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> 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.

• montag 3mo ago
  That is a great analogy! I still remember the day my cousin explained that there was a whole internet outside of AOL…
• adamwk 3mo ago
  This doesn’t really make sense. Apps were pretty popular immediately after decades of web usage. There are many reasons to prefer an app. Even on desktop; if I’m using a service enough throughout the day, I want a native app, not a website.
  • vaylian 3mo ago
    Web sites optimized for mobile weren't really a thing when the iPhone launched. That's why apps shined on smart phones. Web designers did eventually catch up with the <meta-viewport> hack but the trend towards apps was already too established at that point and people thought that you need an app to use a service.
    • steve1977 3mo ago
      Funnily enough, when the iPhone launched, it didn't have a native SDK. With iPhone OS 1, developers were supposed to create web apps. That only got changed with iPhone OS 2. https://web.archive.org/web/20070722172208/http://developer.apple.com/iphone/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070722172208/http://developer....
      • vaylian 3mo ago
        You are right. Steve Jobs also used the opportunity to destroy Flash. But my point still stands: Most web sites weren't developed with the mobile form-factor in mind until a while later.
    • rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3mo ago
      Eh it's partially true - the browsers on phones needed to get better as well. Zuckerberg famously made the Facebook apps basically just a responsive webpage under the belief that maintaining one codebase for all platforms would be best. The performance on mobile was so terrible that Instagram started eating his lunch simply by maintaining native mobile apps that are actually performant, and Zuckerberg was forced to panic purchase Instagram (made by a team of 13 people) for a billion dollars. Eventually phones got more powerful and mobile web browsers got good enough that PWAs could perform comparably to native apps, but it was too late, and Apple and Google had absolutely zero interest in promoting something that would damage their app store / play store revenue.
    • pjmlp 3mo ago
      HTML 5 canvas exists because of the iPhone, originally it was going to use Web apps.
      • JimDabell 3mo ago
        Apple created <canvas>, but it wasn’t for the iPhone, it was for Mac OS X dashboard widgets. This was a few years before the iPhone existed.
        • pjmlp 3mo ago
          While I stand corrected, it was nonetheless pushed by Apple.
  • johnecheck 3mo ago
    There are many reasons to prefer an app, most of which are ways OS makers have crippled web apps for reasons that TOTALLY HAVE NOTHING TO DO with the fact that they get a 30% cut if the user chooses the native app.
    • esaym 3mo ago
      Yes, this
    • tcfhgj 3mo ago
      One important which is not included: web apps are resource hogs
      • stackghost 3mo ago
        Electron and React apps, perhaps. It's completely feasible to build a webapp that is lightweight. I have done it several times.
        • gxs 3mo ago
          Or just shitty developers that never give things a second - just sayin
        • tcfhgj 3mo ago
          put the same optimization effort into a native app
          • johnecheck 3mo ago
            Why?
            • tcfhgj 3mo ago
              to avoid comparing apples with oranges
      • deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
  • wwweston 3mo ago
    It has now been longer since apps on smartphones were introduced than it was between the web’s birth and smartphones (to say nothing of popular uptake, it’d be generous to give the web a full decade there before the rise of the smartphone). Combine that with recency bias and the marketing serving incentives of platforms and vendors to push towards “native” and the point seems pretty strong. There’s some minority of apps where work is offline resource bound or mostly offline regardless, those certainly have always made sense on device, other than that habit and mindset probably is the main driver of preference.
  • bloppe 3mo ago
    At this point, most of those "native" apps are actually just web apps packaged in Electron. The fact that you generally can't tell the difference is proof that there aren't any real reasons to prefer a native app. All the reasons have to do with either OS vendors trying to hobble PWAs, or web developers creating React monsters for no good reason. Web apps can actually be very performant.
