alt Hacker NewsYour 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
Comments
I recently decided to publish an app on the App Store just so I could say I accomplished that, and maybe even make a little bit of beer money on the side.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that my actual app is pretty much garbage. I don’t expect it to be popular. It’s basically a worse version of stuff that is already available.
I expected this to be a learning exercise about the process of getting stuff published.
Long story short, by the end of the ordeal I was somewhat surprised that anyone independent bothers to publish apps at all. The amount of red tape and nitpicking by the initial app review process is astounding. The business/legal side is also annoying. I might be misremembering or misinterpreting, but it seems like you really need an LLC with a mail forwarding service and a cheap second phone line just to avoid the App Store sending the whole internet to your personal phone and address.
On a website you can just not deal with any of that, and not give Apple $99/year just to keep your app on the store.
And we haven’t even gotten into the big royalties you’re paying for App Store purchases.
Still, I understand the appeal at some point, just not for an app like OP was forced to use. I certainly wouldn’t want to use something like Immich or Opencloud without an app: these apps need to deeply integrate with my phone to be truly useful.
I once read that app users are seven times more profitable than web users. That easily answers the author's question about why a company would bother make an app when a web page is the natural fit for the use case.
I don't remember the source or methodology for that number, but I have no trouble believing it. An app gives the developer a foothold on the user's device. It can more easily send notifications, track the user's location, resist customization like ad blocking, and remain present on the user's device even when closed. It's easier to funnel users into profitable behavior with an app.
Companies wouldn't do this if a large fraction of users refused the app, but most users don't.
Something the author doesn't mention as a pro for the web is my favorite type of tech: browser extensions. I love web because I can basically customize pretty much everything to my needs.
I have published a few of them in the last few years, and I have tens of them which I haven't published. I use them for tons of different things:
* allowing only text tweets on X
* blocking photos and videos on all Meta products
* blocking explicit content
* customizing exchange rates for online shopping (Argentine peso, you wouldn't get it™)
* having reddit hot as default for the home and subreddits (they been pushing the "best" for a couple years and it's actually trash)
browser extensions have allowed me to regain some of my cognitive sovereignty while being a heavy internet user.
> I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture”!
The short version: ad blockers work on browsers but not apps[0].
Treefort [1], the company where I work, provides a no-code cross-platform app builder (iOS, Android, web) for streaming apps, and probably the only really big feature we've noticed that browsers don't support is media downloads for offline listing/watching in an app, although that might actually be possible now [2].
That said it seems like we're constantly coming across things that are sub par or sometimes broken on the web that work in native apps. E.g. autoplay, background playback (TBH this is a real pain on Android too [3]), notifications, and there's probably more.
For instance, I've spent a good chunk of time today and yesterday battling the address bar on mobile Safari, which sometimes animates up/down, changing window.innerHeight, while we're trying to run an animation, leading to some layout issues.
This is really unfortunate because for a host of reasons the web is so much nicer to develop for than the App Store/Play Store, and all of the missing features are things that browsers could support.
[1] https://treefortsystems.com [2] https://web.dev/articles/pwa-with-offline-streaming [3] https://dontkillmyapp.com
Low-tech users don't give a damn if something has the guts of an "app" or not, they care about having a thing on the home screen they can click.
Businesses have the incentive to give their users that low friction experience (at the point of need) using already familiar rails (i.e. "install app from app store").
The makers of both iOS and Android treat the ability to "bookmark" a web URL onto your home screen as a power user feature that requires navigating through complex, technical-sounding menus. Does it have to be like that? Of course not. They just have a business interest in pushing users away from the open web and towards their walled gardens.
--
Mind you, I'm not saying, "advertising doesn't play a role in this". A clump of well aligned motivations is obviously going to be more powerful than a single isolated motivation. But let's not forget that apps built for non-technical users, which—I cannot stress this enough—IS MOST USERS, benefit greatly from lowest common denominator solutions where they never feel like they have to learn anything to get going.
We were supposed to be in the age of PWAs. That was the initial plan for iOS before the app store and 30% cuts on subscription apps.
Most web apps suck too though so I guess pick your poison. My strong belief is they want apps because they can spam you with notifications to get your attention.
I remember when Steve Jobs stood on stage and complained about Flash, how he hated its dominance of the free web, how it was a heavy and proprietary technology that prevented mobile devices from participating. His solution? To adopt the latest HTML standards… and also to build responsive apps. But now some apps have become heavy, advertising-bound, subscription nightmares. So it’s back to HTML, right?
The list of things that require an app rather than a web page was pretty long circa 2010, but it's quite a bit shorter now: it's mostly hardware access (Bluetooth/NFC), background activities (like background app refresh), persisting location permission, reliable offline storage, and system/OS integration (widgets/live activities, Siri shortcuts).
