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.
> 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.
They "love apps" because apple and android have spent billions to break their mental models and convince them that "you use apps to do things on your phone". Literally. That's the extent of most people's understanding.
So, sure, they "want" apps in the same sense that early internet users "wanted" AOL because in their minds AOL and the internet were indistinguishable. But actual free choice requires an understanding of the choices.
When I say I want an app that implies a few things:
- this isn't a one-off use, I don't want an app to pay parking meter once and never use it again.
- it's an app and not a WebView pretending to be native
- it's native and not react-wanna-be-native
- you know how to make an app
I have to use this app to open a parcel locker and every time I launch it I have to wait for "downloading bundle". It's probably the easiest kind of app to make and yet somehow they made it worse then a website.
Most of the users of phones seem to operate on the no idea what's going on model. It's on developers to meet them where they are at, and if that's the app store you better be there for them.
Honestly, they probably would have been perfectly happy with a bookmark on their home screen, but have you ever tried walking someone who doesn't know how to enter a url into their browser through the process of making a home page bookmark on their phone?
Ultimately I ended up making a PWA that does nothing except act as a bookmark. Which was way more of a PITA than it should have been.
>Ultimately I ended up making a PWA that does nothing except act as a bookmark.
Which is exactly what I was going to reply to your original post.
I am willing to bet 80-90% of user don't want / need / care if it is an Native app. They simply want the website / PWA bookmark icon on their App Screen selection.
The problem right now is the experienced of getting a PWA on to an App screen is not user friendly or in someway user hostile because it goes against the fundamental service revenue of their App Store model.
I really wish PWAs were more well-known among average users. If people knew and expected they could install certain websites as apps, that would simplify things so much and really balance the power of the app stores.
Unfortunately apple accomplished their goal of killing that entire idea. The time for it to take off was 10 years ago. They begrudgingly support it now but it's too late. gg
It's not well known because it's annoying to install ... and it's annoying to install because the stores are huge cash printing machines so that's not going to change.
I think you're right, but I think it's also because the industry trained everyone on this model. I remember ~ 2010-2012 there was a big push to make everything an app. As far as I can tell the only benefit to users is a nice icon on the home page, and the benefit for the company is.. exfiltrating data from the users phone?
If pinning website bookmarks was more prominently advertised in the UI, they would be fine with it I guess. Though it would need some more changes.
Why do people like apps? Because they can put it on their home screen, they can open the app list and pick from there, they are searchable in a canonical repository, which is kind of like googling for the website but still.
Login flows are simpler and persist better, with local storage etc.
Multiple apps can be switched between by just moving between the currently opened apps, while website tabs appear inside the browser only and are mixed with many other unrelated browsing tabs, making it harder to find.
I guess fundamentally all of these could be supported with browsers. But in the end, Google and Apple don't want to make bookmarks and independent persistent "browser windows" easier.
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.
I had a similar experience. It was mostly lower- and middle-managers who needed to put their mark on something visible.
I responded with, "Tell me what features you want the app to have that the web site doesn't; or is this a vanity project?" The "vanity project" line is what made people re-think what they were asking.
When that didn't work, I pointed out that they'd have to hire an entire new team to do the app, and gave them a high six-figure number to accomplish what they wanted.† That always worked.
† For a number of regulatory and political reasons, we cannot offshore for cheap.
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 like making maps, and I wanted to do a certain bend on a very specific kind of online map, filling a gap I noticed in existing maps.
The idea of an app really appealed to me (at first), but the more I thought about it the more I didn't want to deal with iOS and then Android and then maintaining parallel functionality on the web and all that mess just for a fairly-local hobby project that I make no money off of.
So, I just kept it as a website (which is also a PWA) with extensive testing on every platform I can think of. It's just worked out so well and is so, so, so much less complicated. And if I abandon it, should just keep working for years so long as the website stays up (or until browsers start doing something very different JS-wise.)
So i've done similar things in the past - and my justification for 'app' over website has been offline.
Does the PWA state of things resolve that in the modern days? If it did, yeah I'd agree, no need for an app at all. In my case the app was being used in rural Ontario. I cant even make a phone call here without wifi.
> my justification for 'app' over website has been offline.
Gosh, I wish more apps did some kind of progressive "enhancement" and let people read already cached messages and do deferred sends like the old days, instead of being completely useless without a data connection.
I used to run a company (2010-2018) where our customers were almost always using our product inside of grocery stores, which are almost always metal sheds with some finishings on the walls. Not so great for cell service, it became essential for us to support offline mode if we wanted to keep those customers happy and engaged.
I spent many late nights trying to debug reachability bugs. It's frankly a nightmare trying to build a reliable app when the user has /some/ cell service, but not enough to operate the app reliably.
Gosh, having tried to use the Home Depot app (to find products in store) while IN their stores... It's so bad. I can't even imagine what you dealt with in trying to handle those things.
(And so, so many little bugs in my map thing from upthread were these odd timing quirks when a user didn't have good service and one check would run and leave something else hanging resulting in a blank map. <sigh>)
Yeah, home depot is a tricky case. They have a huge array of products, and in my experience when you cant find something you need to search beyond the store you're in....so the database you need access to isn't exactly small. Makes a practical offline experience tricky.
Home depots website sucks anyway, slow, clunky, terrible touch space, and the search is awful.
Aside, they should ad cell repeaters inside to fix all this.
Maybe in the US, in Canada i find their online services are pretty average. A lot of the time i search for something and i get a US link, much to my disapointment.
This actually handles that, at least for my use case. Specifically, on first load of the page (in a browser, or the stripped-down browser that runs the app-like PWA install) a service worker gets installed, that caches the entire site/app/map locally, and runs it from there. Then every 24 hours, or on new page load, it checks the live site for content changes and pulls down the changes if they exist. If there's no network connectivity it just silently runs the map.
Each map is 16MB - 20MB in total, so this is all nice and simple to do. Even on a slow 3G connection it's only a minute or so for a full map update to stream in.
The whole point of this system was to take a snapshot of data (mostly OSM), add on some local things that can't really be represented in OSM (like WHICH parking lots are most appropriate, stylistic overrides, system descriptions, etc) and display them. Because of issues I've had in the past with well-meaning-but-misguided OSM mappers wrongly editing trail systems I did not want anything that pulls live.
And then by having purely static content the hosting is very cheap and easy, there's no security concerns around... well... anything dynamic on the site. And each map is portable were I to want someone else to host them. And literally in a couple of years if I haven't updated the map it won't change yet still will work, and that's fine and accepted for this use. Sort-of like a mobile version of a traditional print map. Kinda like the print workflow of editing/design/etc and then rendering the PDF, but web.
This all aligned nicely for me to have a tool that works this way, with each map generated by a tool.
(Sort-of disclaimer: It was also a big personal project in learning to work with AI stuff for development. I knew and understood the inputs and outputs, was able to design the UI, handled/managed all the testing... But I didn't have to worry about the actual-code part. I was able to make pretty quick progress and iterate nicely on my ideas.)
Happy to talk, etc, more about it too. Either here, or contact info is on the site.
Hello fellow map maker! I feel like I’m in the same boat. PWAs work great, I wish Apple would treat them as first class apps. I tinkered with launching a TWA for my app on the Play Store and it works pretty well but I haven’t published it yet. Probably a harder market to monetize than iOS but it seems like good advertising just to have the listing up
Hello! And yeah... :\ The Android/Chrome/Edge support for it is great, and on iOS it's actually nice, but you have to do all the hoop-jumping of clicking Share, whatever, and getting the icon to actually appear.
Also, apparently Apple really doesn't like approving apps that are basically wrapped PWAs (Google will, I guess?) so that is yet another check against bothering with an app.
Yeah, Apple has a rule against simple wrappers. Check out bubblewrap if you haven’t already. It’s made by Google specifically for wrapping PWAs for the Play Store. There’s a tiny bit of work to make a keystore and manifest file, otherwise it just pulls from your PWA config automatically
Thanks for that pointer. I have, but I just really don't want to do it... With my current architecture -- that I like -- it'd be an app per map. Which I guess could make a little pocket money, but they are so hyper-local it wouldn't earn much. So I may as well just keep things going the way they are.
The main idea was to solve the gap of how many trail systems have colored loops, or signed/colored loops made up of multiple "trails", and Trailforks (et al) has no concept of that. So the situation a user finds themselves in is being at a trail, with Trailforks up, wanting to follow the "Orange" loop (for example), and Trailforks doesn't show that.
Hopefully the "Orange" loop is documented as a route, but this stuff often gets missed, and is still awkward since the image of the map still doesn't match the signs.
So my goal was to show the map close to what's physically there, use OSM data as much as possible, and filling in gaps for what OSM doesn't capture, rendering it all into a static map that also happens to work offline. For some specific examples, compare these two systems and their print, Trailforks, and trailmaps.app maps:
There is the same kind of gap when compared to RideWithGPS, Strava, Gaia, etc.
And also, I'm a volunteer with our local trails non-profit. I want anyone and everyone to be able to find maps so they can enjoy the trails. A /lot/ of trail clubs are starting to replace maps with a link to Trailforks, which I believe does riders a disservice because it both requires an app and account and (if a user is trying to view a map out of their home area on a phone) payment. It's literally locking the basic info about a trail -- the map -- behind a semi-paywall. By making a system like this for our local trails I've helped completely avoid that mess. And so I made the map generator open as well so other techy folks can do the same or build on this.
This generated-static-map system does have the downside of being single-person-ish manually managed, and the maps do NOT update automatically. But I also see this as a feature, just like the print maps and in-person signage they are designed to complement.
I periodically try to put something together. I don’t even care about publishing to the app store really, I mostly want to make stuff for myself for macOS.
My last attempt, it felt like Apple was no longer interested in the idea of hobbyist developers. The setup just to get the Xcode project setup felt like I needed to have a company and a website. When I selected something about iCloud, because I thought it would be nice if what I made synced to iCloud, I couldn’t even get started without paying $99, so I had to start again and choose a different option without it. And here I thought the $99 was just to publish to the store.
Considering how Apple started, this trend feels wrong. When I wanted to make a simple little app a few weeks ago, I ended up using python with webview. It seemed to be one of the few ways to make a little GUI app without boiling the ocean.
This is exactly what I've been observing as well. As soon as the App Store became a cash cow, the incentive to support non-commercial development went away. It's now a place constructed by a giant company, for giant companies.
I am on a formerly fairly active game app forum elsewhere and it's been dead for years. Indie developers are still probably making some releases, but the combination of Apple being unfriendly to small developers and the economics of the whole thing means it's close to dead. There were tons of experimental little $1 or $2 games in the early days but that seems to be gone. Even worse many of the old ones aren't playable anymore because they never made the transition to 64 bits and OS support for them is gone.
As someone who uses apps, the hoops you have to jump through are one of the reasons I prefer apps. I'm glad Apple knows who you are and have scrutinized (to some degree) your app.
I have no interest in installing a web app that could look innocuous today and be entirely different every time I hit F5.
Search right now in the App Store for "Morpho" and you'll find a "Morpho: Network" app. That app says it's some sort of TODO/Note taking app. It uses very broad language in the screenshots and assets from morpho.org (a decentralized protocol).
Once you open the app, it immediately downloads another bundle using OTA updates and shows an entirely different app where you "connect your wallet". You can imagine what happens next.
> I have no interest in installing a web app that could look innocuous today and be entirely different every time I hit F5.
Or as I have encountered several times over the years, it turned out to have vanished without a trace for whatever reason (author got bored, became ill, didn’t want to pay for the domain any more, etc) when I reach for it, sending me searching for an alternative in the midst of a task.
Self-contained binaries stored on my personal devices don’t do that, and one can usually find third party copies scattered across the internet long after the author stopped publishing/maintaining them.
This highlights the differences between what developers want vs. what (some) end users want. Developers love the web because they can change things and deploy instantly, they can have a single version of their app "out there" and not have to worry about clients running old software, and they can take their software down when it becomes inconvenient to maintain. Users on the other hand, like apps: They don't want their app changing out from under them suddenly. They want to be allowed to use the old version they are comfortable with and that's not stuffed with ads. And they want the assurance that the software will actually be there the next time they want to use it.
I personally have no love for web apps either. No matter how many well-behaving developers are out there, the median web developer has ruined the web as an app platform to the point where I view web software as generally hostile, ad-filled, spyware, that's under the control of and serves the web developer's interests over the end user's interests.
In addition, it’s a lot easier to seek rent with a web app which is also likely a big factor.
I’m a dev and understand how web apps can be attractive to us, but as a user they irritate me. During my formative years, software by and large served the user over the dev, so flipping the scales entirely in my favor as a dev feels almost wrong.
Interesting. Since we're talking about PWAs, which are essentially apps running in the sandbox of a web client (i.e. browser), the issue you raise could presumably be fixed in an instant with a client-side setting: "Do not update this app".
That improves the situation a little, but the user still doesn’t have an easy way to migrate the app to other browsers on the same machine or to new machines. With a self-contained binary you just copy the executable wherever and you’re done.
The other issue is that web browsers are dynamic environments (much more so than operating systems) and sometimes break/change things. Users who’ve frozen PWA updates don’t have any access to critical fixes. A lot of devs just wouldn’t support frozen versions.
It's against the App Store rules but if you build an app with React Native/Expo you can OTA update it to do something completely different without going through another review. Enforcement is minimal, especially since you can selectively roll out updates to make it unlikely that a reviewer gets it.
It's such a weird thing to be concerned about though. Your phone automatically updates apps by default so they can suddenly look different later. And even then, so what? If the change was malicious just stop using it? Apps are sandboxed, websites are sandboxed, you'll be fine.
> Enforcement is minimal, especially since you can selectively roll out updates to make it unlikely that a reviewer gets it.
What's worse is that there's practically no process to report any sort of rulebreaking, so someone could be mining crypto or running a residential proxy [1] through the mobile game I've been playing, and I'd be none the wiser.
In this case the police are not watching. Apple does a cursory review during the approval process but they are not proactively firing up your app to see if anything changed post-review.
My assumption is that 99% of what is on the app store is trash. I never go surfing the app store to find "an app" because I know it will be a waste of time. I'm outright offended that they hide the search in a corner and center a bunch of ads for apps that I know I want nothing to do with. I had to subscribe to Apple Arcade and cancel right away to make the (1) badge go away on a feature that insults me as a "gamer."
All the time I hear that "PhotoSync" is good or I install an app for a business that I deal with like my bank or the local gas station.
On the other hand I feel like it is safe and usually worthwhile to browse the web -- even the sketchy parts, like the web sites that lead me into rabbit holes right out of Videodrome.
I have no interest in installing a web app in almost all cases. I'm happy to visit one though, and I trust the browser sandbox to keep it from doing anything worse than making my device warm until I notice and close the tab.
Exactly. I've published apps. When GP says their actual app is "pretty much garbage" and that there was red tape and nitpicking - Apple is trying to stop garbage!
From experience doing mobile development at work, natively for both Android and iOS, Apple does test and run your app to make sure it works and that it does what it promises to do. I can see it because we issue both Google and Apple accounts and I can see when they get used. While Apple's app review is harsh, it did make our app higher quality and they are quick to reject when there are bugs. They run our app on every review and go through their checklist. Apple is also quick to question the permissions we ask for and make us justify them. In one instance, whoever did the app review, listened to our justification and actually recommended a better, alternative approach. Android, Google test ran our app when we put it up for the first review and havn't used their test credentials for any subsequent reviews to push app updates. We totally could just completely bust our app, push it to the store or do whatever we want and there seems like little to no oversight.
It's hard to go look in the app store and see what a dumpster fire it actually is and then claim Apple is trying. They aren't. They're just claiming that as marketing to keep their money making machine.
> It's hard to go look in the app store and see what a dumpster fire it actually is and then claim Apple is trying. They aren't.
You cannot make that claim unless you know how many apps Apple has rejected for being garbage. On one hand, developers complain Apple runs all kinds of checks on their apps before publishing on the App Store. On the other hand, users complain that App Store has too many low-quality apps. Both can be true at the same time if the stream of apps is high volume and low quality.
It's not about a "good job" or a "bad job". It's a continuous game of cat and mouse. They're getting better at it just as some of the best funded bad actors are.
They only have 500 reviewers for the whole App Store, and in fact, they were chastised by the judge in the Epic case for investing very little in the review process six years ago when they also only had 500 reviewers for the whole App Store. This isn't cat and mouse it's theater while they're shielded by section 230 immunity and pocketing enormous profits.
It matters in the context of trusting their review process, and certainly "seems small" considering these 500 people oversee 2 million apps while scams and fraud have been prolific for years.
I think if they didn't have immunity for all the scams and fraud - and that's being challenged by both the EU regulators and in US courts - they'd probably have a lot more than 500 people. Multiples of it.
> 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.
For something free I can get why this would seem unreasonable (modulo scams, for which this is a hoop I would rather have than not), but if money's involved, a consumer should be able to contact a human and be made whole, and having the money be handled by a company (even if that company is just a one-man-show) honestly does not seem unreasonable.
If you want to bypass that, you just shouldn't publish to the App Store, which does (or at least is supposed to) have protections suitable for most people. You should still be able to make apps and use them without the App Store involved, then the individual human who wants that app can make decisions based in the specific app in question and the people behind it, but that's a separate conversation.
Yes, you’re right that much of this only comes up when you’re trying to charge money for an app.
However, if you’re running your own website you can make those decisions on your own without being forced into most of them.
Plenty of very large “reputable” companies obfuscate their physical address and phone number, and don’t even offer an email address for contact.
I’d also say that this shouldn’t be as necessary when an app platform is involved. Apple takes 15-30% of the revenue and acts as a full retailer. Why do App Store customers have any need to contact the underlying developers in this scenario?
