I'm moving in to a new apartment tomorrow and it comes with this "app" to communicate with your neighbours. Of course, it's just an app and not a site. I instal

I'm moving in to a new apartment tomorrow and it comes with this "app" to communicate with your neighbours. Of course, it's just an app and not a site. I installed it on Android emulator just to see what it's like; the entire thing is basically just a web forum, like what we had 20 years ago, except of course it's worse. You can't search (on a page with ^F, or in general), you can't adjust its tiny font size, it only runs on iOS/Android, etc. I must sound like an old man, but I don't see it as anything other than reinventing 20-year old tech except "as an app" and shittier. I think it's very different from the move to the web; in spite of common complaints about it on HN, it really brought cross-platform capabilities to the world. Yes, there's issues with Chrome's dominance, but have you tried running on Linux or NetBSD in 2000? It was all fun and games until someone sent you a .doc file, or until you had to do your taxes, or until you wanted to do a million other things that were "Windows-only". With the web the only thing stopping anyone from creating a new environment that works for a lot of common every-day things is just putting in the work to implement an OS + browser. Yes, this is not easy, but also not undoable (and not as hard as sometimes claimed, IMO), and compared to proprietary protocols and formats of the 90s it's a huge improvement. But with all this mobile stuff now we're back to proprietary protocols and formats that only work on proprietary systems. I don't think it's comparable at all. If anything, it's the reverse, and also worse than the 90s because PCs are "open" platforms where you can install any OS you want, which is not the case with the vast majority of mobile phones, and the "app store" distribution model makes it even worse. I'm not necessarily against smartphones as a concept, but the current implementations are a huge regression in many ways.