If done for the right reasons, a native app could theoretically be a bit more power- and bandwidth-efficient for a given level of polish.
But usually what you're getting is some cross-platform mystery meat UI, a boatload of tracking, and no real system/OS integration (because it isn't trivial to do from whatever cross-platform environment they chose).
My app already is a webpage. I made Android and iOS apps for years. Got fed up with the arbitrary roadblocks, erratic whims of store reviewers, and general bureaucracy involved. Pushing a simple fix would sometimes be delayed for days and a couple of weeks in the worst case I experienced. Now I can deploy patches immediately and no one needs to download or update anything on their device. Abandoning those walled garden regimes was one of the best things I ever did.
> There only seem to be two things that this “app” does, that a webpage might not have, and they’re both anti-features:
> It reports tracking data associated with your Google Account back to the developers.
Fortunately webpages never do any tracking whatsoever, let alone “Gobshite LLC and its 1131 partners need your permission for (contd. p94)”
Websites like Reddit love to say “it’s better in the app”, except it should have this added to that sentence: “for us, not so much for you”.
I wish PWAs took off, or a "desktop" environment for phones and tablets that allows me to save a simple website shortcut as an app.
I want my phone to be the portal to the places I want to go to and the things I want to see. I want to have the same experience going to a web app or website I regularly visit as with a normal app.
Like, I want to click on an icon and be there. I don't want to click on the browser and then find the tab.
Also, I want PWAs and website shortcuts to be first class citizens. I want a normal icon, not one that has some sort of visual marker that it's not a normal app.
It's been an ongoing annoyance, but it's getting to be more commonplace of an issue because there are a lot of people building cool things on atproto, and they generally start as a web app before they maybe build a phone app.
I haven't gotten to it, but I've been meaning to update my personal site from wordpress to just be statically rendered markdown I publish. I realized that I don't want the security surface area, and the features it offers are more or less things I don't even want anymore (post comments, text editor, analytics, etc.) I pretty much just want a static thing I can put on a CDN and never worry about ever again until I have an update. I already designed my (unlaunched) business site that way and I'm very happy with it.
The fundamental problem with the internet is that hosting sucks and no one wants to do it. It's thankless and it's expensive to maintain, both time and money. Apps are a way to not worry about that.
By the way, the link doesn't load for me, so I used the archive to read it. https://archive.ph/ByFBN
> With only a couple of minutes experimentation I discovered that the app works by concatenating the username and password5 and using it in a URL of the form:
Why not both? In Prepbook[0] (shameless plug) we created a web app, then used it to make a native app. You can use whatever you want. I like both. The native app though gives an objectively better experience - you can set timers on the OS level, open recipes in the app using the OS native share menu, etc.
We worked hard so you don't have to vibe code your way to get the experience you prefer.
How can we collectively fix apps/websites that are so poorly built that they take 10 minutes and 100 taps on your smartphone just to do something that could have been done in a minute? Companies put out an app/website as the only way to interface with them, you just have to deal with it. I've daydreamed about starting an agency which scouts bad apps and offers to fix them, as a sort of public service.
I prefer native apps over web apps, but I’m honestly at the point now where I just want to make voice or chat commands and get an output, instead of learning some self-important UI/UX person’s custom UI controls aka “””design system”””
I did something similar (though I used a slightly different method to intercept traffic) to make the US version of the Costco app better: www.97cost.co
I'm only surfacing two api requests that Costco's app is using, but even with a server as a middle man between the browser and Costo's backend this is way faster than the app.
I was recently raving about how NYC's metro payment system OMNI doesn't require an app, so you can use whatever contactless payment device you already have to get around NYC. That characteristic makes it so easy to just slide into the metro without having to deal with unfamiliar apps and all the mental overhead that comes with them on top of all the mental stress and sensory overload that comes with traveling.
I understand the anger. But I wish I were better able to resist fixing the world with code in this way, as I really am supposed to be working.
This is awesome. I think the much bigger use case here is building web equivalents of apps that are only available on iOS/Android.
I usually prefer apps to sites if there’s any usability improvement over the webpage - which there usually is.
If the app just shows a webpage then no.
> But at least I (and the rest of our group, whom I’ve shared it with) now get the choice about how we access this content.
What I want to know is: How many people actually used the website? How many people prefer the website?
It's easy to forget that many people use their computers (and phones) differently than the typical HNer.
Also: I wonder how easy/hard it is to do this with an LLM / vibecoding? Seems like there could be a Napster moment for bad apps where the LLM installs the app in a sandbox and makes educated guesses about how to turn it into a simple website.
Y'all are missing a huge benefit of apps: offline use. The #1 reason I download apps for every booking website I use for example.
Wait, the users password is part of the URL? What happens if the password contains a forward slash or a question mark? Wouldn't that break the whole endpoint?