Walmart doesn’t make it easy/possible for me to contact the manufacturer of their t-shirts.
There are even other digital software stores like GOG or Steam that really aren’t selling you software that has a guaranteed point of contact.
Those platforms just have a half-decent to decent return policy and act as the middleman.
But when you’re on iOS you have all the burdens of a third-party supplier without all the benefits.
> However, if you’re running your own website you can make those decisions on your own without being forced into most of them.
You will however pay for that privilege - a lot of people don't seem to realise their home address is in the WHOIS data, because they didn't pay the protection money to redact it
I find this hard to believe, since Google Play store requires much less info, and doesn't disclose it to consumers (AFAIK).
Did the EU specifically demand this from Apple? Did they specifically require that consumers must be able to contact developers?
Or is this another "spin" by Apple to make the EU look bad when it imposes consumer protection that is bad for Apples revenue? Like they did with "chargers", "cables" and like the ad- and surveillance-industry has done quite successfully with their "spin" on the GDPR (making it seem like the EU or GDPR requires cookie banners - which it doesnt)
I'm pretty sure the Google Play Store does require this. I remember a few years ago (no longer at the company) having to verify a phone number and maybe address that is posted publicly.
I'm not published in Google Play and don't have Android to check for myself, but when I look it up, I find claims that they do publish names and addresses for paid apps / apps with in-app purchases, due to the same EU law.
> Plenty of very large “reputable” companies obfuscate their physical address and phone number, and don’t even offer an email address for contact.
This is whataboutism. They should do that too. The fact they don't isn't an excuse for smaller devs or companies.
> I’d also say that this shouldn’t be as necessary when an app platform is involved. Apple takes 15-30% of the revenue and acts as a full retailer. Why do App Store customers have any need to contact the underlying developers in this scenario?
You should be able to contact the underlying manufacturer or whatever of any product you buy. Why should programs be different?
> Walmart doesn’t make it easy/possible for me to contact the manufacturer of their t-shirts.
They should.
> There are even other digital software stores like GOG or Steam that really aren’t selling you software that has a guaranteed point of contact.
More whataboutism. You should have a guaranteed point of contact for what you buy there too.
How far down does this go? Should I be able to contact the individual person who picked the specific strawberries in my carton of strawberries?
In the Walmart t-shirt example, should I have the contact info for not only the factory but the other suppliers who made the dyes, threads, cotton, the people who made the fuel for the harvester, the people who welded the tractor together?
Sure, maybe your idealist answer is yes, and on a conceptual level I can agree with that. But from a practical standpoint as the end consumer there is a stopping point.
My point is that Apple handles the money and the refunds, and they make all the software APIs. Completely closed platform. Why doesn’t the buck stop there? I feel like they pass along business responsibilities despite taking a large percentage of revenue.
If they’re going to pass on all those responsibilities for me then their cut should be more like ~5% to just cover transaction and platform costs.
> How far down does this go? Should I be able to contact the individual person who picked the specific strawberries in my carton of strawberries?
Down to the manufacturer of the whole product you're buying. In the case of your strawberries that would probably be the farmer.
> In the Walmart t-shirt example, should I have the contact info for not only the factory but the other suppliers who made the dyes, threads, cotton, the people who made the fuel for the harvester, the people who welded the tractor together?
No.
> Sure, maybe your idealist answer is yes, but from a practical standpoint as the end consumer there is a stopping point.
Of course there is. But you as the sole dev of an app are not at that point.
> My point is that Apple handles the money and the refunds, and they make all the software APIs. Completely closed platform. Why doesn’t the buck stop there?
My local electronics shop also handles the money and refunds when I buy a Dell. I can still get a refund directly from Dell if my machine breaks (not that I actually have a Dell). Yay reasonable laws.
The platform being closed and all the APIs being controlled by Apple are different problems that should be solved separately (which the EU is working on!).
> Down to the manufacturer of the whole product you're buying.
In case of an app, what is the "product" you are buying? Because according to Apple, they add a lot of "value" by ensuring the software is safe, performant, etc etc. Am I not buying "a safe, checked app"? Or am I buying an app and then separately pay Apple for an added service of "checking the app for safety" etc etc. I'd very much presume the first.
But if its separate, "an app" can be rather ambigous. For a one-time-purchase game, its clear. But many apps are really a service or even more that happen to have "an app" as one of the ways to interact with the service: Netflix, Uber, protonmail, Vinted (or ebay), etc etc: the app isn't the thing I buy. It's a wrapper around a service. Or even just one of the portals through which I can buy stuff. Point being: It's not simple, so your answers don't fit the analogy of "wallmart".
> In case of an app, what is the "product" you are buying?
The app.
> Because according to Apple, they add a lot of "value" by ensuring the software is safe, performant, etc etc. Am I not buying "a safe, checked app"? Or am I buying an app and then separately pay Apple for an added service of "checking the app for safety" etc etc. I'd very much presume the first.
If you want to, you can imagine the 30% cut being that separate service, but most analyses I've seen of this assume the first is the case, and I can't really see why it wouldn't be.
> But many apps are really a service or even more that happen to have "an app" as one of the ways to interact with the service: Netflix, Uber, protonmail, Vinted (or ebay), etc etc: the app isn't the thing I buy.
In those cases the app on the App Store is free, so there's nothing a consumer can really complain about, since they haven't bought anything. You can complain about the service rendered when you pay, but that purchase is handled completely separately from the app (non-)purchase.
> Point being: It's not simple, so your answers don't fit the analogy of "wallmart".
It does for apps bought as products. If you want an analogy for apps bought as services, then I'll use a different analogy, since they behave differently, and are treated differently in law.
> For something free I can get why this would seem unreasonable (modulo scams, for which this is a hoop I would rather have than not), but if money's involved, a consumer should be able to contact a human and be made whole, and having the money be handled by a company (even if that company is just a one-man-show) honestly does not seem unreasonable.
You're buying a digital good. You can already get refunds. An email address is fine for contact.
You definitely don't need someone's physical home address, nor an actual phone number.
Apple is the analog to the local electronics store. They're the ones with the direct relationship with you, they're the ones you paid, they took a 30% cut off the app developer's top line explicitly under the pretext that they handle the whole store arrangement.
And sure enough, they are in fact the ones who can issue a refund if you need one. The developer cannot. By design.
> Apple is the analog to the local electronics store. They're the ones with the direct relationship with you, they're the ones you paid, they took a 30% cut off the app developer's top line explicitly under the pretext that they handle the whole store arrangement.
Yet I can also ask Dell for a refund despite buying my Dell at my local electronics store. Both should be reachable and both should be able to give me a refund if my item is broken.
> And sure enough, they are in fact the ones who can issue a refund if you need one. The developer cannot. By design.
No, Dell will not give you a refund for something purchased at a retailer. For general returns and refunds, the retailer is on the hook because they're the ones who actually took your money.
What Dell will do is repair or replace a computer that is still under warranty. They won't refund.
I don't understand how this functions in practice: if business A sells a widget to reseller B who sells it to reseller C who sells it to the customer, there's multiple layers of markup. How can the original manufacturer be expected to refund the purchase price?
Reading the law, it does not say that the consumer is entitled to a refund.
> if business A sells a widget to reseller B who sells it to reseller C who sells it to the customer, there's multiple layers of markup. How can the original manufacturer be expected to refund the purchase price?
Simple. They operate within the law and provide the customer with a refund, or they get fined. From the consumer's point of view, this is irrelevant. Business can fix this B2B issue between themselves however they wish, so long as it doesn't affect the consumer. If you don't like it, then don't do business here.
Here's a case where a consumer complained directly to the manufacturer,[1] and the Consumer Disputes Commission ruled in favour of the consumer.[2] It's not even the core of the issue, but just mentioned, since it's settled law.
> Reading the law, it does not say that the consumer is entitled to a refund.
Refunding is one possible remediation, see section 32 (cancellation) and section 26 (The consumer's rights in the event of defects). That option cancels the purchase contract, meaning you as the consumer give the item back, while the seller gives you the money you paid for the item.
'Innklagde er klaget inn i kraft av å være produsent av syklene. De er følgelig ansvarlige
for kjøpsrettslige mangler etter direktekravsreglene i fkjl. § 35.'
Rough translation: 'A claim is lodged against the defendant due to it being the manufacturer of the bicycles. The defendant therefore liable for for defects accordance with the rules on direct claims set out in section 35 of the Act relating to consumer purchases.'
[2] They didn't rule in favour of the consumer's demand to have the manufacturer pay for their jacket that got damaged following them falling of their broken bike. They did rule in favour of the cost of repairing the bike (new handle bar), so the manufacturer is on the hook for that.
Fair enough, I didn't realize Norwegian law had this provision. EU-wide and US law do not, so this is pretty specific to the Nordic countries from what I can tell.
The joys of consumer protection. This one is fairly old (2002), and doesn't have any origin in any EU law, although I would have though that the EU had something roughly equivalent by now, and if they don't, they really should.
> a consumer should be able to contact a human and be made whole
Apple does not provide any mechanism for developers to issue a refund, or even look up or view your purchase or subscription - so there is nothing a developer can do here besides refer you to apple support.
(Although as a developer I would like to be able to do this, because customers are very confused by it)
Correct! In my other comment within the greater thread I detail how conceptually the App Store should be shouldering more of the burden considering they sell in a retail-like arrangement.
I would want that hoop for free apps too. If the developer is, for example, found to be mishandling private data, or maybe sharing my intellectual property, someone needs to answer for it.
> 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
That's an EU thing. If you don't publish in the EU you don't need to dox yourself.
It's also a very general European mindset thing. They have a very different approach to privacy there - they basically expect everyone's identity to be public, and then protect those identities from abuse, rather than the more US approach of letting you hide your identity so it can't be abused. You see supermarkets with the owner's full name plastered across the storefront underneath the franchise logo. "This store is EDEKA John Smith"
There's something to this but it's still a slightly dodgy generalization.
A random counter-example from France. If you have a one-person small business (i.e. with a registered business number and the right to invoice), all personal information beyond the name is private by default, it cannot be looked up. The Nordic countries are perhaps closer to the image you're painting. Personal tax information is famously public in Sweden, for example.
But IMO differences are easy to exaggerate. Let's not forget that private phone numbers used to be published in paper directories - with home addresses! - everywhere, including America.
A store is more reasonable to put your name on because generally if you want to meet the person running it you could just walk into it regardless of whether you know their name.
The internet has created a culture of deranged harassment that makes posting your identity online alongside anything you publish more insane than ever. And your market is more or less the entire world rather than your local community.
Occasionally mobs of hateful psychos will target individuals with harassment. There is absolutely not enough protection from unwanted messages, unwanted phone calls, false reports to SWAT teams, identity theft, who knows what else.
In Europe, a lot of the protection is that they have to provide their own identity to access the system. So I can host something on my internet connection, which is tied to my ID, and people can DoS it, but those people also have to provide ID for their own internet connections and can be traced, unless they are outside Europe in which case I can solve it by blocking all other countries. If someone spam-calls me from Europe, their phone is registered to their ID and caller ID is strictly enforced, so I know who is spamming me. For this reason there are few spam calls. If someone sends me a letter - well, I don't think sender address is mandatory because it couldn't be enforced. If someone wants to look up my details on the business registry, they leave a record showing who is looking them up.
Nope, at least in Play Store it's because of how Google chooses to run their store. Google is the middleman between two sides of the transaction and its the developer that actually sells these apps, while Valve is one of the sides of the transaction and sells things based on the license granted by the developer. Not sure how Apple does it though.
It's also in the US. A consumer protection law in California started it around a decade ago and Google applied it to everyone instead of letting us opt out of the state (it's why I let my Android app die), and since then they've also disallowed PO boxes.
I did something similar. I wanted to tell myself I had done it, but also it was an inexpensive learning experience and I got an app that I wanted out of it.
And I think I got that. I like how mine does what it does (maps breaker panels and records home maintenance and stuff) without someone trying to sell me something.
But once I realized what advertising costs everywhere, I pretty quickly realized that app exists essentially just for me.
And that’s ok, but it’s a stark contrast from the goldrush years of (even garbage) apps making money.
I did something similar, for similar reasons. In the end I just did whatever to get it published. If you show up at my door, I'll pour you your choice of beer/coffee. But I agree, it feels very invasive!
On the web side of things DNS only recently started being more private - 10+ years ago it was common to have your phone + postal address on whois.
Two take aways from my experience
1. I'm happy that I invested more in the web
2. The app store gives you distribution - I have a few websites with almost 0 traffic, but the app I wrote gets a handful of downloads a week almost 2 years later?
>10+ years ago it was common to have your phone + postal address on whois
This is the .dk TLD today, and it's the reason I've never posted my website here. The .dk registry (punktum.dk) is run by absolute clowns.
On the other hand, the first thing I do before spending money on a danish website is "whois eksempel.dk", and if it doesn't return a danish address (and wasn't created recently), I'm out.
Back when I used to freelance, somebody once paid me a scant fee to build a pretty cool online tool for music teachers, basically an interactive piano. I checked in on the website a few years afterwards and found that they had wrapped it into an app and been selling it for $5/install ever since I made it for them. Probably my fault for not licensing the software I wrote for them (I was basically a kid at the time) but it still bothers me.
Yeah it’s all a pain. One thing that helped was using hotwire native. It is basically a web view but it bridges the mobile app with your website and wraps it into a mobile app. This is the only way I can make apps now. Flutter never worked well for me.
It's like a lot of tech trajectories. At first it was fairly easy and people did it, and then both the producer, consumer, and platform evolved off in some direction in an endless feedback cycle, and now a newcomer sees the whole ecosystem is all the way over there in some weird place and doesn't join it because why would you want to be over there, but the existing actors don't see it as strange because they acclimatized to each step along the way.
Recently I tried out tiktok for a day and couldn't fathom why I would possibly want to ever use this app. Same with Instagram. But people who followed their trajectory since their earlier days find them normal.
Same with Facebook, actually. And Google.
On the other side of that equation, my very old YouTube account (which still has a subscription to "YouTube Red" that costs half of what a new subscription to YouTube Premium costs) has been trained to show me certain content, and if I joined with a new account or told someone else to join, I know the homepage would be filled with dumb slop.
Facebook only made sense in the context of living on a college campus… I think it doesn’t quite fit this pattern because realistically users were rarely in the “good fit” case for only ~4 years. Then, for each user, it becomes this sort of awkward slowly decaying network as people move on.
Facebook was once a friend network and they added more and more advertising and slop to it. If you were the frog in the pot as it heated, it feels normal to you that your feed is entirely made of spam. If you're still out of the pot now, it seems foolish to jump in, unlike when it was lukewarm.
Maybe. I joined fairly early, still have an account, but did become pretty disengaged from it after graduation. So maybe I didn’t get the proper gradual boiling experience.
I still have a Facebook account, and will occasionally log in (most recently attempting to sell something on their craigslist equivalent). The default content shown in your "feed" or dashboard is more than 50% engagement bait and/or slop. I attempted to start flagging those posts as "never show me again," but it soon became apparent that it was a Sisyphean task, and I just logged out again.
There’s the “friends feed” in the app that has less garbage in it. I mean, these days it is just full of my friends posting pictures of their kids or reposting political things. But I can’t really blame Facebook for the fact that we got old and boring, and it doesn’t have the “suggested content” nonsense.
It's about tracking. Most of the money in the industry comes from knowing precisely when you were on the toilet every day and they can't get that from a web app.
Couldn't agree more. I've only published on Google Play, but the number of hoops Google makes you jump through (and keeps making you jump through if you want to keep your app in the store) is a full-time job in itself. New permission requirements, needing to self-decalre that your app does/doesn't do this or that, forcing you to reveal your personal details. The list goes on.
I’m not sure what you mean. My app is published. I actually jumped through the hoops because I wanted to learn how to jump through those hoops.
My project hasn’t been filtered at all. I just found the process more of a bureaucratic exercise than made sense (and the end result was that my low quality app was accepted so none of this is done in the name of quality).
Aside from the low-effort snark and lack of empathy towards someone's project, this is also how you filter people out of caring about software development at at a young age, and then who's going to keep the computer systems running?
Nobody cares about the future, only the present. America forgot how to manufacture things, too, because it was momentarily uneconomical and there was no concern about how to keep the living knowledge going.
It's professionally made slop, engineered precisely for maximum value extraction. This guy's app presumably didn't extract value successfully so they don't want it.
You'll still find people praising Apple (maybe even Google) for their review process even though their store is full of garbage. Really justifies their 30% cut.
> 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.
This is an EU requirement, and Apple didn't do this before EU required it. All app marketplaces have the same requirement for EU
> On a website you can just not deal with any of that
This may violate other EU compliance requirements but sure there's obviously no authority determining your compliance before allowing you to publish on web
I have been publishing apps as a solo developer for a long time and every app I've published has been something I wanted for myself. For example, I spent so much time here on hacker news. So I wanted an app for a better experience. So I built my app almost a decade ago. Then people requested me build one for Android, so I built that too. I've similarly built various macOS apps which I use daily for myself.
If anyone is interested, it's called HACK and I am writing this comment from it. Link is in my bio.
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.
That's so opposite to my preferences that I'd be really interested in the results of someone studying that group of users.
I do like local native software, preferably using the native UI toolkit, filesystem and features of the device hardware not necessarily available to the browser. That doesn't describe most commercial mobile apps in 2026.
There are actually apps which will "appify" webpages/websites for Android, or were the last time I needed one. They've been aroubd a long time. I assume they still exist.
Apps bypass ad and tracking blockers too. They do have OS permissions as a potential roadblock, but most users just click "OK" on those prompts the first time when they install or open the app.
