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> If you've ever opened Reddit, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or practically any popular service on your phone's web browser, you've likely encountered it. Another webs

> If you've ever opened Reddit, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or practically any popular service on your phone's web browser, you've likely encountered it. Another website that asks to Get The App is https://imgur.com/ https://imgur.com/ , every time you open a link to just view that image you instantly got asked to Get The App. It's really annoying!

frollogaston 1y ago
Also uhh the default search engine in mobile Safari. Just Google searching gives you a half-page notice to install the app. If you have the app, it's a half-page notice to use the app. And guess what's inside the app, a website.
userbinator 1y ago
I believe that's done based on user-agent header; but it shouldn't be surprising that the UA on a mobile browser is the hardest to change, showing once again that users' control of their computing devices is extremely important. With the appropriate UA, imgur will just give you the raw image data directly.
kristopolous 1y ago
The "download app" notifications on reddit are like some kind of art project to maximimally annoy you. Probably the worst offender is facebook where they have what can only be called an intentionally broken mobile website - the idea of losing the person's name if you edit a comment, the page deciding to reload you back to the main page if you switch tabs to research something or the post box clearing out if you switch focus, the comment box being nearly impossible to navigate through with the cursor, these are all profoundly egregious bugs that have been there for years. Basically if you intend it to do something more substantive than comment a series of emojis, they have a bunch of bugs that block you. I'm guessing someone has made the calculation that being terrible in these ways are more profitable. Maybe people doom scroll more if the content is vapid? I'd love to see the user stories. "Brenda is a 52 year old professional who likes commenting "Happy Birthday" to AI generated images of people with cakes. She loves multilevel marketing and buying stuff on Temu. Her husband Greg, reposts memes programmatically generated by content farms using LLMs and topic trackers"
- andoando 1y ago
  I feel the same way about reddit. Modals are bigger than the page with unclickable buttons. Profile/settings icon/button is rendered half way or fully out of the page. Chat feature is completely unusable
  - kristopolous 1y ago
    I really think Reddit did it as a rebrand. It's somehow 20 years old and still gets teenagers. Social media almost always skews older as it ages, beyond the natural pace of time. AOL became mostly seniors as did Facebook and Yahoo. Reddit has not only shaken off most of the aging legacy users but had also captured a new generation of effectively children. I personally don't like what they've done but it's worked. The younger users view it as an app with a website as opposed to a website with an app
    - econ 1y ago
      The formula to clear out the old people is to clear out their input area half way the first draft of their TL;DR They will just go away for a few years.
    - Eisenstein 1y ago
      Unfortunately they have a major problem that is going to hit them soon: they rely on volunteer moderators to run the site for them, and the young people aren't doing it.
      - kristopolous 1y ago
        They'll LLM that, or at least they'll majorly try.
- jorisboris 1y ago
  And it literally blocks users from using messenger in the mobile browser, I need to ask for desktop website
Winsaucerer 1y ago
I hate Imgur. Even with the app installed I find it doesn’t work well. I don’t understand why people use it — does it just work for them in a way it doesn’t for me, or are they more tolerant of its terrible usability?
- WD-42 1y ago
  It’s not designed to work well, it’s designed to serve ads.
LostMyLogin 1y ago
The worst for me is when you open Google Maps in the browser and the appears with the blue continue button. If you click it, it opens the iOS store page. If you then move back to your browser it re-opens and focuses the iOS store page one more time.
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 1y ago
I hate imgur with their freaking redirects of deep links that have .jpg or .png in their URLs. They redirect to the HTML and then ask me to download a shitty app and prevent me from looking at the damn content. If you cannot afford the web traffic, just shut down your webservers instead of this bullshit.
myHNAccount123 1y ago
the imgur website is one of THE shittiest ever made. Just try it on mobile or without ad blocks. They can't even play a gif properly.
cibyr 1y ago
Imgur is particularly infuriating because it was initially touted as an alternative to the shitty image-sharing sites of the day (photobucket and the like) - one that would let you just link to an image without any bullshit. Now it's completely unusable.
- progbits 1y ago
  We just need to repeat the cycle again. Every ~5 years someone makes a new good site, it's great at first, funded from donations. Then they hire people, feature creep, add ads, sellout to VC, enshittyfi, rinse and repeat.
quitit 1y ago
And a big thumbs down to Google Maps, that when presenting a location on the web, that's already being shown, it will cover it with a pop-up heavily steering the user to download the app.

