the reason is children. for some reason the most recent generation of kids requires apps instead of sites. god forbid they have to remember an address.
just look at the fuckload of people who cant use lemmy without an ‘app’
this is one of my peeeves
My high school computer teacher once ranted about this to us. He said the younger students are lacking the basic concepts of computer stuff. They are spoiled too much to not even know what a file browser is.
Eeh, I see it as a gray area. Majority of millenials, myself included, grew up learning about novel technologies as they developed. We learned how to use desktop computers and browse the internet during a ‘golden age’ of innovation. They became part of our everyday lives and are second nature to us. The next generations don’t fully have that experience but are expected to natively know their way around a computer since they’re so ubiquitous in our lives. In reality, they know how to use smart phones and chromebooks but aren’t getting the experience of working on a real desktop computer.
Regarding teaching kids the basics, I’d put it on the schools, not the parents. Do schools still have computer labs? That’d be where proper computer skills should be taught. If parents can help at home that’s great, but I don’t think it should be expected that every kid is going to have a real computer at home to learn on (versus phones, tablets, chromebooks, etc).
One of the reasons I like apps for Lemmy is for notifications.
Coincidentally, one of the reasons companies like apps is for notifications.
Your mobile browser supports notifications per site like an app. It even supports custom icons per site when the notification pops up.
You don’t even know if the telemetry leaving your phone to the app server is using TLS encryption, you just let them hail-mary football-throw send it.
I don’t understand why we insist on bending over and freely giving away our data to fucking apps.
I don’t understand why we insist on bending over and freely giving away our data to fucking apps.
Some people are extremely averse to the discomfort of the slightest speedbump in their computer/phone usage and are more than willing to give their “worthless” data in return.
One benefit an app for something like Lemmy offers is significantly better customization.
thats a copout for the site sucking. lemmy looks like someone forgot the css. one of the reasons i chose mbin, its not fugly and very user-configurable.
no app required
I mean, I think part of it is because they grew up interacting with apps because parents were, mostly rightly, restricting their children from use of the greater unrestricted web. Every modern parent I know had children who knew which apps on mommy or daddy’s phone they were allowed to touch - their games or youtube kids or whatever. These apps provided easy safeguards for parents to rein in their child’s internet experience. Even if these methods weren’t perfect in their attempt (Elsagate and all that), this was still good practice for allowing your child access to modernity in the times you couldn’t fully devote your time to overseeing their activity with relative confidence they were probably not watching wildly inappropriate content.
In a perfect world parents and educators would also be devoting time to teaching their child to navigate the internet and allowing them monitored (with physical eyeballs, not tracking) online browsing time, but I don’t think we can rightly fault the kids for not having received that. Rather than grumbling about the situation, I think we’d be better served accepting it for what it is and instead approaching the topic from a stance of: how do we teach them better behavior and help them unlearn these bad habits?
edit: typo
If it’s a service I use regularly on my phone like Lemmy then an app usually does provide a better experience. The UI is usually better optimised and they tend to load faster. However if I’m only using it once, or if I’ve just visited your site then stop trying to get me to use the fucking app! That goes for Reddit as well, I have the app installed but if I’m just trying to view a post because I googled something I don’t want to be forced into the app
I’m not a child. But I already have an entire OS running on my phone. Why would I run a browser on top (with all of its UI clutter) so I can use an app.
If I’m going to use an app often, for more than a couple minutes each time, I’m gonna use an app. If I’m just visiting a site for the first time, or I’m just going to stay there a couple seconds (search engines), I’m using the web browser.
Browsers are for browsing the web. Apps (run by the OS, not by a web browser) are for doing things.
Browsers are for browsing the web. Apps (run by the OS, not by a web browser) are for doing things.
hahahahhahhaahahha
im deep in the corporate, non-app web-based environment. this comment is so out of touch. i get that its your POV, but its not even close to the broader reality that most apps are just packaged websites and that browsers are nearly fully virtual machines and incredibly capable.
again, the apps exist generally because they want to capture more data than the browser allows (they are exploiting you). theres very little functionality that cant be run in the browser directly.
They just haven’t seen the light yet - I feel like most people from every generation are app’d up.
I prefer using Lemmy with an app because apps are better designed for my screen than an website. It’s kind of rare finding an website that looks good on portrait.
right, the lemmy website is garbage. many others are not. i have zero issue using mbin, accessing lemmy content without an app on my mobile device in portrait.
no app needed, but its because mbin is designed as modern sites should be. dynamically scaled to the requested interface.
again, if your website isnt absolute garbage no app is required.