I mean, I don't know if that's a generation thing or what but as much as I'm comfortable using my phone, and ordering things in my phone's apps, when it's a website and I'm on mobile I always feel an urge to go to my desktop or laptop to check and do it there, I don't "trust" mobile websites as they always seem to give a limited set of information. Or at least that's the vibe I'm getting.
Interesting. I'm 29 and hate downloading apps on phone or pc, if I can use a website I'll choose that every time. Unless performance matters like a game or media editor.
the mobile website is just the PC website with css responsiveness, you can just enable "show desktop version" on mobile if that helps reduce your paranoia
The other common reason I use "show desktop version" is when the mobile "version" displays nothing but "use our app", while the desktop version actually provides the content.
I've had to use this a few times when on my phone to be able to actually access the webpage.
Many years ago, there was a trend to show a different website, sometimes on a different domain and often with more differences than just a mobile version of the stylesheet. Sometimes the mobile version was not updated enough, or there was a reduction in functionality, hence the paranoia.
I'm fine using my mobile browser for things. What I'm not fine on is using the, um, internet intent thing that comes up when you click on a link in slack or email or something and isn't actually you're browser and if you switch applications it might go away forever?
You need to click the 3 dot menu and select "open in <browser of choice>", then you can switch apps normally as you'd expect and it'll be a tab in your browser like usual.
Mid 80s, grew up watching dad playing around with his atari st and was lucky enough to be able to toy around on his 386 and then 486, feeling like a god because I managed to get those config.sys and co to start games he couldn't. For me mobile website was something "tacked on" the real website and I have never been able to shake that feeling away somehow.
hmm, im the same age and feel no qualms about mobile web - it almost always literally just different CSS on the same desktop site. That's the benefit of the web vs mobile.
Am I the only person who buys things on mobile websites? I feel like most apps are just websites rendered in webviews with a bunch of background tracking added, and websites create a bit of a firewall between my OS/filesystem and the application.
I purchase almost exclusively from mobile websites and the Amazon app. I'm likely to abandon a purchase if it doesn't work smoothly on mobile - there's really no excuse in this day and age. Also a mid-80's kid. I hate having to pull out my laptop for anything. Different strokes for different folks as they say.
On this forum? You are probably one of the few. I hate the way mobile browsers handle tabs with no control over forcing a reload and losing state. I prefer the desktop. I prefer my treestyle tabs. I am hardly on the phone as a result.
I hate installing apps, sitting tracking my data in the background, and then there are often silly restrictions such as copy/paste being disabled, for what is basically just a web app.
On well implemented mobile websites, Google password manager pops up as does Google pay, can even authenticate with my fingerprint, zero friction. Theres zero need for an app.
And that's coming from a millennial who used to buy big ticket items on the PC.
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’m sure Disney (or whoever made this app) cares very very little about this, or treats it as a negative.
Virtually every company will treat it as a negative as the first thing most users are going to do if you allow them 100% experience customization is remove all the ads.
> I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture"
Thie assertion is extremely funny to me. Historically we come from an "app culture". Back in the day, around 2000 or so, if you wanted some functionality, you ran an application. You ran software in your computer.
Then on the early 2000s people started migrating their software web" , inventing "SaaS" (software as a service" .
I remember my young self being strongly opposed to that, because I saw little sense in constraining what you could do with a scripting language, when you could easily get the "networking" capabilities adding tcp/ip to your software .
But the web and Javascript won, mostly due to control (there was advertising in software since the 90s, for example Opera or GetRight had ad banners) .
The feature and mobile phones came and people started to migrate to "apps" again. So we came full circle.
It's because apple pushed towards apps and didn't want web apps on their phone. Likely due to the profits they can gain from appstore sales
Native apps would be the better platform in my eyes if the Operating Systems would be better in terms of letting a user manage what a native app have access to and can do.
But currently they are preferred by companies despite more dev effort because they can get more user data without the user having easy ways to prevent that. And of course showing ads without the user being easily able to block them
There's nothing technical stopping us from investigating and modifying the apps we install - at least on operating systems that allow you to install unapproved apps. YouTube Vanced only got in legal trouble for distributing a copyrighted work (the YouTube app) which led to ReVanced which is a patcher that doesn't include a copy of the original app.
You're not wrong at all, but it's interesting that iOS launched with only web app support for third party software, and it took community pressure to persuade them to support native apps. There was not even an app store to begin with.
Pretty much every single feature added in the early days (and later) of ios was simply copying what was popular on cydia. That well started to run dry as they got better at whack a moleing jailbreaking exploits, severely contracting that community of tweak developers, and we've seen the resulting product stagnation for some time now.
OP is about information, not functionality. In the early 2000s you would put things like that on a web page, and you'd put e.g. chat in its own application like Gaim.
In the 2010s the model inverted: now you need to keep an entire browser open to use google chat, and people try to get you to install an app to read a web page.
I was having that argument with everybody in the late 1990s and was vindicated.
In corporate IT, for instance, you have to roll out new versions of software all the time. There are better solutions for managing desktop fleets than there were back then, but with a web app you just update the server and... you're done!
Keep going further back, we had thin client terminals (not sure of the terminology, this was just before my time - I remember using them to look for books at our town library when I was a kid, green or orange text on a black screen, no mouse).
I don't think that's it. Apps took off because people felt comfortable yoloing stuff from the Apple app store, and for a short while before saturation, the app store reach was making small developers rich.
To be fair, apps took off before nice PWAs that masquerade as apps were a thing. The app store was already thriving to the point of oversaturation when the first versions of React were released.
IIRC, the cutting edge of PWAs when the app store was taking off was Backbone.js, which I don't recall being pleasant enough to work with to want to make anything large in.
I worked on converting an existing knockoutjs SPA into a PWA around that time. I won't claim it was a pleasant experience but it was probably a lot easier and quicker than a small team of webdevs learning mobile dev and cheaper than a new hire. It wasn't a small or basic app, but we did have the advantage of it being a B2B tool that would only be used on android tablets. IIRC it was going to be either extra work or maybe even impossible to get the same functionality on iOS/safari at the time so we just didn't.
React was open sourced in 2013. Service workers, which I consider to be essential to what we understand as PWAs, shipped first in Chrome in 2015, Safari in 2018.
I completely understand the confusion, but "Progressive Web App" or PWA[1], coined by Alex Russell and Frances Berriman[2], has become a specific term for websites that work normally on a pc but can also take advantage of things like push notifications and be installed on the home screen of a phone. You can see a measurable uptick on Google Trends after this blogpost [3].
The problem is that for nearly all apps I want them to have neither notifications nor access to data. For instance, with few exceptions, the only apps I allow to give me notifications are the default apple apps, like iMessage.
The only reasons I'll use an app over a website is if I have no choice in the matter, or if the app provides an easier UI/UX than the website.
apps took off before browsers had the capabilities required for native-like behaviour (fast graphics, hw functionality, notifications) and then were used even for apps that could have been web-apps.
When apps took off they weren't really making use of any of that either. Top apps back then were either using the standard ux libraries, or they were something like a simulated beer pint. Rehashing of popular flash and flip phone games like bejeweled.
The original intent of the iPhone was not to have 3rd party apps at all. Web apps were how developers were supposed to deliver to iPhone users. At the time, web apps weren’t as good as they are today and the market demanded local apps. Jailbreaks happened quickly, delivery systems like Cydia were set up. Apple either had to deliver their own official methods or play a cat and mouse game with hackers while trying to gaslight the public that websites were better than local apps.
Apps also took off on Android and Google likes PWAs.
I am not sure about the history, but a lot of it now is about tracking, and perceived security. Its far harder for users to manage things like location tracking in apps than in browsers.
The App Store took off because of the distribution channel it offers for developers (including being able to charge for the work) and the place of discovery it offers to users.
There was and is more than one App Store. You mention other good reasons to develop, but the money from ads was the biggest reason for an app to exist. Otherwise, it could and should just be a website.
Nah. When the App Store started getting truly popular you couldn't even run an ad blocker on mobile Safari. That came many years later.
IMO the reason we got to this place is twofold:
- apps give companies a spot on your Home Screen and allow you to develop a habit of opening it. I suspect Apple are very aware of this, which is why they continue to make it very difficult to install a web app to your home screen.
- notifications. Which, again, draw a returning audience
- well-designed apps retain enough state to be useful offline or in places with spotty coverage; PWAs can kinda be made to work like this but IIRC iOS will happily evict them under disk pressure;
- notifications. I've read that Apple have implemented them for home screen installed web apps but for reasons unknown I have not seen this in action even once.
URL filters in iOS 26 just make network level filtering more convenient (can use a real VPN at the same time) but it's nothing new in terms of replacement for real ad blockers, which is why apps like Wipr still include a Safari extension.
For most app ads it's enough to set a DoT or DoH in the system that blocks ad domains. Android supports this with a settings menu entry, on Apple one needs a more "technical" solution I think (loading some XML?). Most VPN apps also support DNS enforcement.
Apps like YouTube are an exception, but there are other ways around that on Android.
It's too bad not enough people know about using adguard dns on their phones. Dunno about iPhones but it works wonders on Android. Only downside is it sometimes interferes with signing into public wifi networks.
And that's fine, but if your app is just a wrapper for a website, send people to the website and have a link for them to download the app if they prefer.
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.
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.
> 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.
Not the case on many Android browsers, you can present the user with a button to do this for them by listening for the `beforeinstallprompt` event. There are some requirements to meet for that, but it's a pretty user-friendly way to push your PWA to the home screen: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
Yes, this is the answer. It’s easy to forget if you live in a tech bubble, but there are probably billions of smartphone users who don’t even know how to type a url into a browser and navigate to it.
I’ve worked on projects where we ran this experiment, and the success rate of “install this app and click on it” is several times higher than “navigate to this webpage every time you want to use our tool”.
One small correction though, android has made it easier to add a “progressive web app” to the home screen now. You can prompt the user with a dialog asking if they want to install it. I think there was at least some period where Google was really encouraging PWAs. iOS still sucks. I’ve had very poor success rates in getting users to install our PWA using the iOS workflow (and our tool is something they need for their jobs, so they are highly motivated to install it).
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.
> My strong belief is they want apps because they can spam you with notifications to get your attention.
That's it, an app installed on a mobile device is a much more effective attentional hook than a website that must be either bookmarked or remembered. It is like inviting a door-to-door salesman to your house, of course they will take the invitation.
Due to EU regulation, you can use a different browser engine in the EU (and I think Japan too), but thus far none have been developed (it's too much work to maintain two versions of the browser).
uninstall the app. my life is much better since i uninstalled most apps and I just use the web pages these days. To take ONE benefit from not using the youtube app, and instead using a browser: I can open more than one video at once.
There's nothing sinister there. Google is merely trying to break their own app in new user hostile ways and everything else breaking is collateral damage. :)
Apps are also more difficult to intercept and modify on most devices. Companies like them because it means you can't use ad blockers or other privacy tools. It's also why they flip out so outrageously when Apple adds privacy tools at the operating system level, because tracking and abuse are most of the reason why apps are useful to them in the first place.
Seconds since last reformat, number of times clipboard was used since last reformat, seconds since last reboot, dozens of other apps installed on the phone…
On Apple devices, so much is leaked to developers, and they will use it.
No need to play games and intentionally be obtuse all across the thread. "They" are the developers. A website has far less access to a device than an app and ads are easier to block. So they wrap anything into an app to gain that access and make ad money.
> Integration with OS features is what made the app ecosystem, because of utility.
This is true of some apps, like the beer-drinking one that uses the accelerometer / other orientation sensors.
It's not true of a large number of other apps, hence the "your app could have been a webpage" charge. This is distinct from "every app could be a webpage".
Responding but never answering to anything. You were asking a bunch of questions with obvious answers that you should have known or could have discovered yourself, but expected others to dig out and chew them for you. You even went to ridiculous lengths to pretend that apps only do things "because of utility" and everything else like data collection, tracking, ads, etc. is "conspiracy". That's negative value in a conversation.
We are in the age of PWAs. I've created a few where I just host them on Github pages (no backend needed, no hosting costs).
And the P in PWA has become "Personal" ... vibe coding apps with no backend for non-developers for their _personal_ needs e.g. a create a job hunting app for my son specific to the types of jobs he's looking for. If I update it, it updates on his phone plus he can sync to his laptop via WebRTC.
I'm currently attempting to write a calendar app for personal use, and I wanted to go the route of a self-host PWA. Notifications are a good point. How can I create notifications as a reminder before an event? Alerts are part of the icalendar standard ("VALARM"), so these are clearly notifications that are wanted by the user. Is that even possible for a PWA?
That's not true. The browser's push service wakes the service worker on delivery, even if the PWA is fully closed. That's the entire point of Push API vs polling.
> My strong belief is they want apps because they can spam you with notifications to get your attention.
My strong belief is they realized people were prone to spending absurd amounts of money in Facebook games, so they hijacked "social gaming" and spent 20 years deteriorating in defense of it.
Consider this timeline:
- Apple launches iPhone in 2007 with web apps central
- Zynga launches "Zynga Poker" on FB in 2007
- Apple launches App Store in 2008 with single-purchase apps
- Zynga hits 40 million monthly users in 2009
- Apple implements IAP and defensive policies in 2009
- Hundreds of millions of people playing Facebook games in 2010
... Apple goes to war with, bans and eventually kills Flash, the core technology to these games, and all of it moves to mobile and IAP
... web apps deprioritized, arms race with other browsers prevented
Ad supported apps are not necessarily from ad companies.
The point I'm trying to make that these ever-prevalent 'they just want' remarks are superficial, uninformed, overly broad, and vague, to the point of having no point.
There are many benefits to native apps over web apps on mobile devices, depending on the use case. A conspiracy against the people need not be part of every developer's choice to utilize the native platform and associated app store for distribution.
I know there's lots of horrible companies out there (hi Meta!) who will drive you to their native apps just for performance of ads and 'engagement'. This doesn't justify the conspiracy thinking getting applied to native apps as a whole.
Ad tech comes with a whole bundle of mal-incentives, like engagement hacking. If you are supported by ad revenue then your primary job is to get your users to look at ads. That's an ad company, for our purposes here.
Probably a statistical paradox where most developers aren't doing mass surveillance, but most app installs are, because the number of users for apps follows a power law distribution.
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?
They now make 30% of those, no matter the amount of effort, and that part of their business is growing fast in terms of revenues, so no I think even Steve Jobs wouldn't be reverting to html. He was not annoyed about the closed garden, he was annoyed that it wasn't his.
Another lesson here is about how Adobe screwed that up when they had control, but then again they never wanted Flash they just wanted to kill Macromedia, by the time someone woke up over there it was way too late and even Air was too little too late.
> He was not annoyed about the closed garden, he was annoyed that it wasn't his.
Those are reasonable guesses, but as someone who was at Apple at the time (in developer relations, with Adobe/Macromedia among my developers), neither of those were Steve's primary annoyances with Flash. The actual annoyances were that the Flash runtime was (1) slow and (2) very crashy compared to the Windows version.
The former mattered because it created/reinforced a perception that Macs were slow. The latter mattered because it created/reinforced a perception that Macs were unstable, and it created a lot of expensive support calls. (For quite some time, the Flash runtime was the #1 cause of Mac crashes.)
There's more to this story (Adobe was threatening Apple on other fronts), but IMO Steve did the right thing by responding to a toxic partner in the way that he did.
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.
Unlock Origin doesn't enable all filters by default, you can go in the extension settings and enable more filters which removes the cookie banners etc.
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.
You can already do this, browser allow you to add a website as an icon and it acts completely like an app. Even iOS allows this, try adding HN to your home screen.
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
> 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.
No it's not. Hosting a web app is one of the most trivial things you can do these days, far more trivial than attempting to get an app into the app store. Hosting API's and Databases is a little more difficult but you still need those things if you're building an app.
There is no world in which getting your app signed, getting it approved, getting every update approved and paying $X/year to Apple or Google is easier than hosting a webapp, even if you host it in the most difficult way possible (on say AWS + Cloudfront). And even that method isn't that difficult, just moreso relative to other ways of hosting a webapp.
No, the fundamental problem is ios. There are a bunch of features that ios locks down so that you are essentially forced to use apps. Want to send push notifications? You need an app. Want to be able to wake your app up in the background to do stuff intermittently? You need an app. Want to get your app on the home screen? Once again, you need an app. And before anyone says you can do this with PWAs, yes, that's true. But the steps required from your users in order to get a PWA running on ios are so cumbersome (by design) that nobody even bothers. And since ios has something like 60% of market share in the US, we're stuck with apps.
You forgot to mention the part where, to use any of the PWA features, you now have to get the user to close safari, and re-open the page via the icon now on the homescreen. Not exactly easy UI.
> 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.
Except it seems like plenty of apps these days are just vehicles to give web-based services some native abilities, so they're practically useless without a data connection.
I love hosting and I will never stop doing it. I keep buying servers (second hand; almost no one actually needs the latest) and hosting 1000s of companies.
Simply hosting a front-end only app is almost free on several platforms (e.g. Cloudflare). Certainly less than the $99 Apple developer membership fee.
It starts getting more expensive once you add back-end servers and databases and whatnot, but you’d be needing those with the App-approach too if your featureset requires that.
> 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:
In 2026, these terrible practices still common. Meanwhile we are discussing the LLM generated code quality, the race to the bottom continues...
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.
> 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.
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?
Original author here. Upon inspection, these passwords are clearly not chosen by the user and, as far as I can tell, consist only of numbers and uppercase letters.
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
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.
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.
If it's frontier, as much as they want to make you think you need the app, if you lookup the trip manually on the site (using your confirmation code), you can download it from the web
I can sort of understand that - device attestation and all. And it's still a choice since you can go to the airline's counter at the airport to get a boarding pass.