I actually prefer apps because I don't have to wait for each page to load, initialize, see the UI shifting a 100 times. If I had to open webpages for things I use regularly, that would drive me insane. Maybe that says something about web dev standards
If a 120MB app is required just to display an itinerary PDF, that's an architecture problem, not a UX problem.
I recently made a "mobile app" that was hosted as a web page with a mobile-friendly UI. Went on my search browser and saved it as a shortcut. Easy work around for testing it on a mobile interface.
I thought he had created an website which ran an APK server-side and was loadable in a browser. Oh well.
App = Information × Interface = User Experience
It's ×(multiplication), not +(plus). Interface is not simply overlaid on Information; it actively changes how information is perceived and used, thus User Experience (UX).
Users have limited screen space, attention time, context retention, etc. So, apps must be wise about what information matters at any given moment, and make the best out of those limited resources.
Developers have been crazy about this: A/B testing, CVR, retention, churn, LTV, ARPU, DAU/MAU, North Star Metrics. Deploy and analyze, develop and optimize, rinse and repeat, and apps end up as revenue-generating machines.
A side effect of this optimization loop is that, apps become a designed thinking process for users. Apps decide what to show, what to hide, what to emphasize, and what comes next. They actively shape how people see and think, all to lure them into spending money.
So, "this could have been a webpage" misses the point of what apps are for, and, by extension, who apps are for.
Still, I see a bit of potential here. Document is a natural user interface -- almost all apps, including even SPAs, have document-like or document-driven views. Perhaps we've been too obsessed with computer-program-like UI. Documents can always be dynamic and interactive without being overdesigned. Perhaps this is what folks wanted to point out.
Booking a flight on the website and then being told I need the app just to see my boarding pass drives me nuts.
I think yeah, most apps can be webpages, but the biggest used apps can also be webpages, (insta, facebook, x) and so on , I think the only real indicator is how much people are using the apps, not if it's simpler just to do a webpage
The absolute worst is the rare Wi-Fi hotspots in China that require you to install an app in order to connect to the Wi-Fi.
100% agree with this.
I've been wanting to write an article on a very similar topic myself for some time now. Perhaps I'll finish it and share it here. Absolutely done with this modern 'convenience' and app culture.
I’ll always remember that dumb Wired headline screaming “the web is dead” a decade or so ago… nah I’m happy with whatever crappy webpage, thank you very much
I keep telling that outside games, most apps could be done as plain mobile Web, emphasis on mobile Web, not the PWA kludge of workers and what not.
Someone should design a webpage that can run native iOS/Android apps. That will teach them.
depending on the age of the children, could it be designed this way for people who are not allowed to access the internet generally, but their parents will let them have the app installed for vacation?
If that's the case, then I agree. Lots of crapplets should be Web pages (for example, almost every corporate app).
However, there's a lot of stuff that does, indeed, require a native app.
That's the stuff I like to do. Doesn't really scale to Web pages.
If you're having any trouble loading it, it is cached here: https://archive.ph/ByFBN
Of course it should have been a Webpage. You can even code a whole modern map application on the Web, that's under 3 Mo gzipped, instead of the 600 Mo Java applications that we're served.
A webpage cannot harvest your personal data in ways that an app can.
Choosing to do an app is quite often less about the capabilities (of an app on the phone, versus a website in a mobile browser) and more about discoverability and market reach. App Stores serve a "store window" purpose, where it is easy to search, easy to discover, easy to access new tools/solutions.
What annoys me is not that "this app could've been a webpage". It is that "this app should also have a web version".
TripIt comes to mind as the opposite way: they started as a website only, and quickly the need to have an app was obvious: GPS integration, offline access, contact list for sharing, and more.
The strong language is fully appropriate given the circumstances.
Love your username! Great book. It’s a shame he’s been cast into obscurity because of his personal life. You mean someone who writes lots of dark fiction is a deeply dark and troubled soul himself! Gasp!
Articles like this stress me out because they make me feel wildly out of touch by proxy
Like on most other technical opinions this person has I probably agree, but they're so absolutely wrong (for the majority of modern consumers you will fail without an app) that it makes me wonder what other seemingly obvious things we're both completely wrong about.
Nobody here is talking about the fact that a significant number of users want apps, too.
I'm responsible for an internal tool at the company I work for, hosted as a website, that handles a bunch of miscellaneous tasks that other employees need. Think reimbursements, documentation and reporting, gathering and presenting business data. That sort of thing.
When I took it over, it was desktop only ( a lot of <table> formatted pages with fixed px sizes). I spruced it up, modernized it to work on screens of any size, and created a mobile version of any pages that just didn't translate well to small screens (think "large tables of information").
When I announced the update, the number of people who asked me variations of "how to get website on phone if website on computer" or requested I make the damn thing an app was outrageous.
We take tech literacy for granted, because it's like a dozen levels down fundamental to our entire field. But the tech illiterati exist, and they love apps.