    • gymhasanapp 3mo ago
      The real reason is really simple tho, and we could identify it ahead of time even before apps existed: The average users sucks at managing bookmarks. Telling a user that a feature is a webpage instead of an app means that they, in their glorious tech illiterate brain, think they have to memorize the url. They don't want to do that. They want to "have it" so they don't forget it. And having it is easier in the app mental model to them than in the bookmark one. I know sufficient 40+ year olds who have the most absolute disgraceful phone desktops, filled with garbage. And yet, this is what they want. They want their bookmarkrs in the one place they'll check. And they want no folders.
      • oblio 3mo ago
        This is trivially solvable with a good mobile OS level feature to create phone desktop icons from websites. Of course, Apple and Google will never do such a thing when their cut of app sales is ~$100bn globally.
        • Calazon 3mo ago
          I just tried and it looks like I can do this in Chrome on Android relatively easily. The UI could be a lot nicer for it though. And I did run into an issue where if the site allows me to install it as a PWA, Chrome will want to do that and won't want to bookmark a specific page on that site instead. Also, maybe your point was that this could be done at the OS level rather than the browser, which is fair.
        • pjmlp 3mo ago
          Agreed, except that on Android, you can easily bookmark any site as icon, when using Android Chrome. Don't forget that Google also has ChromeOS, it is Apple that isn't that keen on the Web. On the other hand, thanks to devs and Electron garbage, the Web is actually ChromeOS nowadays.
  • Pavilion2095 3mo ago
    Back then developers didn't have tools to create websites that look good on both desktop and mobile devices. So websites back then were hardly usable. Apps solved this issue.
  • memsom 3mo ago
    I want native apps because I don't want to rely on the internet existing and I don't think hosting an offline web page in a captured browser is "good enough"
    • curt15 3mo ago
      A lot of "native" apps rely on the Internet for essential functionality. Your Starbucks app would be deadweight if it couldn't pull your account info and store catalogs from starbucks.com.
  • alt227 3mo ago
    The original reason apps were popular was because they provided access to device apis such as accelerometer and gps which websites didnt. Think the beer drinking app etc. Since web apis have caught up and allowed the same functionality, the common perception hasnt shifted back as App Stores have perpetually tried to keep attention so that they keep getting their cut of sales. If everyone knew you could do everything in a wepb page that you can in an app, sales would stop flowing and that is a bad thing for Apple/Google. Most 'native' apps are just electron wrappers around a webpage these days, so how do you know you 'want a native app', just because it has the convenience of being managed through the app store?
    • palata 3mo ago
      > Most 'native' apps are just electron wrappers Desktop apps tend to be ElectronJS, because somehow Desktop failed. But because ElectronJS sucks doesn't mean that it's impossible to have good desktop apps. I have high hopes that Kotlin multiplatform and Compose multiplatform will make desktop apps cool again. Then mobile apps are a completely different story: a good mobile app is a lot better than a webapp. At one end of the spectrum, I don't need an app to show a website (this should be visited from the browser). At the other end, I don't want a complicated webapp in my mobile browser, I want a mobile app. Another thing that web people tend to completely forget is that a webapp is re-loaded every single time. A mobile app is downloaded once and fetches the data, and can sometimes mostly work offline. I am very, very happy that CoMaps is a mobile app and not a webpage.
      • alt227 3mo ago
        Everything you have said here is pretty much incorrect. Are you a coder and do you know how native and webapps work? If not I would do some research rather than assuming, because things you are saying about how webapps work are just not true.
        • palata 3mo ago
          You may start by elaborating on why everything I said is incorrect. I can't really engage on "it's wrong, trust me bro". > Are you a coder and do you know how native and webapps work? I am, and I do. I am thinking that we may disagree on what a "webapp" is. I meant webapp as "a dynamic webpage that behaves like an app, but in the browser". Not "web tech used to write a desktop app" like ElectronJS. With ElectronJS you ship a desktop app built with web tech. You may also ship a mobile app built with web tech. But that's orthogonal to my point. My point is that what you load in your browser is not installed. It's fetched at runtime.