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
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
Nah, you can look at my GH profile, where I link to some open stuff, but I’m working on apps for a specialized demographic, right now, that don’t benefit from being HN hugged.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Fantastic work! It's always nice to see the method, in case anything is out there making this stuff easier. But the result is the real prize. There's way too much nonsense out there that is an app when it should be a webpage. I'm so tired of all of these apps.
One criticism, though: I wish you would have made a simple form-based alternative to the app's population mechanism, rather than just make the one-off consumer for yourself(/those you shared with). Definitely way more work and not something you should have to do. But that would have been a cherry on top. Not only prevent needing the app for viewing, but also removing future incentive for an organization turning to an app like that in the first place.
I'm the original author (but not the poster here on HN).
Yeah, I considered that. I even wrote the code in such a way that it supports that. But I'm concerned about the legality of distributing it. Given that it hits API endpoints that were expected to be private to the developers' app, giving away a "tool" that bypasses the app (which hosts ads, albeit for their other products, and so serves as a money-maker for the app's owner) could be illegal.
At the very least, it could be a violation of the terms of service or just an annoyance to the app developer, either of which could lead them to trying to stop me from doing it, which would be an inconvenience. So maybe I'll wait until after the trip, when the page becomes useless to me, and THEN open-source it!
Hey, thanks for the follow up! That makes perfect sense to me. Personally, though, I was thinking more of a "competing service" than a "steal your content" kind of offering.
I know hosting an entire sign up process and user content is not something you can just build and forget about, so my thought was that a sufficiently decent website could bundle a package that could be hosted on existing organization infrastructure. A zip file of the user's content that they could upload to dropbox/drive/sharepoint/etc. Then the consumer page would match a url slug to a package file and serve the content that way.
It's... a lot of stuff for a quick workaround project. And it's a pathology of an engineer to make solutions where solutions aren't needed. So grain of salt on any of that. But I did want to clarify since you were willing to engage with the concept, as understood. Hopefully this proposition strikes you as less concerning/illegal! I never want to steal anyone's work or infrastructure. I just believe that better alternatives - even ones borne of seeing how badly other people are doing it - can and should win out, if people ever provide them.
I wanted to ask, why did you go with reverse-engineering using network traffic instead of decompiling the app locally and looking for endpoint definitions?
The terrible thing is that everything is moving to apps so that the developers can get more access to the user's fingerprint and get more data. Get access to photos, location ect. All webpages that suddenly have an app, which in my experience ends up having less functionality than the website, are quite simply there to get data, and be able to push notifications. They are parasitic. I miss the days when an app was the better offering but it isn't anymore.
Unless the app is better than Chrome or Safari, make it a website. The world is a difficult place because of dolts that think others are as dumb as they are. People are okay to use a browser. Nobody wants your stupid app.
> 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:
One of the most annoying things about hacker news is these random hills it dies on. people like apps, they prefer the experiences they provide. not everyone wants to use vim to interact with the internet
> Either a 43MB app (ballooning to 124MB when it’s finished downloading extra content) with tracking and advertisements… or a 0.05MB web page (with an optional extra 35MB of images)
That ought to work better for people who don't have fancy phones and data plans. I've heard they exist somewhere.
Amazing. Love the dedication to fix this minor annoyance, which I also share. Would be great if there was a kind of universal tool for this, as I am sure many of those shitty apps share the same internals.
The reason people want an 'App' instead of a website is purely marketing related. Apps are sexy and native, and have better distribution. Websites are old, crappy things where you can't always control exactly what the user is going to see very well, and sharing a slick URL isn't always easy.
By "marketing" do you mean "experience"? Because absolutely no one is marketing apps as being superior, but instead this is just the experience of users.
There's a weird conspiratorial thing that people do about this whole topic that is so easily debunked. For instance "Apple wanted apps more than PWAs!". Android powers about 73% of the world's smartphones, yet PWAs are irrelevant on the platform.
Web apps can be incredibly powerful, but there's just a massively lower bar in the web app domain, historically. Like people are used to the website being dogshit, a mishmash of broken functionality, terrible layout quirks, slow responsiveness, and so on. Because that is generally acceptable to the web community, where it is deadly to an app.
Like I think it's hilariously ironic that the website telling us that the app could have been a website is currently completely broken, unable to handle a relatively tiny amount of traffic.
Yes, "marketing". Ability to market your business, not marketing the concept of an app.
Businesses have an app developed because they feel the market demands it. Their marketing departments feel they have to be able to tell prospective customers "we have an app!" and if they can't, they feel they'll be seen as inferior, not with the times, thereby losing customers.
I totally agree with the article that apps shouldn't be the automatic first choice, but that's the way it is. We've reached the stage where it's seen by users as the default. App icons on the homescreen can be seen, for many, as the modern alternative to bookmarks in the browser. And regarding "sharing a slick URL isn't always easy", perhaps the App Store is, for many users, the modern alternative to Google Search?
Businesses started advertising that they had an app because user's preferred apps, having had so many poor experiences with websites and web "apps" that the entire field was tainted.
This is 100% a "made your own bed" kind of thing. Again, the general standards among web apps for years were terrible, and users became accustomed that using a website on a mobile device was a brutal experience. Things have gotten a lot better, and honestly AI tooling should massively improve the space, but people really need to be honest about root causes.
I mean...a local grocery store advertises their "app" and it's just their website wrapped into a webview, and it is just total dogshit. Because they brough the extremely poor standards they have in their web domain into the app domain, and it simply doesn't transfer.
I don't agree with your thesis that users hated websites on mobile. It's not so much a question of being "honest about root causes" if consensus on the root cause doesn't really exist.
Apps initially looked like the fancy thing to do (so marketing departments loved them), and very quickly snowballed into becoming simply "the way it's done" on mobile.
Most of them are just their website wrapped into a webview. They're sometimes awful, but they mostly do the job well enough - exactly as well as if it was a website instead (coming back to this thread's article).
> Most of them are just their website wrapped into a webview.
Such as? Give some examples, which should be easy given that it's "most", right?
In the linked piece it details one that is so exceptionally trash that it is universally hated. I mean, ostensibly it isn't even allowed by appstore / play store rules, and it's a shit, lazy thing to do.
My thesis is that the standards for web teams were often much, much lower than for app teams. Where tolerance for shit, tolerance for slow and inconsistent behaviours, and so on was just much, much more common.
That is why there was such a fracture. And it's why the "webview wrapped website" is universally reviled trash.
Do websites have to be bad? Of course they don't. But the norms of the realm made users jaded.
> Because absolutely no one is marketing apps as being superior, but instead this is just the experience of users.
I guess you haven't used the mobile web? Practically any website you use covers half the page with a banner saying don't use the website, the app is SOOO much better.
The question is: Why would anybody prefer a web-app over a native app in any kind of system or on any kind of device?
I think the answer is "only when there is no native app for the system I use", ie Linux.
So FOSS people want for apps to become much worse for everybody else, so that they can have the apps also through a web browser. Remembering that everybody else is who pays for the apps and all development, while FOSS people will never pay a dime to software developers.
I'm a "FOSS person" and spend a fair amount on apps that behave well. Just bought Brave Origin for $60 on Sunday, as an example.
I've been in the room when companies talk about web vs. app. It's always a business decision that basically comes down to "The LTV of app users is higher, because we live rent-free on their home screen and we can push notifications to get people to re-engage." Doesn't matter what company: apartment searches, rideshare, communications app, etc.
The reason I will always prefer web experiences is because:
* I have a user agent that I can configure the behavior of. I can examine, and even change, app behavior to suit my needs. I can intercept and black-hole telemetry. I can remove distracting UI elements. uBlock Origin allows me to do this. Vimium gives me a keyboard-centric interface to help avoid mouse usage, since lots of mousing gives me RSI.
* I write web apps that are self-contained HTML files. These are awesome because they endure. An app written that way will open in 20 years just as well as it does today. Tiddlywiki is a living example of this.
* Browsers provide a baseline of functionality: selecting, cutting, pasting, and editing all work the same (or can be made to). Apps randomly prevent me from selecting text, or pasting a password.
* Apps are a constant treadmill. Staying up to date with APIs and app store fees and reviews all cost money, which means apps have to make money. This discourages hobbiest coders from releasing cool tools like the did 15 years ago, but it's those apps, the ones made for fun or utility, not for profit, that tend to behave the best. App stores are selecting against the very thing that brings me the most value, in favor of what brings them the most value.
* Finally: control. App stores increasing think they should not only vend money-making software, but they should be the only source where users can go to get functionality. I reject this outright; it's my computer, I decide what runs on it. The web is the last bastion of this on mobile, so I prefer the web.
FOSS enjoyer here. I actually prefer native apps. I already got too many tabs and windows opened with my browser(s) and also, I really hate when a web app decided to rearrange the UI and I have no clue until I am in it. With native apps, its seems like people are not as eager to change the UI and I also know the possibility is there when I see the update happen. I can also generally look at the version number and see its a patch release, so generally, my UI should not have changed.
I encourage you to actually read the OP if you haven't, because I think it gives the most obvious example for that. That kind of app makes much more sense (for the user) to be a web app, especially when you don't intend to become a repeat customer.
Yes, for the article example I completely agree that a travel itinerary should never be an app. But it shouldn't be a web page either. It should be a document saved on your device. So that you always have offline access to it when traveling.
I'll bite (I did not downvote). Why should I have to go to an app store to see text/images with occasional buttons that make GET/POST requests? This is what most "apps" in the world do.
The question should be reframed in the opposite direction: why do apps need to be siloed into multiple incompatible systems (appstores).
Its been this way for a long time, but macOS apps through the app store essentially ship in a sandbox with the ability to configure permissions.
And there are now solutions that are very similar or the same on Linux (flatpak, appimage, snap with their very degrees of isolation). Windows, I will admit, I don't know much about it, but it may be the odd one out on this.
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.
> 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.
They "love apps" because apple and android have spent billions to break their mental models and convince them that "you use apps to do things on your phone". Literally. That's the extent of most people's understanding.
So, sure, they "want" apps in the same sense that early internet users "wanted" AOL because in their minds AOL and the internet were indistinguishable. But actual free choice requires an understanding of the choices.
That is a great analogy! I still remember the day my cousin explained that there was a whole internet outside of AOL…
When I say I want an app that implies a few things:
- this isn't a one-off use, I don't want an app to pay parking meter once and never use it again.
- it's an app and not a WebView pretending to be native
- it's native and not react-wanna-be-native
- you know how to make an app
I have to use this app to open a parcel locker and every time I launch it I have to wait for "downloading bundle". It's probably the easiest kind of app to make and yet somehow they made it worse then a website.
That sounds less like wanting apps, than simply having no idea what's going on.
Most of the users of phones seem to operate on the no idea what's going on model. It's on developers to meet them where they are at, and if that's the app store you better be there for them.
Honestly, they probably would have been perfectly happy with a bookmark on their home screen, but have you ever tried walking someone who doesn't know how to enter a url into their browser through the process of making a home page bookmark on their phone?
Ultimately I ended up making a PWA that does nothing except act as a bookmark. Which was way more of a PITA than it should have been.
>Ultimately I ended up making a PWA that does nothing except act as a bookmark.
Which is exactly what I was going to reply to your original post.
I am willing to bet 80-90% of user don't want / need / care if it is an Native app. They simply want the website / PWA bookmark icon on their App Screen selection.
The problem right now is the experienced of getting a PWA on to an App screen is not user friendly or in someway user hostile because it goes against the fundamental service revenue of their App Store model.
Sounds like what could be a useful built-in OS feature. Along the lines of:
"Aim camera at QR code to put "open-link" icon on your home screen"
Does something like that not exist?
Devs can pretty easily implement this on their site using the BeforeInstallPromptEvent.prompt method.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
Though of course...
> This is not supported on iOS.
It could, right? But let me tell you a secret: Apple doesn't want PWAs/web apps and actively limits Safari to force developers to build apps.
I really wish PWAs were more well-known among average users. If people knew and expected they could install certain websites as apps, that would simplify things so much and really balance the power of the app stores.
My problem with PWA, is that it usually completely ruins the multiple tabs/windows of the same app/data
Unfortunately apple accomplished their goal of killing that entire idea. The time for it to take off was 10 years ago. They begrudgingly support it now but it's too late. gg
It's not well known because it's annoying to install ... and it's annoying to install because the stores are huge cash printing machines so that's not going to change.
It's not that hard to install. The website can just have a button you click to trigger an install prompt: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
But of course...
> This is not supported on iOS.
I think you're right, but I think it's also because the industry trained everyone on this model. I remember ~ 2010-2012 there was a big push to make everything an app. As far as I can tell the only benefit to users is a nice icon on the home page, and the benefit for the company is.. exfiltrating data from the users phone?
If pinning website bookmarks was more prominently advertised in the UI, they would be fine with it I guess. Though it would need some more changes.
Why do people like apps? Because they can put it on their home screen, they can open the app list and pick from there, they are searchable in a canonical repository, which is kind of like googling for the website but still.
Login flows are simpler and persist better, with local storage etc.
Multiple apps can be switched between by just moving between the currently opened apps, while website tabs appear inside the browser only and are mixed with many other unrelated browsing tabs, making it harder to find.
I guess fundamentally all of these could be supported with browsers. But in the end, Google and Apple don't want to make bookmarks and independent persistent "browser windows" easier.
FTA
> I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture”
> Nobody here is talking about the fact that a significant number of users want apps, too.
End users, for the most part don't know what they want. They take when makes sense to them. To end users apps are easy. To us, a URL is easy.
> But the tech illiterati exist, and they love apps.
Yup!! And we get sucked into this vortex at times. Good post btw.
If the app store allowed you to install bookmarks, I doubt most people would notice.
It does. It's called a PWA.
That is not an App Store functionality, that is a Safari functionality
Okay I guess? So then you politely answer to them the “app” is their web browser of choice! Problem solved
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.
I had a similar experience. It was mostly lower- and middle-managers who needed to put their mark on something visible.
I responded with, "Tell me what features you want the app to have that the web site doesn't; or is this a vanity project?" The "vanity project" line is what made people re-think what they were asking.
When that didn't work, I pointed out that they'd have to hire an entire new team to do the app, and gave them a high six-figure number to accomplish what they wanted.† That always worked.
† For a number of regulatory and political reasons, we cannot offshore for cheap.
On iOS, I think the only two reasons to have an app are: notifications and access to contacts.
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 like making maps, and I wanted to do a certain bend on a very specific kind of online map, filling a gap I noticed in existing maps.
The idea of an app really appealed to me (at first), but the more I thought about it the more I didn't want to deal with iOS and then Android and then maintaining parallel functionality on the web and all that mess just for a fairly-local hobby project that I make no money off of.
So, I just kept it as a website (which is also a PWA) with extensive testing on every platform I can think of. It's just worked out so well and is so, so, so much less complicated. And if I abandon it, should just keep working for years so long as the website stays up (or until browsers start doing something very different JS-wise.)
(You can see it at https://trailmaps.app if you're interested.)
So i've done similar things in the past - and my justification for 'app' over website has been offline.
Does the PWA state of things resolve that in the modern days? If it did, yeah I'd agree, no need for an app at all. In my case the app was being used in rural Ontario. I cant even make a phone call here without wifi.
> my justification for 'app' over website has been offline.
Gosh, I wish more apps did some kind of progressive "enhancement" and let people read already cached messages and do deferred sends like the old days, instead of being completely useless without a data connection.
I used to run a company (2010-2018) where our customers were almost always using our product inside of grocery stores, which are almost always metal sheds with some finishings on the walls. Not so great for cell service, it became essential for us to support offline mode if we wanted to keep those customers happy and engaged.
I spent many late nights trying to debug reachability bugs. It's frankly a nightmare trying to build a reliable app when the user has /some/ cell service, but not enough to operate the app reliably.
Gosh, having tried to use the Home Depot app (to find products in store) while IN their stores... It's so bad. I can't even imagine what you dealt with in trying to handle those things.
(And so, so many little bugs in my map thing from upthread were these odd timing quirks when a user didn't have good service and one check would run and leave something else hanging resulting in a blank map. <sigh>)
Yeah, home depot is a tricky case. They have a huge array of products, and in my experience when you cant find something you need to search beyond the store you're in....so the database you need access to isn't exactly small. Makes a practical offline experience tricky.
Home depots website sucks anyway, slow, clunky, terrible touch space, and the search is awful.
Aside, they should ad cell repeaters inside to fix all this.
If I have good service their mobile app is actually pretty quick, but I don't want to join their wifi so... Yeah. :\
Maybe in the US, in Canada i find their online services are pretty average. A lot of the time i search for something and i get a US link, much to my disapointment.
This actually handles that, at least for my use case. Specifically, on first load of the page (in a browser, or the stripped-down browser that runs the app-like PWA install) a service worker gets installed, that caches the entire site/app/map locally, and runs it from there. Then every 24 hours, or on new page load, it checks the live site for content changes and pulls down the changes if they exist. If there's no network connectivity it just silently runs the map.
Each map is 16MB - 20MB in total, so this is all nice and simple to do. Even on a slow 3G connection it's only a minute or so for a full map update to stream in.
The whole point of this system was to take a snapshot of data (mostly OSM), add on some local things that can't really be represented in OSM (like WHICH parking lots are most appropriate, stylistic overrides, system descriptions, etc) and display them. Because of issues I've had in the past with well-meaning-but-misguided OSM mappers wrongly editing trail systems I did not want anything that pulls live.
And then by having purely static content the hosting is very cheap and easy, there's no security concerns around... well... anything dynamic on the site. And each map is portable were I to want someone else to host them. And literally in a couple of years if I haven't updated the map it won't change yet still will work, and that's fine and accepted for this use. Sort-of like a mobile version of a traditional print map. Kinda like the print workflow of editing/design/etc and then rendering the PDF, but web.
