if you literately just called in because you can't due to inflexibility and options you don't understand.
Also "you can manage it from your phone" is not the sales pitch it once was, because it's no longer the entire truth. You can in fact ONLY manage it from your phone. If whatever you're selling requires an app, chances are that I'm not buying and if it's a service, I will seek out your store or staff and make them do it for me.
Literally bought new networking gear from Ubiquiti because of this crap, and could not be happier with it. Only problem is the ISP literally blocks any modem that's their stupid combo router modem Internet-of-Shit cloud-connected hardware-as-a-service garbage. Modem works for a few hours, then the line goes suddenly dead (even to their own router) until I've called them and gotten told that my modem is faulty even though it was working fine until they cut the line, etc. so I have to deal with still having their router in front of my own gear
https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/
It's impossible though. There actually isn't a single company alive that's capable of doing something like that, because it would require a decision maker to say "instead of these two things I want just one thing" and the second that happens it will be the end of the world.
(I think it was for a chain or churches or a similar civic organization)
IE, I think someone made a group of locations in Google Maps, and then for the "Locations" link on their website, just linked to the group of locations in Google Maps. In the browser, this works fine, but on mobile, Google Maps just imports the link to my account without asking.
The whole thing is nuts:
1. All of reddit's content is UGC. They write literally nothing themselves. There's a strong argument that everything there written by unpaid users should be considered a public good.
2. Tech companies are now, ostensibly, aware of value of having users who engage intentionally instead of compulsively. Mobile apps, with their notifications etc., encourage compulsion. Websites less so.
It will be an interesting reckoning when the polity wakes up to the idea that as social media companies don't pay for the content, they should have no right to restrict access to it. LLMs likewise wouldn't work at all without the petabytes of data they either got for free from users or purloined, and so the argument for their weights being public goods is similar.
My rule for apps these days is that if it is not available through F-Droid, I won't be using it.
I know not everyone can do this, and some PWAs are downright terrible if they work at all, but for my usecase it has been great.
They charge you 25% for each sale you do via their platform, but the latest thing they did was to force you to "identify" you are you via a website where they track your face features and scan your ID "because of security". Yeah, that sounds good, so I did that in 2021.
They asked this again last year because of reasons. But this time they won't let you use a regular web browser: they forced you to do this via their app. No matter how much you try, it will always fail citing "compatibility issues" or "errors". I tried to complain but their customer support is incredibly shitty, if you even manage how to find to contact them.
But oh surprise, their "app" is just a web wrapper.
It's a shame there's no alternative to Meli. I'm shopping around for a macbook and I would much rather have a marketplace with verified identities and profiles than the shady whatsapp groups and contacts I'm finding.
Native is a much better experience than mobile websites when you actually use the features and power of these fairly advanced computers we carry around in our pockets.
The result is that instead of building one app that works on all platforms, software companies need to build three apps: Web, iOS, and Android. I'm sympathetic to why most software companies (including my own) choose to just build a web app wrapped in a native wrapper. If a company does decide to build a totally separate iOS app, I dunno, it seems reasonable not to build support for every single niche feature that the web app has. I'm not sure I get the outrage here, especially since Google has a long track record of preferring web apps to native.
[1]The "reasons" primarily are that Apple refused to support PWAs, hamstrung mobile Safari, and refused to allow third-party browsers. So while it's true that native apps can offer a better experience than mobile web apps, that's mostly just because Apple artificially restricts web apps.
(Source: https://www.emarketer.com/content/search-behavior-being-rede...)
So in the future, when you have those three versions you need to build, its starting to make sense to have the mobile version be the full functionality version. Although, I guess it would be crazy to go to a link on your computer and be told it only works on mobile.
HN's take -- Clearly this is Apple's fault.
ROFL. I mean, this is beyond parody at this point.
When I started working there (2012) L&S were already openly pushing "mobile first" and then later even "mobile only" because they saw it (mobile adoption) as existential threat to advertising revenue and worried that us engineers had a desktop bias that was going to set them back. I worked on several products where the PMs saw the web as a hindrance not a goal. e.g. I worked on Google WiFi and there was never an out-of-box experience or administration story for it for browser. Us SWEs asked for it, said we'd build it even, and the PMs and leadership level said no.
Google makes a browser, but a large part of the company is openly hostile to the open web at this point.
Everyone complained, loudly, and they caved in and launched the app store.
IMHO the web community dug their own grave here. WAP/WML and whatever it was the Japanese phones used was a better starting point than HTML etc as they'd already solved a lot the big problems around mobile developement. They were not perfect and support was terrible but they were much more focused on the problem of mobile app development than the "everything is the same nail" approach of HTML.
Even to this day the UX experience of web apps in HTML/Javascript/CSS is subpar to native apps and I say that as someone who spends their day developing such web apps. You can only put so much lipstick on the pig.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=szrsfeyLzyg&pp=0gcJCYsCo7VqN5tD&...
This is disingenuous. Quoting Steve Jobs himself:
> We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
> This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.
Originally about Adobe's Flash, but can apply with no editing (!) to Google Chrome :)
Interestingly, Palm (webOS) & Microsoft (Sidekick / WebTV) folks ended up creating Android.
When I attempt to load earth.google.com it is total dogshit, just a terrible all-around experience (with glitches and an additional layer of obfuscation between map and browsing: a 3rd-party web browser).
My RTX5070Ti renders everything so beautifully within the Google Earth program – smooth and fully-3D everything.
The only reasoning I can muster is that it's harder to embed advertisements/tracking within the program (compared to the website interface); but when I cannot use the application anymore, I will no longer use Google Earth (entirely) – which is unfortunate because it is a fantastic resource (I have a computer dedicated almost-entirely to Google Earth tasks; it is the only machine in my office that can contact Google servers).