17 ms·

Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

• Hard_Space 3mo ago
  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.
• ed_mercer 3mo ago
  This is awesome. I think the much bigger use case here is building web equivalents of apps that are only available on iOS/Android.
• datakan 3mo ago
  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.
  • brabel 3mo ago
    > 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!
    • smallpipe 3mo ago
      Casting from the web doesn’t work (on iOS at least) but that’s all I can think of.
      • echoangle 3mo ago
        AirPlay should work for every native video element, or do you mean something like chromecast?
        • jorisw 3mo ago
          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.
      • craftkiller 3mo ago
        Chromecast from desktop chromium works, so there's no reason they couldn't make the universal turing machine in my pocket do the same.
        • reddalo 3mo ago
          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).
          • craftkiller 3mo ago
            > 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?
            • Gander5739 3mo ago
              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).
            • spogbiper 3mo ago
              i've often wondered how Apple gets away with things like this, I guess its because they never gained the marketshare that Microsoft had
    • LoganDark 3mo ago
      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.
    • jaffa2 3mo ago
      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.
      • IIsi50MHz 3mo ago
        > can open more than one video at once. And a nice side-effect of that is that YouTube doesn't throw away the list of other videos on the page you came from!
    • ForHackernews 3mo ago
      NewPipe mostly works except when Google breaks it.
      • dizhn 3mo ago
        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. :)
    • cube00 3mo ago
      > 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.
  • dec0dedab0de 3mo ago
    sure, but that original idea was 20 years ago.
  • forlorn 3mo ago
    They want apps so they could fingerprint your device, spy on you and get a lot more information than a web app.
    • jorisw 3mo ago
      Sure. They. They want. You know who they are, and what they want.
      • close04 3mo ago
        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.
        • jorisw 3mo ago
          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.
          • close04 3mo ago
            > 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.
          • NiloCK 3mo ago
            > 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".
  • jorisw 3mo ago
    > they want Who are 'they' and how do you know what they want
    • pluralmonad 3mo ago
      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.
      • jorisw 3mo ago
        Ad companies now. Just one sentence earlier you said it's people 'delivering their payload'.
        • pluralmonad 3mo ago
          Yes, ad (supported) companies are a large subset of the former. I am not sure what point you are attempting to make.
          • jorisw 3mo ago
            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.
            • pluralmonad 3mo ago
              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.
  • mr_mitm 3mo ago
    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?
    • whstl 3mo ago
      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/main/site/en/docs/web-platform/notification-triggers/index.md https://github.com/GoogleChrome/developer.chrome.com//blob/m...
      • mr_mitm 3mo ago
        > 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/main/site/en/docs/web-platform/notification-triggers/index.md 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!
        • whstl 3mo ago
          > 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.
          • mr_mitm 3mo ago
            And the OS will never background the browser for battery optimization reasons? Genuine question, I'm not an expert on mobile OSs (as you already guessed).
  • doginasuit 3mo ago
    > 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.
    • z3c0 3mo ago
      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.
  • harryf 3mo ago
    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.
  • benoau 3mo ago
    > 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
  • polycancel 3mo ago
    With the state of current Android locking down to iOS level of closeness ( https://keepandroidopen.org https://keepandroidopen.org ) Since my last smart phone broke, I have held out on getting a smart phone for personal use. Sure for doing professional stuff for work, I'll use the work phone, but NOT going to pay my own money to get a surveillance device now. If you are a business, and the you don't have a web site working, then yeah too bad. Until Ubuntu Touch or something similar catches up and can run on old smart phone in a reliable way (not having to hunt down ROM like LineageOS ) it will be going back to before 2007 for me. It is more inconvenient sometimes, but life is also better in many ways.
• cainxinth 3mo ago
  Preach!
• catapart 3mo ago
  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.
  • Dan-Q 3mo ago
    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!
    • DrammBA 3mo ago
      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?
    • catapart 3mo ago
      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.
• viaredux 3mo ago
  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.
• billyp-rva 3mo ago
  > 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 https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle
  • CuriouslyC 3mo ago
    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.
    • reddalo 3mo ago
      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.
      • CuriouslyC 3mo ago
        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.
        • jorisw 3mo ago
          PWAs (progressive web apps) surely existed before React though
          • CuriouslyC 3mo ago
            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.