This all aligned nicely for me to have a tool that works this way, with each map generated by a tool.
(Sort-of disclaimer: It was also a big personal project in learning to work with AI stuff for development. I knew and understood the inputs and outputs, was able to design the UI, handled/managed all the testing... But I didn't have to worry about the actual-code part. I was able to make pretty quick progress and iterate nicely on my ideas.)
Happy to talk, etc, more about it too. Either here, or contact info is on the site.
Hello fellow map maker! I feel like I’m in the same boat. PWAs work great, I wish Apple would treat them as first class apps. I tinkered with launching a TWA for my app on the Play Store and it works pretty well but I haven’t published it yet. Probably a harder market to monetize than iOS but it seems like good advertising just to have the listing up
Hello! And yeah... :\ The Android/Chrome/Edge support for it is great, and on iOS it's actually nice, but you have to do all the hoop-jumping of clicking Share, whatever, and getting the icon to actually appear.
Also, apparently Apple really doesn't like approving apps that are basically wrapped PWAs (Google will, I guess?) so that is yet another check against bothering with an app.
Yeah, Apple has a rule against simple wrappers. Check out bubblewrap if you haven’t already. It’s made by Google specifically for wrapping PWAs for the Play Store. There’s a tiny bit of work to make a keystore and manifest file, otherwise it just pulls from your PWA config automatically
Thanks for that pointer. I have, but I just really don't want to do it... With my current architecture -- that I like -- it'd be an app per map. Which I guess could make a little pocket money, but they are so hyper-local it wouldn't earn much. So I may as well just keep things going the way they are.
That's a cool project. Sort of a more open Trailforks alternative?
Thanks! Sorta kinda... But also different.
The main idea was to solve the gap of how many trail systems have colored loops, or signed/colored loops made up of multiple "trails", and Trailforks (et al) has no concept of that. So the situation a user finds themselves in is being at a trail, with Trailforks up, wanting to follow the "Orange" loop (for example), and Trailforks doesn't show that.
Hopefully the "Orange" loop is documented as a route, but this stuff often gets missed, and is still awkward since the image of the map still doesn't match the signs.
So my goal was to show the map close to what's physically there, use OSM data as much as possible, and filling in gaps for what OSM doesn't capture, rendering it all into a static map that also happens to work offline. For some specific examples, compare these two systems and their print, Trailforks, and trailmaps.app maps:
RAMBA: [1], [2], [3] Shelden Trails: [4], [5], [6]
There is the same kind of gap when compared to RideWithGPS, Strava, Gaia, etc.
And also, I'm a volunteer with our local trails non-profit. I want anyone and everyone to be able to find maps so they can enjoy the trails. A /lot/ of trail clubs are starting to replace maps with a link to Trailforks, which I believe does riders a disservice because it both requires an app and account and (if a user is trying to view a map out of their home area on a phone) payment. It's literally locking the basic info about a trail -- the map -- behind a semi-paywall. By making a system like this for our local trails I've helped completely avoid that mess. And so I made the map generator open as well so other techy folks can do the same or build on this.
This generated-static-map system does have the downside of being single-person-ish manually managed, and the maps do NOT update automatically. But I also see this as a feature, just like the print maps and in-person signage they are designed to complement.
I've prattled on a little more about the what-why-etc over here on my personal blog if you're interested: https://nuxx.net/blog/2026/06/25/trailmaps-app-map-generator...
--
[1]https://static.wixstatic.com/media/9d19d2_b85c5684f54a4fdc85...
[2] https://www.trailforks.com/region/ramba-trails/
[3] https://trailmaps.app/ramba/
[4] https://www.metroparks.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/2022-S...
[5] https://www.trailforks.com/region/stony-creek-metropark/
[6] https://trailmaps.app/shelden/
That’s cool.
Our local trail association did that. Well, actually we went from an old “become a member to download GPS files” to “go find the trails on Trailforks”
But that was when Trailforks was more open and less locked down.
We’ve discussed replacing Trailforks with something better/more under our control, but haven’t gotten around to it.
cool project!
Thanks!
I periodically try to put something together. I don’t even care about publishing to the app store really, I mostly want to make stuff for myself for macOS.
My last attempt, it felt like Apple was no longer interested in the idea of hobbyist developers. The setup just to get the Xcode project setup felt like I needed to have a company and a website. When I selected something about iCloud, because I thought it would be nice if what I made synced to iCloud, I couldn’t even get started without paying $99, so I had to start again and choose a different option without it. And here I thought the $99 was just to publish to the store.
Considering how Apple started, this trend feels wrong. When I wanted to make a simple little app a few weeks ago, I ended up using python with webview. It seemed to be one of the few ways to make a little GUI app without boiling the ocean.
This is exactly what I've been observing as well. As soon as the App Store became a cash cow, the incentive to support non-commercial development went away. It's now a place constructed by a giant company, for giant companies.
I am on a formerly fairly active game app forum elsewhere and it's been dead for years. Indie developers are still probably making some releases, but the combination of Apple being unfriendly to small developers and the economics of the whole thing means it's close to dead. There were tons of experimental little $1 or $2 games in the early days but that seems to be gone. Even worse many of the old ones aren't playable anymore because they never made the transition to 64 bits and OS support for them is gone.
As someone who uses apps, the hoops you have to jump through are one of the reasons I prefer apps. I'm glad Apple knows who you are and have scrutinized (to some degree) your app.
I have no interest in installing a web app that could look innocuous today and be entirely different every time I hit F5.
Well...
Search right now in the App Store for "Morpho" and you'll find a "Morpho: Network" app. That app says it's some sort of TODO/Note taking app. It uses very broad language in the screenshots and assets from morpho.org (a decentralized protocol).
Once you open the app, it immediately downloads another bundle using OTA updates and shows an entirely different app where you "connect your wallet". You can imagine what happens next.
> You can imagine what happens next.
Section 230 immunity baby!
> I have no interest in installing a web app that could look innocuous today and be entirely different every time I hit F5.
Or as I have encountered several times over the years, it turned out to have vanished without a trace for whatever reason (author got bored, became ill, didn’t want to pay for the domain any more, etc) when I reach for it, sending me searching for an alternative in the midst of a task.
Self-contained binaries stored on my personal devices don’t do that, and one can usually find third party copies scattered across the internet long after the author stopped publishing/maintaining them.
This highlights the differences between what developers want vs. what (some) end users want. Developers love the web because they can change things and deploy instantly, they can have a single version of their app "out there" and not have to worry about clients running old software, and they can take their software down when it becomes inconvenient to maintain. Users on the other hand, like apps: They don't want their app changing out from under them suddenly. They want to be allowed to use the old version they are comfortable with and that's not stuffed with ads. And they want the assurance that the software will actually be there the next time they want to use it.
I personally have no love for web apps either. No matter how many well-behaving developers are out there, the median web developer has ruined the web as an app platform to the point where I view web software as generally hostile, ad-filled, spyware, that's under the control of and serves the web developer's interests over the end user's interests.
In addition, it’s a lot easier to seek rent with a web app which is also likely a big factor.
I’m a dev and understand how web apps can be attractive to us, but as a user they irritate me. During my formative years, software by and large served the user over the dev, so flipping the scales entirely in my favor as a dev feels almost wrong.
Interesting. Since we're talking about PWAs, which are essentially apps running in the sandbox of a web client (i.e. browser), the issue you raise could presumably be fixed in an instant with a client-side setting: "Do not update this app".
That improves the situation a little, but the user still doesn’t have an easy way to migrate the app to other browsers on the same machine or to new machines. With a self-contained binary you just copy the executable wherever and you’re done.
The other issue is that web browsers are dynamic environments (much more so than operating systems) and sometimes break/change things. Users who’ve frozen PWA updates don’t have any access to critical fixes. A lot of devs just wouldn’t support frozen versions.
> I have no interest in installing a web app that could look innocuous today and be entirely different every time I hit F5.
That's been the case with native apps for a long time now too.
It's against the App Store rules but if you build an app with React Native/Expo you can OTA update it to do something completely different without going through another review. Enforcement is minimal, especially since you can selectively roll out updates to make it unlikely that a reviewer gets it.
It's such a weird thing to be concerned about though. Your phone automatically updates apps by default so they can suddenly look different later. And even then, so what? If the change was malicious just stop using it? Apps are sandboxed, websites are sandboxed, you'll be fine.
> Enforcement is minimal, especially since you can selectively roll out updates to make it unlikely that a reviewer gets it.
What's worse is that there's practically no process to report any sort of rulebreaking, so someone could be mining crypto or running a residential proxy [1] through the mobile game I've been playing, and I'd be none the wiser.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48864252
Not really, no.
Not that it doesn’t occasionally happen, but at that point you’re trying to dodge the police… as compared to there being no police in the first place.
In this case the police are not watching. Apple does a cursory review during the approval process but they are not proactively firing up your app to see if anything changed post-review.
My assumption is that 99% of what is on the app store is trash. I never go surfing the app store to find "an app" because I know it will be a waste of time. I'm outright offended that they hide the search in a corner and center a bunch of ads for apps that I know I want nothing to do with. I had to subscribe to Apple Arcade and cancel right away to make the (1) badge go away on a feature that insults me as a "gamer."
All the time I hear that "PhotoSync" is good or I install an app for a business that I deal with like my bank or the local gas station.
On the other hand I feel like it is safe and usually worthwhile to browse the web -- even the sketchy parts, like the web sites that lead me into rabbit holes right out of Videodrome.
I have no interest in installing a web app in almost all cases. I'm happy to visit one though, and I trust the browser sandbox to keep it from doing anything worse than making my device warm until I notice and close the tab.
Exactly. I've published apps. When GP says their actual app is "pretty much garbage" and that there was red tape and nitpicking - Apple is trying to stop garbage!
> When GP says their actual app is "pretty much garbage" and that there was red tape and nitpicking - Apple is trying to stop garbage!
and failing at it, because that garbage got published on the app store.
Yeah, that part was a bummer. I get that Apple has incentives at cross purposes there. Do they have a higher bar than Google? Can we even tell?
From experience doing mobile development at work, natively for both Android and iOS, Apple does test and run your app to make sure it works and that it does what it promises to do. I can see it because we issue both Google and Apple accounts and I can see when they get used. While Apple's app review is harsh, it did make our app higher quality and they are quick to reject when there are bugs. They run our app on every review and go through their checklist. Apple is also quick to question the permissions we ask for and make us justify them. In one instance, whoever did the app review, listened to our justification and actually recommended a better, alternative approach. Android, Google test ran our app when we put it up for the first review and havn't used their test credentials for any subsequent reviews to push app updates. We totally could just completely bust our app, push it to the store or do whatever we want and there seems like little to no oversight.
That's really interesting - thank you for sharing! I've only ever submitted to the App Store, so I didn't know!
It's hard to go look in the app store and see what a dumpster fire it actually is and then claim Apple is trying. They aren't. They're just claiming that as marketing to keep their money making machine.
> It's hard to go look in the app store and see what a dumpster fire it actually is and then claim Apple is trying. They aren't.
You cannot make that claim unless you know how many apps Apple has rejected for being garbage. On one hand, developers complain Apple runs all kinds of checks on their apps before publishing on the App Store. On the other hand, users complain that App Store has too many low-quality apps. Both can be true at the same time if the stream of apps is high volume and low quality.
If they were actually doing a good job this would make sense.
Just weeks ago they published a sanctioned Russian bank's app masquerading as a pomedoro timer lmao.
It's not about a "good job" or a "bad job". It's a continuous game of cat and mouse. They're getting better at it just as some of the best funded bad actors are.
They only have 500 reviewers for the whole App Store, and in fact, they were chastised by the judge in the Epic case for investing very little in the review process six years ago when they also only had 500 reviewers for the whole App Store. This isn't cat and mouse it's theater while they're shielded by section 230 immunity and pocketing enormous profits.
I'm not sure why it matters that they have 500 reviewers, or had six years ago. Is this a "that number seems small" argument?
It matters in the context of trusting their review process, and certainly "seems small" considering these 500 people oversee 2 million apps while scams and fraud have been prolific for years.
I think if they didn't have immunity for all the scams and fraud - and that's being challenged by both the EU regulators and in US courts - they'd probably have a lot more than 500 people. Multiples of it.
How many exactly would they have and why?
BTW, good recent comment on the difference between Apple and Google reviews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48911599
And it's a long running practice, they've been at it for years now
> 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.
For something free I can get why this would seem unreasonable (modulo scams, for which this is a hoop I would rather have than not), but if money's involved, a consumer should be able to contact a human and be made whole, and having the money be handled by a company (even if that company is just a one-man-show) honestly does not seem unreasonable.
If you want to bypass that, you just shouldn't publish to the App Store, which does (or at least is supposed to) have protections suitable for most people. You should still be able to make apps and use them without the App Store involved, then the individual human who wants that app can make decisions based in the specific app in question and the people behind it, but that's a separate conversation.
Yes, you’re right that much of this only comes up when you’re trying to charge money for an app.
However, if you’re running your own website you can make those decisions on your own without being forced into most of them.
Plenty of very large “reputable” companies obfuscate their physical address and phone number, and don’t even offer an email address for contact.
I’d also say that this shouldn’t be as necessary when an app platform is involved. Apple takes 15-30% of the revenue and acts as a full retailer. Why do App Store customers have any need to contact the underlying developers in this scenario?
Walmart doesn’t make it easy/possible for me to contact the manufacturer of their t-shirts.
There are even other digital software stores like GOG or Steam that really aren’t selling you software that has a guaranteed point of contact.
Those platforms just have a half-decent to decent return policy and act as the middleman.
But when you’re on iOS you have all the burdens of a third-party supplier without all the benefits.
> However, if you’re running your own website you can make those decisions on your own without being forced into most of them.
You will however pay for that privilege - a lot of people don't seem to realise their home address is in the WHOIS data, because they didn't pay the protection money to redact it
> Why do App Store customers have any need to contact the underlying developers in this scenario?
The EU decided so, and Apple didn't require this before EU did
I find this hard to believe, since Google Play store requires much less info, and doesn't disclose it to consumers (AFAIK).
Did the EU specifically demand this from Apple? Did they specifically require that consumers must be able to contact developers?
Or is this another "spin" by Apple to make the EU look bad when it imposes consumer protection that is bad for Apples revenue? Like they did with "chargers", "cables" and like the ad- and surveillance-industry has done quite successfully with their "spin" on the GDPR (making it seem like the EU or GDPR requires cookie banners - which it doesnt)
I'm pretty sure the Google Play Store does require this. I remember a few years ago (no longer at the company) having to verify a phone number and maybe address that is posted publicly.
> I find this hard to believe, since Google Play store requires much less info, and doesn't disclose it to consumers (AFAIK).
This changed recently.
I'm not published in Google Play and don't have Android to check for myself, but when I look it up, I find claims that they do publish names and addresses for paid apps / apps with in-app purchases, due to the same EU law.
> Plenty of very large “reputable” companies obfuscate their physical address and phone number, and don’t even offer an email address for contact.
This is whataboutism. They should do that too. The fact they don't isn't an excuse for smaller devs or companies.
> I’d also say that this shouldn’t be as necessary when an app platform is involved. Apple takes 15-30% of the revenue and acts as a full retailer. Why do App Store customers have any need to contact the underlying developers in this scenario?
You should be able to contact the underlying manufacturer or whatever of any product you buy. Why should programs be different?
> Walmart doesn’t make it easy/possible for me to contact the manufacturer of their t-shirts.
They should.
> There are even other digital software stores like GOG or Steam that really aren’t selling you software that has a guaranteed point of contact.
More whataboutism. You should have a guaranteed point of contact for what you buy there too.
How far down does this go? Should I be able to contact the individual person who picked the specific strawberries in my carton of strawberries?
In the Walmart t-shirt example, should I have the contact info for not only the factory but the other suppliers who made the dyes, threads, cotton, the people who made the fuel for the harvester, the people who welded the tractor together?
Sure, maybe your idealist answer is yes, and on a conceptual level I can agree with that. But from a practical standpoint as the end consumer there is a stopping point.
My point is that Apple handles the money and the refunds, and they make all the software APIs. Completely closed platform. Why doesn’t the buck stop there? I feel like they pass along business responsibilities despite taking a large percentage of revenue.
If they’re going to pass on all those responsibilities for me then their cut should be more like ~5% to just cover transaction and platform costs.
> How far down does this go? Should I be able to contact the individual person who picked the specific strawberries in my carton of strawberries?
Down to the manufacturer of the whole product you're buying. In the case of your strawberries that would probably be the farmer.
> In the Walmart t-shirt example, should I have the contact info for not only the factory but the other suppliers who made the dyes, threads, cotton, the people who made the fuel for the harvester, the people who welded the tractor together?
No.
> Sure, maybe your idealist answer is yes, but from a practical standpoint as the end consumer there is a stopping point.
Of course there is. But you as the sole dev of an app are not at that point.
> My point is that Apple handles the money and the refunds, and they make all the software APIs. Completely closed platform. Why doesn’t the buck stop there?
My local electronics shop also handles the money and refunds when I buy a Dell. I can still get a refund directly from Dell if my machine breaks (not that I actually have a Dell). Yay reasonable laws.
The platform being closed and all the APIs being controlled by Apple are different problems that should be solved separately (which the EU is working on!).
> Down to the manufacturer of the whole product you're buying.
In case of an app, what is the "product" you are buying? Because according to Apple, they add a lot of "value" by ensuring the software is safe, performant, etc etc. Am I not buying "a safe, checked app"? Or am I buying an app and then separately pay Apple for an added service of "checking the app for safety" etc etc. I'd very much presume the first.