frollogaston 1y ago

Also uhh the default search engine in mobile Safari. Just Google searching gives you a half-page notice to install the app. If you have the app, it's a half-page notice to use the app. And guess what's inside the app, a website.

userbinator 1y ago

I believe that's done based on user-agent header; but it shouldn't be surprising that the UA on a mobile browser is the hardest to change, showing once again that users' control of their computing devices is extremely important. With the appropriate UA, imgur will just give you the raw image data directly.

kristopolous 1y ago

The "download app" notifications on reddit are like some kind of art project to maximimally annoy you. Probably the worst offender is facebook where they have what can only be called an intentionally broken mobile website - the idea of losing the person's name if you edit a comment, the page deciding to reload you back to the main page if you switch tabs to research something or the post box clearing out if you switch focus, the comment box being nearly impossible to navigate through with the cursor, these are all profoundly egregious bugs that have been there for years. Basically if you intend it to do something more substantive than comment a series of emojis, they have a bunch of bugs that block you. I'm guessing someone has made the calculation that being terrible in these ways are more profitable. Maybe people doom scroll more if the content is vapid? I'd love to see the user stories. "Brenda is a 52 year old professional who likes commenting "Happy Birthday" to AI generated images of people with cakes. She loves multilevel marketing and buying stuff on Temu. Her husband Greg, reposts memes programmatically generated by content farms using LLMs and topic trackers"

andoando 1y ago
I feel the same way about reddit. Modals are bigger than the page with unclickable buttons. Profile/settings icon/button is rendered half way or fully out of the page. Chat feature is completely unusable
- kristopolous 1y ago
  I really think Reddit did it as a rebrand. It's somehow 20 years old and still gets teenagers. Social media almost always skews older as it ages, beyond the natural pace of time. AOL became mostly seniors as did Facebook and Yahoo. Reddit has not only shaken off most of the aging legacy users but had also captured a new generation of effectively children. I personally don't like what they've done but it's worked. The younger users view it as an app with a website as opposed to a website with an app
  - econ 1y ago
    The formula to clear out the old people is to clear out their input area half way the first draft of their TL;DR They will just go away for a few years.
  - Eisenstein 1y ago
    Unfortunately they have a major problem that is going to hit them soon: they rely on volunteer moderators to run the site for them, and the young people aren't doing it.
    - kristopolous 1y ago
      They'll LLM that, or at least they'll majorly try.
jorisboris 1y ago
And it literally blocks users from using messenger in the mobile browser, I need to ask for desktop website

Winsaucerer 1y ago

I hate Imgur. Even with the app installed I find it doesn’t work well. I don’t understand why people use it — does it just work for them in a way it doesn’t for me, or are they more tolerant of its terrible usability?

WD-42 1y ago
It’s not designed to work well, it’s designed to serve ads.

LostMyLogin 1y ago

The worst for me is when you open Google Maps in the browser and the appears with the blue continue button. If you click it, it opens the iOS store page. If you then move back to your browser it re-opens and focuses the iOS store page one more time.

h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 1y ago

I hate imgur with their freaking redirects of deep links that have .jpg or .png in their URLs. They redirect to the HTML and then ask me to download a shitty app and prevent me from looking at the damn content. If you cannot afford the web traffic, just shut down your webservers instead of this bullshit.

myHNAccount123 1y ago

the imgur website is one of THE shittiest ever made. Just try it on mobile or without ad blocks. They can't even play a gif properly.

cibyr 1y ago

Imgur is particularly infuriating because it was initially touted as an alternative to the shitty image-sharing sites of the day (photobucket and the like) - one that would let you just link to an image without any bullshit. Now it's completely unusable.

progbits 1y ago
We just need to repeat the cycle again. Every ~5 years someone makes a new good site, it's great at first, funded from donations. Then they hire people, feature creep, add ads, sellout to VC, enshittyfi, rinse and repeat.

quitit 1y ago

And a big thumbs down to Google Maps, that when presenting a location on the web, that's already being shown, it will cover it with a pop-up heavily steering the user to download the app.