• Doctor_Fegg 3mo ago
  > 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)”
  • reddalo 3mo ago
    Luckily tools such as uBlock Origin let you block all those nasty scripts, _including_ the cookie banner themselves.
    • deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    • inigyou 3mo ago
      I have uBO and I still see cookie banners.
      • hollow-moe 3mo ago
        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.
        • inigyou 3mo ago
          Does it remove them by automatically consenting to the cookies, rejecting them or just hiding the banner?
          • reddalo 3mo ago
            It hides the banner, so no consent is ever given. Plus, uBlock would block most scripts that place cookies anyway.
          • rpdillon 3mo ago
• mohammedmsgm 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• pdnagilum 3mo ago
  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?
  • lstodd 3mo ago
    RFC 1738 Uniform Resource Locators (URL) December 1994 section 2.2
  • Dan-Q 3mo ago
    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.
    • philipwhiuk 3mo ago
      More of an ugly authToken then.
• wsdn 3mo ago
  If a 120MB app is required just to display an itinerary PDF, that's an architecture problem, not a UX problem.
• Grombobulous 3mo ago
  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.
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  • Steve16384 3mo ago
    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.
  • criddell 3mo ago
    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.
• mcdonje 3mo ago
  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.
  • stavros 3mo ago
    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.
    • hn111 3mo ago
      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
      • stavros 3mo ago
        Yes, exactly. I was looking for it for ages the other day, it really does feel like they hid it intentionally.
    • mcdonje 3mo ago
      [dead]
• pjmlp 3mo ago
  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.
• Eleg007 3mo ago
  Love this
• me_vinayakakv 3mo ago
  Why they would have password in the URL?!
• rTX5CMRXIfFG 3mo ago
  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”””
• mrcrm9494 3mo ago
  does not load for me
  • creaturemachine 3mo ago
    Maybe it should've been an app after all.
• smcg 3mo ago
  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 https://archive.ph/ByFBN
  • anonzzzies 3mo ago
    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.
    • smcg 3mo ago
      For every person like you there are thousands who don't want to host!
      • anonzzzies 3mo ago
        My lovely clients!
    • inigyou 3mo ago
      How did you get companies to sign up to your website business?
      • anonzzzies 3mo ago
        I have been in business for 30 years. That helps. We don't overgrow or over hype and we discourage people who just want to overload things; we like boring companies with a lot of revenue / profit that run boring things like ERP, CRM, dashboards, LoB apps etc. And those companies just keep buying ; especially Vibe LoBbing makes for departments within companies churning out tons of apps they need to host somewhere.
  • vaylian 3mo ago
    [dead]
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• deadbabe 3mo ago
  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.
  • llm_nerd 3mo ago
    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.
    • abanana 3mo ago
      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?
      • llm_nerd 3mo ago
• ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
  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.
  • bobro 3mo ago
    examples?
    • ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
      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.
      • ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
        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.
        • cindyllm 3mo ago
          [dead]
• maelito 3mo ago
  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.
• Dwedit 3mo ago
  A webpage cannot harvest your personal data in ways that an app can.
• gwbas1c 3mo ago
  > 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.
• carlosjobim 3mo ago
  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.
  • carlosjobim 3mo ago
    I invite down voters to make a reply explaining why users would prefer web apps to native apps, given the choice.
    • philipwhiuk 3mo ago
      At least with web app I have a browser sandbox to protect my system.
      • carlosjobim 3mo ago
        I think most modern operating systems have app sandboxes also to protect the system.
      • tcmart14 3mo ago
        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.
    • max-privatevoid 3mo ago
      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.
• david-moore 3mo ago
  If you're having any trouble loading it, it is cached here: https://archive.ph/ByFBN https://archive.ph/ByFBN
• pknerd 3mo ago
  Yeah, it can be, but who'd take care of distribution and making money?
• 0xdeadbeefbabe 3mo ago
  > 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.
• glasffordd 3mo ago
  Booking a flight on the website and then being told I need the app just to see my boarding pass drives me nuts.
  • stronglikedan 3mo ago
    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.
  • mavleop 3mo ago
    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
• timnetworks 3mo ago
  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.
• eightturn 3mo ago
  I love it when folks get fired up and fix things and use uplifting cuss words. a+
• Magicrafter13 3mo ago
  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.
• brunoborges 3mo ago
  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.