But if its separate, "an app" can be rather ambigous. For a one-time-purchase game, its clear. But many apps are really a service or even more that happen to have "an app" as one of the ways to interact with the service: Netflix, Uber, protonmail, Vinted (or ebay), etc etc: the app isn't the thing I buy. It's a wrapper around a service. Or even just one of the portals through which I can buy stuff. Point being: It's not simple, so your answers don't fit the analogy of "wallmart".
> In case of an app, what is the "product" you are buying?
The app.
> Because according to Apple, they add a lot of "value" by ensuring the software is safe, performant, etc etc. Am I not buying "a safe, checked app"? Or am I buying an app and then separately pay Apple for an added service of "checking the app for safety" etc etc. I'd very much presume the first.
If you want to, you can imagine the 30% cut being that separate service, but most analyses I've seen of this assume the first is the case, and I can't really see why it wouldn't be.
> But many apps are really a service or even more that happen to have "an app" as one of the ways to interact with the service: Netflix, Uber, protonmail, Vinted (or ebay), etc etc: the app isn't the thing I buy.
In those cases the app on the App Store is free, so there's nothing a consumer can really complain about, since they haven't bought anything. You can complain about the service rendered when you pay, but that purchase is handled completely separately from the app (non-)purchase.
> Point being: It's not simple, so your answers don't fit the analogy of "wallmart".
It does for apps bought as products. If you want an analogy for apps bought as services, then I'll use a different analogy, since they behave differently, and are treated differently in law.
> Am I not buying "a safe, checked app"?
I wouldn't presume that. Malware ends up in the app store all the time.
> For something free I can get why this would seem unreasonable (modulo scams, for which this is a hoop I would rather have than not), but if money's involved, a consumer should be able to contact a human and be made whole, and having the money be handled by a company (even if that company is just a one-man-show) honestly does not seem unreasonable.
You're buying a digital good. You can already get refunds. An email address is fine for contact.
You definitely don't need someone's physical home address, nor an actual phone number.
I don't need a physical address nor a phone number to get a refund from my local electronics store either, but I do believe they should be available.
Apple is the analog to the local electronics store. They're the ones with the direct relationship with you, they're the ones you paid, they took a 30% cut off the app developer's top line explicitly under the pretext that they handle the whole store arrangement.
And sure enough, they are in fact the ones who can issue a refund if you need one. The developer cannot. By design.
> Apple is the analog to the local electronics store. They're the ones with the direct relationship with you, they're the ones you paid, they took a 30% cut off the app developer's top line explicitly under the pretext that they handle the whole store arrangement.
Yet I can also ask Dell for a refund despite buying my Dell at my local electronics store. Both should be reachable and both should be able to give me a refund if my item is broken.
> And sure enough, they are in fact the ones who can issue a refund if you need one. The developer cannot. By design.
And Apple should fix that.
No, Dell will not give you a refund for something purchased at a retailer. For general returns and refunds, the retailer is on the hook because they're the ones who actually took your money.
What Dell will do is repair or replace a computer that is still under warranty. They won't refund.
> No, Dell will not give you a refund for something purchased at a retailer.
They're legally required to.[1]
[1] https://lovdata.no/dokument/NLE/lov/2002-06-21-34/KAPITTEL_5... Section 35
Edit: Forgot there's an English version.
I don't understand how this functions in practice: if business A sells a widget to reseller B who sells it to reseller C who sells it to the customer, there's multiple layers of markup. How can the original manufacturer be expected to refund the purchase price?
Reading the law, it does not say that the consumer is entitled to a refund.
> if business A sells a widget to reseller B who sells it to reseller C who sells it to the customer, there's multiple layers of markup. How can the original manufacturer be expected to refund the purchase price?
Simple. They operate within the law and provide the customer with a refund, or they get fined. From the consumer's point of view, this is irrelevant. Business can fix this B2B issue between themselves however they wish, so long as it doesn't affect the consumer. If you don't like it, then don't do business here.
Here's a case where a consumer complained directly to the manufacturer,[1] and the Consumer Disputes Commission ruled in favour of the consumer.[2] It's not even the core of the issue, but just mentioned, since it's settled law.
> Reading the law, it does not say that the consumer is entitled to a refund.
Refunding is one possible remediation, see section 32 (cancellation) and section 26 (The consumer's rights in the event of defects). That option cancels the purchase contract, meaning you as the consumer give the item back, while the seller gives you the money you paid for the item.
[1] https://www.forbrukertilsynet.no/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/...
'Innklagde er klaget inn i kraft av å være produsent av syklene. De er følgelig ansvarlige for kjøpsrettslige mangler etter direktekravsreglene i fkjl. § 35.'
Rough translation: 'A claim is lodged against the defendant due to it being the manufacturer of the bicycles. The defendant therefore liable for for defects accordance with the rules on direct claims set out in section 35 of the Act relating to consumer purchases.'
[2] They didn't rule in favour of the consumer's demand to have the manufacturer pay for their jacket that got damaged following them falling of their broken bike. They did rule in favour of the cost of repairing the bike (new handle bar), so the manufacturer is on the hook for that.
Fair enough, I didn't realize Norwegian law had this provision. EU-wide and US law do not, so this is pretty specific to the Nordic countries from what I can tell.
The joys of consumer protection. This one is fairly old (2002), and doesn't have any origin in any EU law, although I would have though that the EU had something roughly equivalent by now, and if they don't, they really should.
> a consumer should be able to contact a human and be made whole
Apple does not provide any mechanism for developers to issue a refund, or even look up or view your purchase or subscription - so there is nothing a developer can do here besides refer you to apple support.
(Although as a developer I would like to be able to do this, because customers are very confused by it)
Sounds like something Apples needs to be fix then.
Developers cannot issue refunds from the Apple App Store. Contacting the developer by physical mail doesn’t have any effect.
> Developers cannot issue refunds from the Apple App Store.
That sounds like something that needs to be fixed.
> Contacting the developer by physical mail doesn’t have any effect.
Ditto.
Correct! In my other comment within the greater thread I detail how conceptually the App Store should be shouldering more of the burden considering they sell in a retail-like arrangement.
I would want that hoop for free apps too. If the developer is, for example, found to be mishandling private data, or maybe sharing my intellectual property, someone needs to answer for it.
> 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
That's an EU thing. If you don't publish in the EU you don't need to dox yourself.
It's also a very general European mindset thing. They have a very different approach to privacy there - they basically expect everyone's identity to be public, and then protect those identities from abuse, rather than the more US approach of letting you hide your identity so it can't be abused. You see supermarkets with the owner's full name plastered across the storefront underneath the franchise logo. "This store is EDEKA John Smith"
There's something to this but it's still a slightly dodgy generalization.
A random counter-example from France. If you have a one-person small business (i.e. with a registered business number and the right to invoice), all personal information beyond the name is private by default, it cannot be looked up. The Nordic countries are perhaps closer to the image you're painting. Personal tax information is famously public in Sweden, for example.
But IMO differences are easy to exaggerate. Let's not forget that private phone numbers used to be published in paper directories - with home addresses! - everywhere, including America.
A store is more reasonable to put your name on because generally if you want to meet the person running it you could just walk into it regardless of whether you know their name.
The internet has created a culture of deranged harassment that makes posting your identity online alongside anything you publish more insane than ever. And your market is more or less the entire world rather than your local community.
Europe has basically applied the same principle to websites as to stores, unlike the US where both websites and stores can be fairly anonymous.
Occasionally mobs of hateful psychos will target individuals with harassment. There is absolutely not enough protection from unwanted messages, unwanted phone calls, false reports to SWAT teams, identity theft, who knows what else.
In Europe, a lot of the protection is that they have to provide their own identity to access the system. So I can host something on my internet connection, which is tied to my ID, and people can DoS it, but those people also have to provide ID for their own internet connections and can be traced, unless they are outside Europe in which case I can solve it by blocking all other countries. If someone spam-calls me from Europe, their phone is registered to their ID and caller ID is strictly enforced, so I know who is spamming me. For this reason there are few spam calls. If someone sends me a letter - well, I don't think sender address is mandatory because it couldn't be enforced. If someone wants to look up my details on the business registry, they leave a record showing who is looking them up.
Why isn’t Apple the business with the contact info? They’re taking 15-30% cut and fully control their software APIs.
Unless I’m mistaken, Steam and GOG games aren’t listing the address of the game developers in the EU, but I admit that I might be mistaken.
Apple is just the delivery man, the app contents are solely created by the developer and are not changed by apple
Because of how the EU law was written
Nope, at least in Play Store it's because of how Google chooses to run their store. Google is the middleman between two sides of the transaction and its the developer that actually sells these apps, while Valve is one of the sides of the transaction and sells things based on the license granted by the developer. Not sure how Apple does it though.
Google publishes seller contact and Google and Apple both do so because of how EU law was written as it pertains to how they set up their stores
It's also in the US. A consumer protection law in California started it around a decade ago and Google applied it to everyone instead of letting us opt out of the state (it's why I let my Android app die), and since then they've also disallowed PO boxes.
I did something similar. I wanted to tell myself I had done it, but also it was an inexpensive learning experience and I got an app that I wanted out of it.
And I think I got that. I like how mine does what it does (maps breaker panels and records home maintenance and stuff) without someone trying to sell me something.
But once I realized what advertising costs everywhere, I pretty quickly realized that app exists essentially just for me.
And that’s ok, but it’s a stark contrast from the goldrush years of (even garbage) apps making money.
I did something similar, for similar reasons. In the end I just did whatever to get it published. If you show up at my door, I'll pour you your choice of beer/coffee. But I agree, it feels very invasive!
On the web side of things DNS only recently started being more private - 10+ years ago it was common to have your phone + postal address on whois.
Two take aways from my experience 1. I'm happy that I invested more in the web 2. The app store gives you distribution - I have a few websites with almost 0 traffic, but the app I wrote gets a handful of downloads a week almost 2 years later?
>10+ years ago it was common to have your phone + postal address on whois
This is the .dk TLD today, and it's the reason I've never posted my website here. The .dk registry (punktum.dk) is run by absolute clowns.
On the other hand, the first thing I do before spending money on a danish website is "whois eksempel.dk", and if it doesn't return a danish address (and wasn't created recently), I'm out.
Back when I used to freelance, somebody once paid me a scant fee to build a pretty cool online tool for music teachers, basically an interactive piano. I checked in on the website a few years afterwards and found that they had wrapped it into an app and been selling it for $5/install ever since I made it for them. Probably my fault for not licensing the software I wrote for them (I was basically a kid at the time) but it still bothers me.
Time to make a better version for $4 install and a similar name... out of spite.
Yeah it’s all a pain. One thing that helped was using hotwire native. It is basically a web view but it bridges the mobile app with your website and wraps it into a mobile app. This is the only way I can make apps now. Flutter never worked well for me.
It's like a lot of tech trajectories. At first it was fairly easy and people did it, and then both the producer, consumer, and platform evolved off in some direction in an endless feedback cycle, and now a newcomer sees the whole ecosystem is all the way over there in some weird place and doesn't join it because why would you want to be over there, but the existing actors don't see it as strange because they acclimatized to each step along the way.
Recently I tried out tiktok for a day and couldn't fathom why I would possibly want to ever use this app. Same with Instagram. But people who followed their trajectory since their earlier days find them normal.
Same with Facebook, actually. And Google.
On the other side of that equation, my very old YouTube account (which still has a subscription to "YouTube Red" that costs half of what a new subscription to YouTube Premium costs) has been trained to show me certain content, and if I joined with a new account or told someone else to join, I know the homepage would be filled with dumb slop.
Facebook only made sense in the context of living on a college campus… I think it doesn’t quite fit this pattern because realistically users were rarely in the “good fit” case for only ~4 years. Then, for each user, it becomes this sort of awkward slowly decaying network as people move on.
I agree with everything else you said though.
Facebook was once a friend network and they added more and more advertising and slop to it. If you were the frog in the pot as it heated, it feels normal to you that your feed is entirely made of spam. If you're still out of the pot now, it seems foolish to jump in, unlike when it was lukewarm.
People are on <insert social network here> because their family & friends are. Once on, it's hard to un-glue because it keeps zucking you in.
Maybe. I joined fairly early, still have an account, but did become pretty disengaged from it after graduation. So maybe I didn’t get the proper gradual boiling experience.
I still have a Facebook account, and will occasionally log in (most recently attempting to sell something on their craigslist equivalent). The default content shown in your "feed" or dashboard is more than 50% engagement bait and/or slop. I attempted to start flagging those posts as "never show me again," but it soon became apparent that it was a Sisyphean task, and I just logged out again.
There’s the “friends feed” in the app that has less garbage in it. I mean, these days it is just full of my friends posting pictures of their kids or reposting political things. But I can’t really blame Facebook for the fact that we got old and boring, and it doesn’t have the “suggested content” nonsense.
It's about tracking. Most of the money in the industry comes from knowing precisely when you were on the toilet every day and they can't get that from a web app.
Couldn't agree more. I've only published on Google Play, but the number of hoops Google makes you jump through (and keeps making you jump through if you want to keep your app in the store) is a full-time job in itself. New permission requirements, needing to self-decalre that your app does/doesn't do this or that, forcing you to reveal your personal details. The list goes on.
> I’ll be the first to admit that my actual app is pretty much garbage
It’s working. Your low quality project you weren’t really committed to got filtered.
I’m not sure what you mean. My app is published. I actually jumped through the hoops because I wanted to learn how to jump through those hoops.
My project hasn’t been filtered at all. I just found the process more of a bureaucratic exercise than made sense (and the end result was that my low quality app was accepted so none of this is done in the name of quality).
Aside from the low-effort snark and lack of empathy towards someone's project, this is also how you filter people out of caring about software development at at a young age, and then who's going to keep the computer systems running?
> this is also how you filter people out of caring about software development at at a young age
I got apps on the store before age 18 because I did not believe they were low quality.
You also can make software without selling it on a store.
Nobody cares about the future, only the present. America forgot how to manufacture things, too, because it was momentarily uneconomical and there was no concern about how to keep the living knowledge going.
Having standards is a normal and health professional environment.
Both Google's and Apple's app stores are 99% slop by volume, so no, it's not working.
It's professionally made slop, engineered precisely for maximum value extraction. This guy's app presumably didn't extract value successfully so they don't want it.
The android store is the same. Jump through loads of hoops, fill in tax information for a bunch of countries, dox yourself, etc etc.
I'm finding it hard to reconcile a) how difficult the process and b) the load of absolute garbage apps that are out there.
You'll still find people praising Apple (maybe even Google) for their review process even though their store is full of garbage. Really justifies their 30% cut.
Yeah, it's a hard problem at their scale. It's almost you need an App Store++ where someone trusted verifies apps.
> 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.
This is an EU requirement, and Apple didn't do this before EU required it. All app marketplaces have the same requirement for EU
> On a website you can just not deal with any of that
This may violate other EU compliance requirements but sure there's obviously no authority determining your compliance before allowing you to publish on web
> my actual app is pretty much garbage
The app review process is explicitly meant to keep out garbage apps.
Sounds like it worked as designed?
> Sounds like it worked as designed?
It didn't, because his admittedly garbage app ended up on the app store, because the app review process doesn't actually keep out garbage apps.
I have been publishing apps as a solo developer for a long time and every app I've published has been something I wanted for myself. For example, I spent so much time here on hacker news. So I wanted an app for a better experience. So I built my app almost a decade ago. Then people requested me build one for Android, so I built that too. I've similarly built various macOS apps which I use daily for myself.
If anyone is interested, it's called HACK and I am writing this comment from it. Link is in my bio.
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.
And in fact, a significant subset of users will pester you to make an app, even if your website can and does do everything an app could do.
That's so opposite to my preferences that I'd be really interested in the results of someone studying that group of users.
I do like local native software, preferably using the native UI toolkit, filesystem and features of the device hardware not necessarily available to the browser. That doesn't describe most commercial mobile apps in 2026.
There are actually apps which will "appify" webpages/websites for Android, or were the last time I needed one. They've been aroubd a long time. I assume they still exist.
Apps bypass ad and tracking blockers too. They do have OS permissions as a potential roadblock, but most users just click "OK" on those prompts the first time when they install or open the app.
I mean, I don't know if that's a generation thing or what but as much as I'm comfortable using my phone, and ordering things in my phone's apps, when it's a website and I'm on mobile I always feel an urge to go to my desktop or laptop to check and do it there, I don't "trust" mobile websites as they always seem to give a limited set of information. Or at least that's the vibe I'm getting.
Interesting. I'm 29 and hate downloading apps on phone or pc, if I can use a website I'll choose that every time. Unless performance matters like a game or media editor.
Users of all ages abandon transactions if it requires installing an app.
On PC I'm definitely there with you, it's on phone where I have this issue
the mobile website is just the PC website with css responsiveness, you can just enable "show desktop version" on mobile if that helps reduce your paranoia
The other common reason I use "show desktop version" is when the mobile "version" displays nothing but "use our app", while the desktop version actually provides the content.
I've had to use this a few times when on my phone to be able to actually access the webpage.
Many years ago, there was a trend to show a different website, sometimes on a different domain and often with more differences than just a mobile version of the stylesheet. Sometimes the mobile version was not updated enough, or there was a reduction in functionality, hence the paranoia.
I'm fine using my mobile browser for things. What I'm not fine on is using the, um, internet intent thing that comes up when you click on a link in slack or email or something and isn't actually you're browser and if you switch applications it might go away forever?
You need to click the 3 dot menu and select "open in <browser of choice>", then you can switch apps normally as you'd expect and it'll be a tab in your browser like usual.
What generation are you?
