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Accessibility support: True, you're right. > Apollo, the Reddit app, is a good example: it's has found a niche where people use it over competitors because it'
by WA 8y ago
Accessibility support: True, you're right.
> Apollo, the Reddit app, is a good example: it's has found a niche where people use it over competitors because it's more polished
I'd say this is actually a bad example. Because apparently, Apollo distinguishes itself from the official Reddit app, because it is more polished. So being polished is the sole differentiator. My point is: If your product is unique in some way that doesn't rely on polish, nobody gives a shit.
Sure, your app might be a bit better if it was native, but implementing everything natively comes with a huge cost. I, as a solo developer, can't support 3 platforms (Android, iOS, web). So Ionic or Cordova-based apps are golden.
> People will not generally voice this to you, especially since they may not know what about the app looks wrong to them. But they might be put off from using it, or at least dislike it, without telling you.
Yes, they might not tell me, they might just ditch the app. But there are thousands of reasons why people ditch apps and I'd argue that polish is the least important of them. The most important is whether people or not understand the workflow, whether or not it matches how they thing about the tasks they want to complete.
You make it sound as if native was always superior to web-based apps. Let me give you a counter example:
My app is not native, but it works completely offline and focuses on "expert" users in my niche. A competitor is truly native, but it doesn't work offline. It saves all data to the cloud and has noticeable lag when an item is saved. This app, despite being native, is "less polished" than my app, because of this noticeable lag.
What I'm saying is: If any small dev team or solo dev tries to weight the tradeoffs between native and hybrid/web-based (and I thought about these things for a long time, way too long actually, before I settled on Ionic): Just go with hybrid, because polishing an app is way more than native UI controls and native UI controls might actually be the least important one.