• bwunkhaus 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• jonathanlydall 3mo ago
  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”.
  • philote 3mo ago
    More like "We can track you better in the app"
• Invictus0 3mo ago
  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
• philipwhiuk 3mo ago
  > 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
• 5701652400 3mo ago
  "I did not like the app and their service, so I am breaking the law because I am so smart"
  • philipwhiuk 3mo ago
    None of this is illegal.
    • 5701652400 3mo ago
      really? did you even read T&C of that app? https://www.travelbound.co.uk/terms-and-conditions/ https://www.travelbound.co.uk/terms-and-conditions/
      • philipwhiuk 2mo ago
        T&Cs aren't laws.
• hoherd 3mo ago
  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.
• progforlyfe 3mo ago
  YES!!! I fucking hate all these stupid web-pages-as-Apps
• staticshock 3mo ago
  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.
  • titanomachy 3mo ago
    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).
  • wbobeirne 3mo ago
    > 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_apps/How_to/Trigger_install_prompt https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
• catuscubitus 3mo ago
  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.
• jcmontx 3mo ago
  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.
  • titanomachy 3mo ago
    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.
    • georgemcbay 3mo ago
      > 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.
  • da02 3mo ago
    Are these Chrome extensions? How did you learn to write them?
    • turtlebits 3mo ago
      I use the tampermonkey extension (formerly greasemonkey). AI is fairly good for writing scripts.
    • jcmontx 3mo ago
      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
• amelius 3mo ago
  Someone should design a webpage that can run native iOS/Android apps. That will teach them.
• khalic 3mo ago
  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
• slipperybeluga 3mo ago
  [dead]
• fguerraz 3mo ago
  The strong language is fully appropriate given the circumstances.
• frankus 3mo ago
  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).
• paulddraper 3mo ago
  > 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.
• tingletech 3mo ago
  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?
• dumpHero2 3mo ago
  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
• baud9600 3mo ago
  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?
  • DonHopkins 3mo ago
    I want my lickable pixels back. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581424
  • nolok 3mo ago
    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.
    • CharlesW 3mo ago
      > 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.
• Zak 3mo ago
  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.
  • nolok 3mo ago
    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.
    • rhines 3mo ago
      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.
      • nolok 3mo ago
        On PC I'm definitely there with you, it's on phone where I have this issue
        • paulatreides 3mo ago
          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
• drunken_thor 3mo ago
  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.
• qurren 3mo ago
  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.
• nsxwolf 3mo ago
  Your app could have been a webpage with a cookie banner
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• OkayPhysicist 3mo ago
  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.
  • nitwit005 3mo ago
    That sounds less like wanting apps, than simply having no idea what's going on.
    • OkayPhysicist 3mo ago
      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.
      • RetroTechie 3mo ago
        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?
        • foxygen 3mo ago
• clodecloud 3mo ago
  And then there’s websites that should be apps
• dudeWithAMood 3mo ago
  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 https://github.com/DavidZirinsky/costco-deals
• gabilin 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• user2722 3mo ago
  I thought he had created an website which ran an APK server-side and was loadable in a browser. Oh well.
• pvtmert 3mo ago
  > 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...
  • bearjaws 3mo ago
    I don't think an LLM would propose this terrible method ever, at least not any of the big 3.
• esjeon 3mo ago
  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.
• temilson 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• audioh4cker 3mo ago
  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.
• cwoolfe 3mo ago
  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.
• yard2010 3mo ago
  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 https://prepbook.app
• rosstex 3mo ago
  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.
• VladVladikoff 3mo ago
  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!
• alkonaut 3mo ago
  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.
• overgard 3mo ago
  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.
• BoorishBears 3mo ago
  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.
• jack09268 3mo ago
  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 https://treefortsystems.com [2] https://web.dev/articles/pwa-with-offline-streaming https://web.dev/articles/pwa-with-offline-streaming [3] https://dontkillmyapp.com https://dontkillmyapp.com
• koolba 3mo ago
  I like apps to sequester authentication. Not for everything, but nice to keep some things only authenticated in their own walled garden.
• hackermeows 3mo ago
  The no copy paste of visible text(have to take a screenshot then select) and in app browsers fucking annoys me the most . These two are IMO the Worst UX pattern that affect me every day .