Mid 80s, grew up watching dad playing around with his atari st and was lucky enough to be able to toy around on his 386 and then 486, feeling like a god because I managed to get those config.sys and co to start games he couldn't. For me mobile website was something "tacked on" the real website and I have never been able to shake that feeling away somehow.
hmm, im the same age and feel no qualms about mobile web - it almost always literally just different CSS on the same desktop site. That's the benefit of the web vs mobile.
Yes, you are part of the generation that 'buys things' on an actual computer. Get much older or much younger and they'll use apps instead.
Am I the only person who buys things on mobile websites? I feel like most apps are just websites rendered in webviews with a bunch of background tracking added, and websites create a bit of a firewall between my OS/filesystem and the application.
I purchase almost exclusively from mobile websites and the Amazon app. I'm likely to abandon a purchase if it doesn't work smoothly on mobile - there's really no excuse in this day and age. Also a mid-80's kid. I hate having to pull out my laptop for anything. Different strokes for different folks as they say.
On this forum? You are probably one of the few. I hate the way mobile browsers handle tabs with no control over forcing a reload and losing state. I prefer the desktop. I prefer my treestyle tabs. I am hardly on the phone as a result.
I hate installing apps, sitting tracking my data in the background, and then there are often silly restrictions such as copy/paste being disabled, for what is basically just a web app.
On well implemented mobile websites, Google password manager pops up as does Google pay, can even authenticate with my fingerprint, zero friction. Theres zero need for an app.
And that's coming from a millennial who used to buy big ticket items on the PC.
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.
It’s a pro for you (the user), but I’m sure Disney (or whoever made this app) cares very very little about this, or treats it as a negative.
> I’m sure Disney (or whoever made this app) cares very very little about this, or treats it as a negative.
Virtually every company will treat it as a negative as the first thing most users are going to do if you allow them 100% experience customization is remove all the ads.
Are these Chrome extensions? How did you learn to write them?
I use the tampermonkey extension (formerly greasemonkey). AI is fairly good for writing scripts.
they are just js scripts and a manifest for permissions. it's like game-mod scripting but for the web. ask any llm and they'll guide you through
> 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].
[0] https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle
> I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture"
Thie assertion is extremely funny to me. Historically we come from an "app culture". Back in the day, around 2000 or so, if you wanted some functionality, you ran an application. You ran software in your computer.
Then on the early 2000s people started migrating their software web" , inventing "SaaS" (software as a service" .
I remember my young self being strongly opposed to that, because I saw little sense in constraining what you could do with a scripting language, when you could easily get the "networking" capabilities adding tcp/ip to your software .
But the web and Javascript won, mostly due to control (there was advertising in software since the 90s, for example Opera or GetRight had ad banners) .
The feature and mobile phones came and people started to migrate to "apps" again. So we came full circle.
It's because apple pushed towards apps and didn't want web apps on their phone. Likely due to the profits they can gain from appstore sales
Native apps would be the better platform in my eyes if the Operating Systems would be better in terms of letting a user manage what a native app have access to and can do.
But currently they are preferred by companies despite more dev effort because they can get more user data without the user having easy ways to prevent that. And of course showing ads without the user being easily able to block them
There's nothing technical stopping us from investigating and modifying the apps we install - at least on operating systems that allow you to install unapproved apps. YouTube Vanced only got in legal trouble for distributing a copyrighted work (the YouTube app) which led to ReVanced which is a patcher that doesn't include a copy of the original app.
You're not wrong at all, but it's interesting that iOS launched with only web app support for third party software, and it took community pressure to persuade them to support native apps. There was not even an app store to begin with.
Pretty much every single feature added in the early days (and later) of ios was simply copying what was popular on cydia. That well started to run dry as they got better at whack a moleing jailbreaking exploits, severely contracting that community of tweak developers, and we've seen the resulting product stagnation for some time now.
OP is about information, not functionality. In the early 2000s you would put things like that on a web page, and you'd put e.g. chat in its own application like Gaim.
In the 2010s the model inverted: now you need to keep an entire browser open to use google chat, and people try to get you to install an app to read a web page.
I was having that argument with everybody in the late 1990s and was vindicated.
In corporate IT, for instance, you have to roll out new versions of software all the time. There are better solutions for managing desktop fleets than there were back then, but with a web app you just update the server and... you're done!
Keep going further back, we had thin client terminals (not sure of the terminology, this was just before my time - I remember using them to look for books at our town library when I was a kid, green or orange text on a black screen, no mouse).
I don't think that's it. Apps took off because people felt comfortable yoloing stuff from the Apple app store, and for a short while before saturation, the app store reach was making small developers rich.
Apps took off because Apple did everything they could to make PWAs work badly, with no reliable notifications, no access to some data, etc.
Apple did that because they want their sweet 30% from in-app purchases, which they couldn't enforce in PWAs.
To be fair, apps took off before nice PWAs that masquerade as apps were a thing. The app store was already thriving to the point of oversaturation when the first versions of React were released.
PWAs (progressive web apps) surely existed before React though
IIRC, the cutting edge of PWAs when the app store was taking off was Backbone.js, which I don't recall being pleasant enough to work with to want to make anything large in.
I worked on converting an existing knockoutjs SPA into a PWA around that time. I won't claim it was a pleasant experience but it was probably a lot easier and quicker than a small team of webdevs learning mobile dev and cheaper than a new hire. It wasn't a small or basic app, but we did have the advantage of it being a B2B tool that would only be used on android tablets. IIRC it was going to be either extra work or maybe even impossible to get the same functionality on iOS/safari at the time so we just didn't.
React was open sourced in 2013. Service workers, which I consider to be essential to what we understand as PWAs, shipped first in Chrome in 2015, Safari in 2018.
Sure. But Jobs was talking about running 'web apps' on iPhone OS as a software distribution channel, pre App Store, 2007-2008.
I completely understand the confusion, but "Progressive Web App" or PWA[1], coined by Alex Russell and Frances Berriman[2], has become a specific term for websites that work normally on a pc but can also take advantage of things like push notifications and be installed on the home screen of a phone. You can see a measurable uptick on Google Trends after this blogpost [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_app
[2] https://infrequently.org/2015/06/progressive-apps-escaping-t...
[3] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fg%2F11bzxympx6...
If anyone wishes to remember what that looked like.
https://web.archive.org/web/20071012231544/http://www.apple....
https://web.archive.org/web/20071012025941/http://www.apple....
The problem is that for nearly all apps I want them to have neither notifications nor access to data. For instance, with few exceptions, the only apps I allow to give me notifications are the default apple apps, like iMessage.
The only reasons I'll use an app over a website is if I have no choice in the matter, or if the app provides an easier UI/UX than the website.
apps took off before browsers had the capabilities required for native-like behaviour (fast graphics, hw functionality, notifications) and then were used even for apps that could have been web-apps.
When apps took off they weren't really making use of any of that either. Top apps back then were either using the standard ux libraries, or they were something like a simulated beer pint. Rehashing of popular flash and flip phone games like bejeweled.
The original intent of the iPhone was not to have 3rd party apps at all. Web apps were how developers were supposed to deliver to iPhone users. At the time, web apps weren’t as good as they are today and the market demanded local apps. Jailbreaks happened quickly, delivery systems like Cydia were set up. Apple either had to deliver their own official methods or play a cat and mouse game with hackers while trying to gaslight the public that websites were better than local apps.
Historically true, but the original intent quickly dissolved once they app store took off and they realized the cash cow they had on their hands.
Apps also took off on Android and Google likes PWAs.
I am not sure about the history, but a lot of it now is about tracking, and perceived security. Its far harder for users to manage things like location tracking in apps than in browsers.
yes, i am forced to to make a real app because storage is not reliable in PWA, browser or OS can wipe off data.
i don't want to pay for servers just to have an app.
and updating apps is slow, for flutter you need to pay for shorebird.
In react native land, not sure but there are paid stuff like expo? you can self host but usually you end up payign for some OTA provider?
The App Store took off because of the distribution channel it offers for developers (including being able to charge for the work) and the place of discovery it offers to users.
There was and is more than one App Store. You mention other good reasons to develop, but the money from ads was the biggest reason for an app to exist. Otherwise, it could and should just be a website.
Nah. When the App Store started getting truly popular you couldn't even run an ad blocker on mobile Safari. That came many years later.
IMO the reason we got to this place is twofold:
- apps give companies a spot on your Home Screen and allow you to develop a habit of opening it. I suspect Apple are very aware of this, which is why they continue to make it very difficult to install a web app to your home screen.
- notifications. Which, again, draw a returning audience
Two more things:
- well-designed apps retain enough state to be useful offline or in places with spotty coverage; PWAs can kinda be made to work like this but IIRC iOS will happily evict them under disk pressure;
- notifications. I've read that Apple have implemented them for home screen installed web apps but for reasons unknown I have not seen this in action even once.
I think it’s that your install base represents real customers who could actually buy things.
Web traffic is so diluted and low signal.
Apple has actually started allowing this. You can find the functionality in an adblocker called Wipr now and it works really well.
URL filters in iOS 26 just make network level filtering more convenient (can use a real VPN at the same time) but it's nothing new in terms of replacement for real ad blockers, which is why apps like Wipr still include a Safari extension.
For most app ads it's enough to set a DoT or DoH in the system that blocks ad domains. Android supports this with a settings menu entry, on Apple one needs a more "technical" solution I think (loading some XML?). Most VPN apps also support DNS enforcement.
Apps like YouTube are an exception, but there are other ways around that on Android.
That and having an app gives you a ton of options for data collection
It's too bad not enough people know about using adguard dns on their phones. Dunno about iPhones but it works wonders on Android. Only downside is it sometimes interferes with signing into public wifi networks.
Does not have to be branded adguard to work. https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists
There are surprising portion of population expect a dedicated app to perform a particular function
And that's fine, but if your app is just a wrapper for a website, send people to the website and have a link for them to download the app if they prefer.
There's also more data you can access from an app than from a browser. E.g. surrounding WiFi networks, battery level, persistent device identifier.
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.
> 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.
Not the case on many Android browsers, you can present the user with a button to do this for them by listening for the `beforeinstallprompt` event. There are some requirements to meet for that, but it's a pretty user-friendly way to push your PWA to the home screen: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
Yes, this is the answer. It’s easy to forget if you live in a tech bubble, but there are probably billions of smartphone users who don’t even know how to type a url into a browser and navigate to it.
I’ve worked on projects where we ran this experiment, and the success rate of “install this app and click on it” is several times higher than “navigate to this webpage every time you want to use our tool”.
One small correction though, android has made it easier to add a “progressive web app” to the home screen now. You can prompt the user with a dialog asking if they want to install it. I think there was at least some period where Google was really encouraging PWAs. iOS still sucks. I’ve had very poor success rates in getting users to install our PWA using the iOS workflow (and our tool is something they need for their jobs, so they are highly motivated to install it).
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.
> My strong belief is they want apps because they can spam you with notifications to get your attention.
That's it, an app installed on a mobile device is a much more effective attentional hook than a website that must be either bookmarked or remembered. It is like inviting a door-to-door salesman to your house, of course they will take the invitation.
Also, analytics are not limited by JavaScript and browser APIs. Getting your attention isn't so valuable without knowing how to do it a second time.
> My strong belief is they want apps because they can spam you with notifications to get your attention.
I believe the same about the Youtube App, I just can't see why else it exists and I hate the video links try to open in the app if you're not careful!
Casting from the web doesn’t work (on iOS at least) but that’s all I can think of.
Chromecast from desktop chromium works, so there's no reason they couldn't make the universal turing machine in my pocket do the same.
Desktop Chromium is Chrome. iOS Chrome is just Safari with a different interface.
Apple doesn't let other browsers use their own engine on iOS (unless you are located in the EU).
> iOS Chrome is just Safari with a different interface
uhh wow. How did Microsoft face antitrust lawsuits for merely bundling IE when Apple is literally forcing their browser?
i've often wondered how Apple gets away with things like this, I guess its because they never gained the marketshare that Microsoft had
Due to EU regulation, you can use a different browser engine in the EU (and I think Japan too), but thus far none have been developed (it's too much work to maintain two versions of the browser).
AirPlay should work for every native video element, or do you mean something like chromecast?
YouTube obfuscates the native video by removing the controls.
Vinegar is a Safari extension that fixes that on iOS and macOS. May exist for other browsers as well.
uninstall the app. my life is much better since i uninstalled most apps and I just use the web pages these days. To take ONE benefit from not using the youtube app, and instead using a browser: I can open more than one video at once.
> I hate the video links try to open in the app if you're not careful!
Uninstall (disable) the app, YouTube on Firefox mobile is fine.
NewPipe mostly works except when Google breaks it.
There's nothing sinister there. Google is merely trying to break their own app in new user hostile ways and everything else breaking is collateral damage. :)
Apps are also more difficult to intercept and modify on most devices. Companies like them because it means you can't use ad blockers or other privacy tools. It's also why they flip out so outrageously when Apple adds privacy tools at the operating system level, because tracking and abuse are most of the reason why apps are useful to them in the first place.
They want apps so they could fingerprint your device, spy on you and get a lot more information than a web app.
Sure. They. They want. You know who they are, and what they want.
What marketer could turn this down?
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/loupe-what-apps-can-see/id6766...
Seconds since last reformat, number of times clipboard was used since last reformat, seconds since last reboot, dozens of other apps installed on the phone…
On Apple devices, so much is leaked to developers, and they will use it.
Loupe HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48608645
No need to play games and intentionally be obtuse all across the thread. "They" are the developers. A website has far less access to a device than an app and ads are easier to block. So they wrap anything into an app to gain that access and make ad money.
What access?
Like the OS native APIs that offer the very utility for these apps to even exist?
Integration with OS features is what made the app ecosystem, because of utility. Project whatever conspiracy on that you want.
> What access?
Push notifications.
> Integration with OS features is what made the app ecosystem, because of utility.
This is true of some apps, like the beer-drinking one that uses the accelerometer / other orientation sensors.
It's not true of a large number of other apps, hence the "your app could have been a webpage" charge. This is distinct from "every app could be a webpage".
> Push notifications
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Push_API
> hence the "your app could have been a webpage" charge
No debate there. I was responding to the ever vague and broad "they want" comments.
> I was responding to
Responding but never answering to anything. You were asking a bunch of questions with obvious answers that you should have known or could have discovered yourself, but expected others to dig out and chew them for you. You even went to ridiculous lengths to pretend that apps only do things "because of utility" and everything else like data collection, tracking, ads, etc. is "conspiracy". That's negative value in a conversation.
> Project whatever conspiracy on that you want
You think a developer making money from their app is a conspiracy? Or that apps track you and developers monetize that data is one?
I don't think you're being intentionally obtuse anymore.
We are in the age of PWAs. I've created a few where I just host them on Github pages (no backend needed, no hosting costs).
And the P in PWA has become "Personal" ... vibe coding apps with no backend for non-developers for their _personal_ needs e.g. a create a job hunting app for my son specific to the types of jobs he's looking for. If I update it, it updates on his phone plus he can sync to his laptop via WebRTC.
I'm currently attempting to write a calendar app for personal use, and I wanted to go the route of a self-host PWA. Notifications are a good point. How can I create notifications as a reminder before an event? Alerts are part of the icalendar standard ("VALARM"), so these are clearly notifications that are wanted by the user. Is that even possible for a PWA?
You can send notifications with PWAs with Web Push API + Service Worker, same as a regular page.
But, AFAIK, you need the server for push, though. It used to be possible to program entirely from the client with this proposed feature but AFAIK it's abandoned: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/developer.chrome.com//blob/m...
> You can send notifications with PWAs with Web Push API + Service Worker, same as a regular page.
While the app is awake, sure.
I'd like notifications to work even if the OS backgrounded the app, and even without a network connection, like I'd expect a reminder to work.
> https://github.com/GoogleChrome/developer.chrome.com//blob/m...
Looks like this is what I need and it doesn't exist. So the short answer is "no". Thanks for the link!
> While the app is awake, sure.
That's not true. The browser's push service wakes the service worker on delivery, even if the PWA is fully closed. That's the entire point of Push API vs polling.
> My strong belief is they want apps because they can spam you with notifications to get your attention.
My strong belief is they realized people were prone to spending absurd amounts of money in Facebook games, so they hijacked "social gaming" and spent 20 years deteriorating in defense of it.
Consider this timeline:
- Apple launches iPhone in 2007 with web apps central
- Zynga launches "Zynga Poker" on FB in 2007
- Apple launches App Store in 2008 with single-purchase apps
- Zynga hits 40 million monthly users in 2009
- Apple implements IAP and defensive policies in 2009
- Hundreds of millions of people playing Facebook games in 2010
... Apple goes to war with, bans and eventually kills Flash, the core technology to these games, and all of it moves to mobile and IAP
... web apps deprioritized, arms race with other browsers prevented
sure, but that original idea was 20 years ago.
> they want
Who are 'they' and how do you know what they want
The people deciding between delivering their payload via app or web page. Engagement hacking is not something we have to guess that ad companies want.
The problem is, I tnink, that most people actually prefer apps over websites - even just a wrapper - for whatever reason.
Possible reasons:
- No waiting for a page to load
- Home screen access (most don't know about bookmarking web apps)
- Discovery (where do you go to find PWAs?)
- Features (native apps have access to more platform APIs)
- Absence of browser chrome (more immersive UX), though on iOS the chrome can be removed from PWAs once bookmarked, using meta tags
Those are all pretty good. Some other reasons:
- well written apps use less memory, battery, and bandwidth
- security: apps go through at least some review while a web app could change with every reload
- scripting: apps often expose more functionality to Apple Shortcuts
- accessibility: the system accessibility features seem to work better with apps
- UI/UX: the best native apps are always going to be more responsive and feel better than the best web apps
In most of the cases, web apps are also much slower as well and the UX is also sub par.
