I have recently started a new position and am required to use an app that has three Facebook trackers, one of them being a Facebook location tracker according to Exodus App Privacy in order to get your food when it would literally work perfectly fine ordering to a real cashier or shit even a website rather than having to download an app.
I have also read many stories of people that live in apartments that require them to use a mobile app for god damn LAUNDRY. All you need, is a card reader, and it will work perfectly fine like it has been for the longest time.
Privacy concerns aside, it is just annoying that you need this app and that app and this app and that app and it just clutters space on your phone. Security concerns too as now they have all of this additional info on you online, such as your phone number your email your real name, instead of just your credit card info like a card reader would have. And I am willing to guarantee that their security model is absolute horseshit because they have such a small team of engineers working on the app and the servers.
Literal enshitification
Magne
Smart phones ruined the internet
I’m going to proide an opposing viewpoint: apps will always have a more native feel, have better performance, have more capabilities, and have entirely different goals compared to web apps.
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You don’t need an app to do data harvesting.
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Users have very different expectations for websites and mobile apps. They look different, they feel different, they function different, and the UX is very different.
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Performance performance performance. Html/css/JavaScript/browsers/whatever are incapable of competing against 60-120fps natively written apps. That sidebar drawer navigation can NEVER feel native in a browser because swiping from the left to open it either works, but takes a second to open, or forced you to go back to the last page.
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The additional vertical real-estate cannot be understated.
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It is a lot more effort to deal with differing browser behavior on the web. Adding mobile experience into that is even more annoying. Developers work on a desktop and will forget about mobile devices at literally every possible moment.
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You have zero control and a user can leave at a moment’s notice even in the middle of critical flows. In an app, you can quick store this information away or continue it in the background. On desktop, you have zero chance to react to it since the browser will destroy-the-world the moment the user wants to go away, which leads to a ton of defensive programming, more chances for errors, and lower performance overall. Death by a thousand cuts.
I’m a developer, if you hadn’t been able to tell. I am responsible for mobile responsivity on the website and it’s a massive goddamn pain in my ass every waking hour of the day, and fixing it definitively is impossible with the actively hostile browser landscape leading to whack-a-mole bugfixing that needs to be done. I also point to my previous point of “devs forget about mobile constantly.” I’m tired. Don’t even get me started on the fixes for one browser breaking literally every other browser, leading to complete refactors of layout being necessary. This has happened more than a few times in the last year alone.
I’m actively pushing for a mobile app because we have complete end-to-end control of the experience. If something works, it just works, and it won’t be broken on a random Friday or Sunday when google or apple decides to push an update to their shitty fucking browser that breaks half of the site with less than zero notice. iOS is especially fucking terrible in this regard. Every single update to safari brings horrendously breaking changes that fuck my life up.
Playing to the higher-ups by enticing them with top-of-mind awareness and having a place on their homepage is a means to an end. I want my life to not be shitty fucking web dev. When something works, I just want it to work and not require checking against every single browser in existence dated back seven years because people don’t update.
This is a lot of nonsense. While it’s true that you can do tracking with websites, the level of exposure and kind of data that can be collected is vastly different.
Performance of a web app in this day and age is negligible. If your web app cannot run well on a device from the past five years, then your web app is awful.
The vertical real estate is a non-starter argument.
It is a lot more effort to deal with differing browser behavior on the web.
This is why web standards exist.
Developers work on a desktop and will forget about mobile devices at literally every possible moment.
This has nothing to do with coding, hardware, or anything technical. This is 100% a project management/attitude problem. Good teams deal with this properly.
You have zero control and a user can leave at a moment’s notice even in the middle of critical flows.
If you can’t deal with this gracefully then your app flow needs to be redesigned.
I’m tired
I want my life to not be shitty fucking web dev.
You need a new job. It sounds like you’re both under paid and over worked. You sound like you’ve hit burnout. You either work for some small company or even a startup that “can’t afford” more devs or you work for a larger company that has learned they can get more work out of you for paying less than a new hire that would either push back or outright quit.