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• MiddleEndian 3mo ago
  Most of the time, I want neither. No I don't want the ticketmaster app (or DICE). I may need to visit a website to buy a ticket, but after that just email me a QR code or something. Even worse, I found myself at Royale in Boston and they wanted me to install yet another app to check my coat. I hid my coat under a chair instead and have not returned to the venue since then. The example from the article: > This summer, the kids’ performing arts school are singing and dancing in a show at Disneyland. We’re all very excited, but my excitement, at least, was muted a little when I was told to install the “Travelbound” app in order to get access to the itinerary, travel arrangements, and accommodation details. I don't need an app for this or website for this. Just email me the information and let me put it in my calendar and then leave me alone.
  • stevage 3mo ago
    Yeah I was considering buying tickets for something recently, then discovered the only option is to install an app just to buy the damn ticket. No. Damn. Way.
• franklinhacker 3mo ago
  [dead]
• VladVladikoff 3mo ago
  Where does the legality with this lie? I’ve read cases where someone was jailed just for changing the ID in a url parameter. If you are intercepting network requests and then replaying them (with modifications?) in you own custom code, I bet under some laws this is “hacking”. Personally I would be afraid to post publicly that I’ve done this, seems like it could be used as an admission of guilt in a trial.
• ConanRus 3mo ago
  [dead]
• kotberg 3mo ago
  [dead]
• QuercusMax 3mo ago
  One problem with PWAs, at least on Android, is that if you save one to your home screen, it may get borked or deleted the next time there's an OS or app update. Chrome has eaten my home screen shortcuts too many times!
• bizzybeezy 3mo ago
  OMG! I am dead. I don’t think I laughed out loud in about a month. It’s been an oddly humorless summer so far. But this made me feel alive. I literally installed on of these shitty apps for my boss for a work trip to a museum leadership retreat-all the information in the app was redundant and sent to us in form of emails, calendar invites, pdf attachments all of which were printed out -and all of them were slightly different in detail. Another variant of this fucking nightmare is an app my boss had to download a month earlier that “page gate” style force you to interact with an ai chat bot to chat about what was maybe 5 pages of conference content
• syngrog66 3mo ago
  a lot of the modern web could just be plain text files. or simple static HTML or Markdown for links and embedded images.
• DOCL02 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• pooploop64 3mo ago
  I wish there hadn't been that weird conspiracy against bookmarks that google and mozilla collaborated on. I keep trying to get back into the habit of using bookmarks, but I keep forgetting they exist again whenever the bookmark bar turns itself off for no reason. While I'm at it, also screw mozilla for messing up the browser history so badly.
• -ev0ve- 3mo ago
  Very interesting. Whosever wrote the codes and supporting this mechanism, "https://travelbound.api.vamoos.com/api/itineraries/{username}-{password} https://travelbound.api.vamoos.com/api/itineraries/{username...". I would run away from that person as far as I can. :)
• -ev0ve- 3mo ago
  Very interesting. Whoever wrote codes and design this mechanism, "https://travelbound.api.vamoos.com/api/itineraries/{username}-{password} https://travelbound.api.vamoos.com/api/itineraries/{username...". I would stay far away from that person as possible. :)
• Animats 3mo ago
  Nice. Would someone please port the Waymo and Uber apps to web sites? And put them on F-Droid? Thank you.
• 11mariom 3mo ago
  I tend not to use websites that forces me to use their app. If users want it - make it existing, but DO NOT force other users to install your app if they want to just use the mobile web experience.
• zenith605 3mo ago
  This resonates with me. I recently built a community site (user submissions, votes, comments, Google login) as a plain static page on free hosting, with a hosted Postgres behind it. No app, no server of my own. People assume you need an app or at least a backend for anything interactive, but the modern web platform covers far more than most product teams give it credit for. The whole thing costs me $11/year for the domain.
• leecommamichael 3mo ago
  How you distribute software is a consequence of the user’s relationship with it. If I “take a number” online for the License Office before driving in, that most certainly shouldn’t be an app. Installing is harder than “taking a number.” Apps are great for tools which the user needs to depend on regularly. A consequence of this is that apps shouldn’t change their UI too frequently.
• louraider 3mo ago
  Personally, I hate installing apps, especially when that's required. So web pages are the deal.
• tlhunter 3mo ago
  I just want icons that I can click from my home screen (eg PWA).