  • dminik 3mo ago
    I kind of get this, but quite a lot of the websites/webapps I use are better off on the web. Imagine that from tomorrow, hackernews is an app. You can't do stuff like open 10 different tabs of it, put it in a tab group, expect it to restore where you left off after shutting down your device. It's interaction with other pages is also wrong. It would have to either open a webview or a separate browser app, both of which make navigations more complex. Extensions no longer work, you can't change stylesheets or use user scripts and so on. This is why I don't like Reddit pushing an app and breaking/limiting the mobile website. It's just not how I want to use it at all.
    • Akronymus 3mo ago
      > This is why I don't like Reddit pushing an app and breaking/limiting the mobile website. It's just not how I want to use it at all. As with many reddit problems, old.reddit.com is a pretty universal fix.
      • dminik 3mo ago
        I do use old reddit on my PC, but unless I'm programming or gaming, most of my browsing is done on mobile. There are extensions to make old reddit mobile friendly, but by default it is a terrible experience. Another example for "you can't use extensions on apps".
        • Akronymus 3mo ago
          I personally find old reddit on mobile more usable than both new and the app version.
• jxdxbx 3mo ago
  No, because I used a computer before web apps took over and native software is a better experience.
• Silasdev 3mo ago
  My take is that they love apps for the simple reason they show as easily clickable buttons to enter. Most dread having to type a Web address for something they regularly do. Few know that they can create an "app-icon" from any Web page. Should be advertised more.
  • teo_zero 3mo ago
    > Few know that they can create an "app-icon" from any Web page Let's say from most web pages. Some sites will hijack your browser and install their PWA instead of the page you requested.
• cyberrock 3mo ago
  To most modern users, web browsers kinda suck if they don't know URLs. For example, if they want to find an item they saw on Amazon, searching it in browser history just sucks compared to the in-service search. A lot of users also use browsers like they use their Desktop folder, which is to say they have 100s of tabs open. The fact that apps enforce quitting and limited state is a plus to them, hence mobile Chrome adding an automatic inactive tabs cleanup feature (which mobile FF removed for some reason?). Browsers really should've adapted to this reality with some UI/UX changes, like showing relevant site history. But none of them are actually interested in improving UI/UX, and the few changes that do get through just piss off long-term users.
  • Akronymus 3mo ago
    > To most modern users, web browsers kinda suck if they don't know URLs. For example, if they want to find an item they saw on Amazon, searching it in browser history just sucks compared to the in-service search. And, more and more, browsers are trying to hide the URL as much as possible. Which is REAPLY annoying.
• herval 3mo ago
  webapps are inefficient, clunky, slow substitutes to actual native apps. I think decades of marketing and billions spent by Google trying to convince people that webapps are better is what makes many tech people think they are. Literally. People "want" webapps to be what users "wanted" bc it pays their salary...
  • high_priest 3mo ago
    They both have their uses. At the extreme, try to imagine Pubg as a web app. There are good modern games that work purely in a browser. But still, there are "applications" that function better as full fledge clients seeping small amounts of data and there are "applications" that function just aswell as dynamically loaded full server-side solutions.
    • herval 3mo ago
      I know, I agree both have their uses :-) I was just jesting about the kind of extreme OP went for.
  • jonahx 3mo ago
    That's clever rhetoric, but for most use cases it's just not true, and that's the point of the original article. There are legitimate use cases for native apps, but many of them could be converted to an instantly loading, 50-100KB web page without losing any functionality. As opposed to a 50-300MB native app, which you need a fast connection to install, and starts up more slowly than the web page every time you use it.
    • herval 3mo ago
      You’re doing native apps wrong if they’re 300mb. And also no web app in 2026 is just 50kb!
• EduardoBautista 3mo ago
  I “love apps” because it’s less likely to be bloated electron crap or browser based. It’s easier for me to review code on the GitHub iOS app than in the browser because performance is much better.