When something works, I just want it to work and not require checking against every single browser in existence dated back seven years because people don’t update.
You need to invest in automation testing. Manually testing everything is just stupid. Even when developing a new feature or a bugfix, most of the work should be done by some kind of testing suite, like Selenium.
On one hand, I agree that a native app is a more integrated and seamless experience. But unfortunately that’s been ruined by all the crap out there, and it’s made even more egregious with everyone and their dog wanting an app for everything.
We don’t need apps for every little thing in my life! No, I’m not installing an app for my Bluetooth toothbrush. Get outta here with that crap.
And it’s even worse when these apps are riddled with ads when they have no right to be! I already bought the product, they advertised that it has an app. I didn’t want the app in the first place, so why am I seeing ads?
And there’s a really warm and scalding place in hell for devs that spam my notification bar with “we haven’t seen you in a while!” and “check out our sale on these things you do not care about!”.
It’s a complete violation of my trust and a complete lack of respect for their users.
So no, native apps can get lost. They have their place but for most things a web app will do just fine.
Others have pointed out things like paying for laundry machines and even paying for rent are now being forced to use an app. That’s 100% unacceptable.
It’s a similar thing with city parking. Most places where I live require an app now. And what makes it even worse is that each city and town use a completely different service! So if I want to park when I go to these places I have to have multiple apps installed JUST FOR PARKING.
Edit: btw, I’m a dev also, and I entirely disagree with most of your points
Performance of a web app in this day and age is negligible.
Hard disagree.
The vertical real estate is a non-starter argument.
Hard disagree. You lose much of the top and bottom of the screen to useless information, and different browsers do different things with them when you start scrolling which easily causes jank in some relatively common use cases.
This is why web standards exist.
Too bad it makes no difference and there are still differences in how browsers function. Just yesterday I discovered an issue in Firefox where overflow: hidden is required to get certain things sized properly in position: absolute properly even though it shouldn’t change how things are sized. iOS also often deviates from the norm.
As far as browsers are concerned, standards exist to be broken.
If you can’t deal with this gracefully then your app flow needs to be redesigned.
It currently CAN deal with it gracefully because we’ve specifically built it to be able to handle it properly. It doesn’t change that we’ve wasted many man-hours and tracked down numerous bugs for something that should not even be a problem in the first place. It also ended up significantly less readable and puts a higher barrier to understanding the codebase itself. We spend more hours putting up annoying safeguards for things that shouldn’t be a problem than we do making new features.
You need a new job. It sounds like you’re both under paid and over worked.
I’m not underpaid in any sense of the term and I’m not over worked. I just absolutely despise everything about the web dev and specifically JavaScript ecosystem, and the absolute distain towards writing anything performant at even the slightest expense of developer experience. I’m tired of the memory hog and leak prevalent garbage web apps that exist literally everywhere.
You need to invest in automation testing.
Too bad that’s not my decision. The architect is actively against automated browser testing because it runs too slowly. Even then it wouldn’t resolve the actual issue.
so why am I seeing ads
I fully agree with you on that front. If you’ve bought and paid for a product and the app is required to use kt, then the dev-required support for the app should be baked into the product rather than relying on subscriptions or ads.
They have their place but for most things a web app will do just fine.
Yes I absolutely love that I can have a total of four web apps open before my browser slows to a crawl due to excessive garbage collection for these shitty react apps that are forced to clone the universe every 2.7 nanoseconds. I adore my computer’s lack of ability to have any amount of ram available that’s not dedicated to Firefox or whatever shitty chrome reskin you decide to use. They start slow as shit due to 50MB bundles, have shitty caching, error every other day, and don’t feel at all like an actual mobile experience because desktop and mobile navigation are fundamentally different experiences which often requires supporting two separate versions of the layout anyways in order to have an “okay” experience. And even if you can miraculously ignore all of that or do some dirty JavaScript war crimes to make it less of an issue, then half the gestures you normally do either end up hard refreshing the page or forcibly send you to the last page in the browser instead of just opening the fucking navigation drawer. Don’t even get me started on electron.