Ad companies now. Just one sentence earlier you said it's people 'delivering their payload'.
Yes, ad (supported) companies are a large subset of the former. I am not sure what point you are attempting to make.
Ad supported apps are not necessarily from ad companies.
The point I'm trying to make that these ever-prevalent 'they just want' remarks are superficial, uninformed, overly broad, and vague, to the point of having no point.
There are many benefits to native apps over web apps on mobile devices, depending on the use case. A conspiracy against the people need not be part of every developer's choice to utilize the native platform and associated app store for distribution.
I know there's lots of horrible companies out there (hi Meta!) who will drive you to their native apps just for performance of ads and 'engagement'. This doesn't justify the conspiracy thinking getting applied to native apps as a whole.
Ad tech comes with a whole bundle of mal-incentives, like engagement hacking. If you are supported by ad revenue then your primary job is to get your users to look at ads. That's an ad company, for our purposes here.
Specific example would be Reddit.
Reddit, Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, sure.
All examples of first party social media clients.
A minority of native app developers, I'm willing to bet.
Probably a statistical paradox where most developers aren't doing mass surveillance, but most app installs are, because the number of users for apps follows a power law distribution.
The developer of the apps obviously.
Why this gaslighting? obviously the massive companies with vested interest in monetizing your attention and data
Nice and vague. Hard to dispute.
Simple fact is that people love to project evil incentives onto entities they don't even bother defining.
Not every native app developer is a 'massive company' with a 'vested interest' (what does that even mean) in monetizing your attention and data.
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?
They now make 30% of those, no matter the amount of effort, and that part of their business is growing fast in terms of revenues, so no I think even Steve Jobs wouldn't be reverting to html. He was not annoyed about the closed garden, he was annoyed that it wasn't his.
Another lesson here is about how Adobe screwed that up when they had control, but then again they never wanted Flash they just wanted to kill Macromedia, by the time someone woke up over there it was way too late and even Air was too little too late.
> He was not annoyed about the closed garden, he was annoyed that it wasn't his.
Those are reasonable guesses, but as someone who was at Apple at the time (in developer relations, with Adobe/Macromedia among my developers), neither of those were Steve's primary annoyances with Flash. The actual annoyances were that the Flash runtime was (1) slow and (2) very crashy compared to the Windows version.
The former mattered because it created/reinforced a perception that Macs were slow. The latter mattered because it created/reinforced a perception that Macs were unstable, and it created a lot of expensive support calls. (For quite some time, the Flash runtime was the #1 cause of Mac crashes.)
There's more to this story (Adobe was threatening Apple on other fronts), but IMO Steve did the right thing by responding to a toxic partner in the way that he did.
I want my lickable pixels back.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581424
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)”
Luckily tools such as uBlock Origin let you block all those nasty scripts, _including_ the cookie banner themselves.
I have uBO and I still see cookie banners.
Unlock Origin doesn't enable all filters by default, you can go in the extension settings and enable more filters which removes the cookie banners etc.
Does it remove them by automatically consenting to the cookies, rejecting them or just hiding the banner?
It hides the banner, so no consent is ever given. Plus, uBlock would block most scripts that place cookies anyway.
It blocks the cookies and the banner. Ideal solution.
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”.
More like "We can track you better in the app"
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.
You can already do this, browser allow you to add a website as an icon and it acts completely like an app. Even iOS allows this, try adding HN to your home screen.
It’s too bad Apple made the option to install a website as a webapp so hard to find. It’s now hidden in ‘Share’ > ‘View more’ > ‘Add to home screen’
This has nothing to do with ‘sharing’ something
Yes, exactly. I was looking for it for ages the other day, it really does feel like they hid it intentionally.
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
> 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.
No it's not. Hosting a web app is one of the most trivial things you can do these days, far more trivial than attempting to get an app into the app store. Hosting API's and Databases is a little more difficult but you still need those things if you're building an app.
There is no world in which getting your app signed, getting it approved, getting every update approved and paying $X/year to Apple or Google is easier than hosting a webapp, even if you host it in the most difficult way possible (on say AWS + Cloudfront). And even that method isn't that difficult, just moreso relative to other ways of hosting a webapp.
No, the fundamental problem is ios. There are a bunch of features that ios locks down so that you are essentially forced to use apps. Want to send push notifications? You need an app. Want to be able to wake your app up in the background to do stuff intermittently? You need an app. Want to get your app on the home screen? Once again, you need an app. And before anyone says you can do this with PWAs, yes, that's true. But the steps required from your users in order to get a PWA running on ios are so cumbersome (by design) that nobody even bothers. And since ios has something like 60% of market share in the US, we're stuck with apps.
"Want to get your app on the home screen?"
Open Safari, navigate to the web app, tap the Share button, scroll down, and select 'Add to Home Screen'.
You forgot to mention the part where, to use any of the PWA features, you now have to get the user to close safari, and re-open the page via the icon now on the homescreen. Not exactly easy UI.
> 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.
Except it seems like plenty of apps these days are just vehicles to give web-based services some native abilities, so they're practically useless without a data connection.
I love hosting and I will never stop doing it. I keep buying servers (second hand; almost no one actually needs the latest) and hosting 1000s of companies.
How did you get companies to sign up to your website business?
For every person like you there are thousands who don't want to host!
Simply hosting a front-end only app is almost free on several platforms (e.g. Cloudflare). Certainly less than the $99 Apple developer membership fee. It starts getting more expensive once you add back-end servers and databases and whatnot, but you’d be needing those with the App-approach too if your featureset requires that.
Not to mention dealing with authentication, securing user data, and opening yourself to being a target for hackers.
Shipping a local app eliminates a lot of those headaches.
Well if you're calling an API you host yourself to populate that said UI, not needing to host that UI as a webpage is not that much of an advantage.
How many free and easy options do you want me to list?
What the hell?
Make your website static and host it on a CDN. There's nothing expensive or thankless about it.
Stop over engineering.
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.
[0] https://prepbook.app
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.
Source: https://github.com/DavidZirinsky/costco-deals
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?
Original author here. Upon inspection, these passwords are clearly not chosen by the user and, as far as I can tell, consist only of numbers and uppercase letters.
More of an ugly authToken then.
RFC 1738 Uniform Resource Locators (URL) December 1994 section 2.2
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.
If it's frontier, as much as they want to make you think you need the app, if you lookup the trip manually on the site (using your confirmation code), you can download it from the web
I can sort of understand that - device attestation and all. And it's still a choice since you can go to the airline's counter at the airport to get a boarding pass.
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.
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.
examples?
Nah, you can look at my GH profile, where I link to some open stuff, but I’m working on apps for a specialized demographic, right now, that don’t benefit from being HN hugged.
Oh, heck. I just realized this was a PWA booster challenge.
Definitely nah. Life’s too short, and I’m already in the back nine.
Sorry. I should have known better, and refrained from commenting at all.
My bad. I thought it was a serious attempt at engagement. I enjoyed the post, and didn't really read the comments before posting.
Have a great day!
> Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig likes it.
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 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.
I love it when folks get fired up and fix things and use uplifting cuss words. a+
Yeah, it can be, but who'd take care of distribution and making money?
Fantastic work! It's always nice to see the method, in case anything is out there making this stuff easier. But the result is the real prize. There's way too much nonsense out there that is an app when it should be a webpage. I'm so tired of all of these apps.
One criticism, though: I wish you would have made a simple form-based alternative to the app's population mechanism, rather than just make the one-off consumer for yourself(/those you shared with). Definitely way more work and not something you should have to do. But that would have been a cherry on top. Not only prevent needing the app for viewing, but also removing future incentive for an organization turning to an app like that in the first place.
I'm the original author (but not the poster here on HN).
Yeah, I considered that. I even wrote the code in such a way that it supports that. But I'm concerned about the legality of distributing it. Given that it hits API endpoints that were expected to be private to the developers' app, giving away a "tool" that bypasses the app (which hosts ads, albeit for their other products, and so serves as a money-maker for the app's owner) could be illegal.
At the very least, it could be a violation of the terms of service or just an annoyance to the app developer, either of which could lead them to trying to stop me from doing it, which would be an inconvenience. So maybe I'll wait until after the trip, when the page becomes useless to me, and THEN open-source it!
Hey, thanks for the follow up! That makes perfect sense to me. Personally, though, I was thinking more of a "competing service" than a "steal your content" kind of offering.
I know hosting an entire sign up process and user content is not something you can just build and forget about, so my thought was that a sufficiently decent website could bundle a package that could be hosted on existing organization infrastructure. A zip file of the user's content that they could upload to dropbox/drive/sharepoint/etc. Then the consumer page would match a url slug to a package file and serve the content that way.
It's... a lot of stuff for a quick workaround project. And it's a pathology of an engineer to make solutions where solutions aren't needed. So grain of salt on any of that. But I did want to clarify since you were willing to engage with the concept, as understood. Hopefully this proposition strikes you as less concerning/illegal! I never want to steal anyone's work or infrastructure. I just believe that better alternatives - even ones borne of seeing how badly other people are doing it - can and should win out, if people ever provide them.
I wanted to ask, why did you go with reverse-engineering using network traffic instead of decompiling the app locally and looking for endpoint definitions?
The terrible thing is that everything is moving to apps so that the developers can get more access to the user's fingerprint and get more data. Get access to photos, location ect. All webpages that suddenly have an app, which in my experience ends up having less functionality than the website, are quite simply there to get data, and be able to push notifications. They are parasitic. I miss the days when an app was the better offering but it isn't anymore.
And then there’s websites that should be apps
does not load for me
Maybe it should've been an app after all.
Your app could have been a webpage with a cookie banner
Why they would have password in the URL?!
> something that could have been a (smaller, faster, more universally-accessible)
Full circle.
I remember when people were complaining that native was smaller, faster, and had richer accessibility integration.
Unless the app is better than Chrome or Safari, make it a website. The world is a difficult place because of dolts that think others are as dumb as they are. People are okay to use a browser. Nobody wants your stupid app.
Preach!
> 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:
yikes
One of the most annoying things about hacker news is these random hills it dies on. people like apps, they prefer the experiences they provide. not everyone wants to use vim to interact with the internet
> Either a 43MB app (ballooning to 124MB when it’s finished downloading extra content) with tracking and advertisements… or a 0.05MB web page (with an optional extra 35MB of images)
That ought to work better for people who don't have fancy phones and data plans. I've heard they exist somewhere.
"I did not like the app and their service, so I am breaking the law because I am so smart"
None of this is illegal.
really? did you even read T&C of that app?
https://www.travelbound.co.uk/terms-and-conditions/
Amazing. Love the dedication to fix this minor annoyance, which I also share. Would be great if there was a kind of universal tool for this, as I am sure many of those shitty apps share the same internals.
The reason people want an 'App' instead of a website is purely marketing related. Apps are sexy and native, and have better distribution. Websites are old, crappy things where you can't always control exactly what the user is going to see very well, and sharing a slick URL isn't always easy.
By "marketing" do you mean "experience"? Because absolutely no one is marketing apps as being superior, but instead this is just the experience of users.
There's a weird conspiratorial thing that people do about this whole topic that is so easily debunked. For instance "Apple wanted apps more than PWAs!". Android powers about 73% of the world's smartphones, yet PWAs are irrelevant on the platform.
Web apps can be incredibly powerful, but there's just a massively lower bar in the web app domain, historically. Like people are used to the website being dogshit, a mishmash of broken functionality, terrible layout quirks, slow responsiveness, and so on. Because that is generally acceptable to the web community, where it is deadly to an app.
Like I think it's hilariously ironic that the website telling us that the app could have been a website is currently completely broken, unable to handle a relatively tiny amount of traffic.
Yes, "marketing". Ability to market your business, not marketing the concept of an app.
Businesses have an app developed because they feel the market demands it. Their marketing departments feel they have to be able to tell prospective customers "we have an app!" and if they can't, they feel they'll be seen as inferior, not with the times, thereby losing customers.
I totally agree with the article that apps shouldn't be the automatic first choice, but that's the way it is. We've reached the stage where it's seen by users as the default. App icons on the homescreen can be seen, for many, as the modern alternative to bookmarks in the browser. And regarding "sharing a slick URL isn't always easy", perhaps the App Store is, for many users, the modern alternative to Google Search?
Isn't this a chicken-egg thing?
Businesses started advertising that they had an app because user's preferred apps, having had so many poor experiences with websites and web "apps" that the entire field was tainted.
This is 100% a "made your own bed" kind of thing. Again, the general standards among web apps for years were terrible, and users became accustomed that using a website on a mobile device was a brutal experience. Things have gotten a lot better, and honestly AI tooling should massively improve the space, but people really need to be honest about root causes.
I mean...a local grocery store advertises their "app" and it's just their website wrapped into a webview, and it is just total dogshit. Because they brough the extremely poor standards they have in their web domain into the app domain, and it simply doesn't transfer.
https://dennisforbes.ca/blog/microblog/2026/05/terrible_mobi...
I don't agree with your thesis that users hated websites on mobile. It's not so much a question of being "honest about root causes" if consensus on the root cause doesn't really exist.
Apps initially looked like the fancy thing to do (so marketing departments loved them), and very quickly snowballed into becoming simply "the way it's done" on mobile.
Most of them are just their website wrapped into a webview. They're sometimes awful, but they mostly do the job well enough - exactly as well as if it was a website instead (coming back to this thread's article).
> Most of them are just their website wrapped into a webview.
Such as? Give some examples, which should be easy given that it's "most", right?
In the linked piece it details one that is so exceptionally trash that it is universally hated. I mean, ostensibly it isn't even allowed by appstore / play store rules, and it's a shit, lazy thing to do.
My thesis is that the standards for web teams were often much, much lower than for app teams. Where tolerance for shit, tolerance for slow and inconsistent behaviours, and so on was just much, much more common.
That is why there was such a fracture. And it's why the "webview wrapped website" is universally reviled trash.
Do websites have to be bad? Of course they don't. But the norms of the realm made users jaded.
> Because absolutely no one is marketing apps as being superior, but instead this is just the experience of users.
I guess you haven't used the mobile web? Practically any website you use covers half the page with a banner saying don't use the website, the app is SOOO much better.
Love this
YES!!! I fucking hate all these stupid web-pages-as-Apps
The question is: Why would anybody prefer a web-app over a native app in any kind of system or on any kind of device?
I think the answer is "only when there is no native app for the system I use", ie Linux.
So FOSS people want for apps to become much worse for everybody else, so that they can have the apps also through a web browser. Remembering that everybody else is who pays for the apps and all development, while FOSS people will never pay a dime to software developers.
I invite down voters to make a reply explaining why users would prefer web apps to native apps, given the choice.
I'm a "FOSS person" and spend a fair amount on apps that behave well. Just bought Brave Origin for $60 on Sunday, as an example.
I've been in the room when companies talk about web vs. app. It's always a business decision that basically comes down to "The LTV of app users is higher, because we live rent-free on their home screen and we can push notifications to get people to re-engage." Doesn't matter what company: apartment searches, rideshare, communications app, etc.
The reason I will always prefer web experiences is because:
* I have a user agent that I can configure the behavior of. I can examine, and even change, app behavior to suit my needs. I can intercept and black-hole telemetry. I can remove distracting UI elements. uBlock Origin allows me to do this. Vimium gives me a keyboard-centric interface to help avoid mouse usage, since lots of mousing gives me RSI.
* I write web apps that are self-contained HTML files. These are awesome because they endure. An app written that way will open in 20 years just as well as it does today. Tiddlywiki is a living example of this.
* Browsers provide a baseline of functionality: selecting, cutting, pasting, and editing all work the same (or can be made to). Apps randomly prevent me from selecting text, or pasting a password.
* Apps are a constant treadmill. Staying up to date with APIs and app store fees and reviews all cost money, which means apps have to make money. This discourages hobbiest coders from releasing cool tools like the did 15 years ago, but it's those apps, the ones made for fun or utility, not for profit, that tend to behave the best. App stores are selecting against the very thing that brings me the most value, in favor of what brings them the most value.
* Finally: control. App stores increasing think they should not only vend money-making software, but they should be the only source where users can go to get functionality. I reject this outright; it's my computer, I decide what runs on it. The web is the last bastion of this on mobile, so I prefer the web.
FOSS enjoyer here. I actually prefer native apps. I already got too many tabs and windows opened with my browser(s) and also, I really hate when a web app decided to rearrange the UI and I have no clue until I am in it. With native apps, its seems like people are not as eager to change the UI and I also know the possibility is there when I see the update happen. I can also generally look at the version number and see its a patch release, so generally, my UI should not have changed.
I encourage you to actually read the OP if you haven't, because I think it gives the most obvious example for that. That kind of app makes much more sense (for the user) to be a web app, especially when you don't intend to become a repeat customer.
Yes, for the article example I completely agree that a travel itinerary should never be an app. But it shouldn't be a web page either. It should be a document saved on your device. So that you always have offline access to it when traveling.
I'll bite (I did not downvote). Why should I have to go to an app store to see text/images with occasional buttons that make GET/POST requests? This is what most "apps" in the world do.
The question should be reframed in the opposite direction: why do apps need to be siloed into multiple incompatible systems (appstores).
At least with web app I have a browser sandbox to protect my system.
Its been this way for a long time, but macOS apps through the app store essentially ship in a sandbox with the ability to configure permissions.
And there are now solutions that are very similar or the same on Linux (flatpak, appimage, snap with their very degrees of isolation). Windows, I will admit, I don't know much about it, but it may be the odd one out on this.
I think most modern operating systems have app sandboxes also to protect the system.