(honestly i think tim cook wrecked the company, he’s a pure bloodless businessman, thinking only about numbers and value extraction versus innovation and changing the world, which jobs, for all his faults, objectively did)
This was a choice by Steve Jobs for how it is now. This was also the time they were trying to push HTML5 as the future as removing dependency on specialty software. If mostly everything was only needing a website, then it didn’t matter what OS you were using. This would help allow iOS and OSX (at the time) be fully compatible against Blackberry and Windows Vista. But then Android got popular and Windows 7 was a major improvement, Linux was growing as well (netbooks, before MS tried to push into that market). Suddenly their push of any device would be on equal footing was not in their favor, so Apple pushed HARD on “There’s an app for that” to start the hard lock in of iOS leading to where things are today.
I miss the old days where a macbook came with a bunch of creative apps that kids in the 60s-90s dreamed of.
That innovative creative freedom train is long gone from that company
One of the most ironic things is if you willingly download the app version of a website, hoping it would speed things up and reduce internet data usage, just for the app to be using WebView or some other micro-browser engine which will essentially be the same as if you were visiting the website using your browser as before.
Thanks for nothing.
TFW someone makes a desktop app but it’s literally just a bundled chrome browser page
Lychee, a slicer software for 3D printing, immediately comes to mind. It’s a fucking electron app. It also only works if you login to a fucking account, even the free version, because fuck you. Oh, and free users have to sit through 30 seconds of advertising whenever they click “Slice”, because fuck you again
As a side point, what the hell is wrong with Snapchat’s UI? It’s a mess of buttons arranged by a monkey on cocaine. How is this shit popular?
I spent most of my programming career working for small companies and doing almost everything myself (including collecting requirements, design etc.) but the last few years I spent with an enormous tech company working on apps with teams of professional designers and UI/UX experts (I’ve avoided the scare quotes around these terms, with difficulty). The designers always designed on paper, and violently rejected any suggestion that their designs be put in front of focus groups of actual users and modified according to feedback. “Users have no idea what they want” was an actual, frequent quote from them. As a user who does know what he wants and rarely gets it from modern mobile apps, I found this attitude a bit surprising. Not surprisingly, our apps usually averaged barely above one star (thanks to corporate instructions to employees to vote our apps up), with many comments along the lines of “only voted one star because you can’t vote zero stars”.
“Users have no idea what they want” was an actual, frequent quote from them.
It’s because they’re not designing for the users’ wants, they’re designing for the users’ engagement (or whatever flawed metric they use to determine that). The designers mindlessly equate what keeps the user engaged with what the user wants.
I hate that I need an app to change the colour of my fucking lightbulb, give me a remote instead, damn.
That being said, I prefer using apps over the browser because they load way faster.
I have Phillips wiz bulbs in my house and I can do most of the stuff in the app from Google home. The only thing I can do is set scenes but I rarely use those.
The only real downside is these use some Phillips API so of course to work they call back to their servers so that stop being smart without an Internet connection. Some day I’ll move my light bulbs out of the cloud but that day is not today.
I have one from a brand called Enki and not only they made me dowload an app but I had to make an account as well. And every time I want to use that damn app it has logged me out and I need to type my credentials once again.
I didn’t know about Google Home, I’ll check if I can use that one instead.
There’s a lot of reasons to use a app over a browser.
Speed is not one of them.
As a web dev, we can absolutely provide you faster experience. Depending on the service and needs, we can blow any app awaym
But a app can access hardware tools that browsers cannot.
Of course a good website can beat a shit app. But there’s no way that you can build a website that’s faster than a good app.
First of all, because your website has to run on an actual app, called a web browser. Additionally, you can’t magically remove the initial load time to fetch resources from the server. Those resources are already on your phone on the app so it’s instantaneous.
You…realize that when you visit a website more than once the resources are also available on your phone right? Even the most bloated JS monstrosity will have most of its data cached after the first visit and the initial load time will be as good as an installed app after the first visit. You’re not fetching all 200mb of its JavaScript every time you visit the site. Of course, if the site updates its code, you’ll have to re-fetch it, but the same goes for app updates.
Obviously if your app is designed to work offline, a website probably is going to be worse. But that’s a scenario that actually does warrant a standalone app, which does not go for the majority of apps.
Most apps just do CRUD and act as a thin client to fetch data from a server (this includes pretty much all social media apps). There is not going to be a real difference in speed between loading the site in a web browser with cached resources or a fully-fledged app you install, except the app can harvest data from you in ways that can be prevented by a good browser. Actually, a site can be faster in many cases since it leverages libraries and capabilities already built into and loaded by a browser while an app might have to load its own standalone resources. And being able to access the app offline in these instances is worthless because if your connection isn’t good enough to serve the website, it’s not good enough to use the app either.