Web dev is shit, chrome is trash, Firefox is barely better, and all we’ve successfully managed to do in two decades of browser and frontend framework development is centralize the web further, prevent any other browser from ever being created due to the absolutely ridiculous feature-set barrier to entry, turn browsers themselves into the kitchen sink with the entire house around it as well, and create a new shitty framework every other year that does the exact same thing with the exact same pitfalls because they still don’t fix the fundamental stain on the world that is JavaScript.
I’ll take a normal app over a web app any day of the week. I’ve never used a web app on my phone that was in any way better than the mobile counterpart. Even if they effectively look exactly the same. Not a single time had the web app been any better.
I think you’ve gotten a bit confused. He’s not saying that we should do stuff in the browser, he’s saying that a phone/computer doesn’t need to be involved at all.
A person’s music taste seems to crystalize at some point in their teenage years. The bands you loved at 15-17 are probably the bands that you’ll love forever.
Likewise, I’m finding that my relationship with information services as a whole probably crystalized a while ago, and the new era of “apps for every individual thing” is just wholly unappealing. Give me a web browser to interface with your information. If I can’t get it done with that, I’m more likely to move on to some even older tech and skip your product altogether.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m late to bingo. And get off my lawn.
Me: “seems to” “at some point” “probably” while making a minor, secondary point. Others: Severely Triggered
I dont listen to anyone I liked as I kid cause they all came out as sex traffickers and pedophiles.
now I just listen to disney music, and waiting for the inevitable horror revelations with regards to those.
I’m doing my best to constantly listen to new music every week to keep fresh and malleable in my taste
For me it depends on the mood. New stuff is fun, but stuff I know can be instantly trabsportative to moods or mental spaces and it feels good. New stuff can be too mentally engaging if I’m trying to do focus work or zone out. I think I listen to less new stuff now because I’m usually wanting to zone out with music more than actively engage with it.
Everything that’s normal between age 10-20 is just as it is.
Everything you get to know between 20 and 30 is the hot new shit.
Everything after age 30 is just another fad you don’t want to invest time to get to know anyway
I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
- Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
The bands you loved at 15-17 are probably the bands that you’ll love forever.
Thank god that wasn’t the case. Listened to some awful shit as a kid
An interesting experiment on the music thing. Top songs on your 13th birthday, at least for US/North Americans. https://www.birthdayjams.com
I don’t know if anyone growing up these days would actually like mobile app requirements if they took the time to think about why they’re required. Source: I’m one of them.
I’m finding that my relationship with information services as a whole probably crystalized a while ago
You are correct but it goes further:
Any tech that existed before you start school is completely natural and quite boring.
Any tech that is invented while you still care about new tech (this can be anywhere between 15 and 45 as it depends on the person) is exciting and cool.
Anything after that is squarely in get off my lawn territory and a bit scary and confronting.
One of the credit card companies I use has a website that won’t work properly anymore in my phone’s browser.
My wife has a card through this company as well and she uses their app with no problems.
I have zero interest in installing their app so once a month I fire up my surface pro just to pay that damn bill.
It used to work just fine in the phone browser though.
Should probably just cancel that shitty account one of these days.
The thing I really can’t understand, and a likely consequence of the ubiquity of apps, is all of the people who can’t seem to function without them.
Like when the Reddit exodus to the threadiverse happened, people started immediately crying for Lemmy apps. And it doesn’t seem to matter that much how bare-bones or unstable one might be - the important thing is that it’s an app. That’s all that seems to matter to them.
It’s as if they aren’t even aware of the fact that these are all websites, so they all work in a browser - as if to them, an app is a necessity and they can’t figure out how to accomplish anything otherwise.
Well when the mobile site is purposely a worse experience with nags and many dark patterns, I can understand that!
I find most apps provide a much better experience.
