Discussion

No, I Won't Download Your App. The Web Version is A-OK.

akshatjiwan: That's my stance as well. Unless the website is completely broken or the devs force me to download the app by blocking features on the website I prefer the web.With responsive design becoming mainstream I'm fine with using my browser for 90% of my internet work. In some cases like Google docs it's painful to use the web version so I just use the app.EDIT: I wish they'd add a console to mobile web browsers though.

mrd3v0: > Unless the website is completely broken or the devs force me to download the app by blocking featuresThat's already the norm.

empyrrhicist: If a website disrespects "request desktop site" and still tries to force you into an app... ugh.Had this happen yesterday when someone sent me a link to something on AllTrails. If the service was good and the website was usable, I might have even considered getting the app for offline features. Not anymore - screw companies that do this.

appsoftware: I don't understand it from the app developers point of view. Having to pay app store cuts over basic card processing fees. I understand the appeal of access to a market, like selling on eBay gets you eyeballs. But once you have a customer using their app, what does the app give you that a PWA doesn't unless you need access to specific sensors / file system access patterns etc?

chistev: My Google Chrome app is by far the most used app on my phone. If you catch me at a random moment on my phone, chances are I'm on Chrome.Sometimes the mobile app experience is better than the mobile browser for me, though. Examples are Twitter, Spotify, Upwork, Google Keep Notes.If I'm on my computer I don't even download the apps, I just use the browser. It just feels more convenient.I haven't thought much about why they all feel good on my laptop browser while some apps offer better experience on mobile.

8cvor6j844qw_d6: Web browser is a sandbox by default. Worst a sketchy site does is eat a tab, less if you run an adblocker. Native app? Background processes, hardware ID shenanigans, your contacts, location. The whole buffet.

happyopossum: [delayed]

jcalvinowens: It's a waste of resources too. I've seen startups waste soooooo much time and effort on simple native apps that could trivially be webviews, it's tragic.

Exuma: Literally no one cares about your opinion, holy shit I hate articles like this

710dev: Maybe you should just shut the fuck up and go away then...

jareklupinski: > the website is completely broken or the devs force me to download the app by blocking features on the websitefor me, this is signal that i wasn't supposed to be visiting that resource in the first place

WhiteOwlLion: I use Twitter/X on web because the iOS so bad.

SunshineTheCat: Turns out if you use brave on iOS it auto-blocks all the ads too.

peterspath: I have it the other way around. I want local first app. Don’t want everything in the cloud apps.Luckily there is choice :)

charles_f: I cared about the author's opinion so it's not literal, I like the article. I didn't care about your opinion though.

jedberg: While I sympathize with the author, and feel the same way, I think Apple/Google have some blame here. They make certain simple things only possible in the apps, because the APIs are not exposed via the web.Notifications is a big obvious one. Not sure if they've changed it since I last looked into it, but having an app installed was the only way to send a notification to someone for a long time.

dbvn: Somehow the one feature I need to use is the one feature broken on the website... every time.

KellyCriterion: Reg. Notifications:Isnt there are similar feature in iOS browser as in Firefox these "desktop notifications" that some webpages request?

cute_boi: We should blame Apple for creating incentives that let it take a 30% cut from apps. I don't know why governments, especially foreign governments, allow Apple app store to operate in their countries.

happytoexplain: My experience might be the minority, but I have found that 95% of the time, when an app is available on both web and native mobile, the native mobile version is significantly better - usually not because it's a fantastic app or has more features, but rather because the web version is more buggy/slow/confusing.

denysvitali: I understand the user point of view, but some web UIs nowadays are so bad and the app so good that I'm not sure this always holds true.I do agree that this seems to be exception rather than the rule - so having both is actually nice IMHO.

microflash: > some web UIs nowadays are so bad and the app so good that I'm not sure this always holds true.This is by design to force you install the app. Most of these days, I just treat it as a signal to neither use the app nor the website.

camdenreslink: Reddit comes to mind. I have so many issues with their mobile website. The back button has been broken for years, comments will frequently just hang as loading indefinitely (only fixable with a hard refresh), videos will sometimes not be replayable, sometimes if you change the zoom on the page it will just hard refresh, etc.I'm not sure if it is intentional to push you to the mobile app, but I have to imagine the mobile app doesn't have all these issues.

duped: Their mobile app sucks too. They just killed /r/all recently.

moffers: It’s a little tough these days. With AI and scraping, running an open webapp/website is now more expensive than ever before. My friends and I have launched a product in the last few months and decided to focus on mobile first and wait to develop a webapp simply because we couldn’t feel we could optimize the costs of open webapp while we have so few resources.

KellyCriterion: Before AI I regularly consumed a larger international news aggregator ran by a single person.Then with ChatGPT he had to enshittify his website with all these cloudflare capture stuff, making the site leeesssssssss fun to use; when complaining he mailed me that AI scrapers are slashing his servers

dhedberg: I take this to be mainly about cloud services that can/could just as well be used in the browser instead, and where installing the app doesn't really allow you to meaningfully use it offline anyway. It's largely orthogonal to the question of local apps vs cloud services.

karimf: This is my stance as well, but keep in mind that a lot of people have the opposite preference.They didn't grow up with the world wide web. They only started using technology when Android and iPhone was popular. They only know Whatsapp, Youtube, TikTok. They're not used to using the browser.So, it'll depend on your target audiences.

plagiarist: That's one of the main reasons to not install an app. Extremely few apps are able to limit their notifications to actually transactional events. As soon as they have the capability they start spamming away.

duped: Almost never is it useful for an app to have my contacts or location.That said only on some platforms is it possible to stop a native app from getting them.

tbolt: Agree with the article. I’m increasingly jaded by the state of the web.Something that has been happening for a long time on iOS Safari that I only recently realized: pinch to zoom on sites like Reddit, instagram, shopping sites, and many others cause what I’m calling “website seizures.” Where I try to zoom in and half the time the page reloads completely or triggers a reload but ends up throwing an error.

ArchieScrivener: Stop asking me for access to my contacts, microphone, location, or permission to send me 5 kinds of useless notifications.

raverbashing: One very egregious example: MoovitEven with mobile FF and adblock their mobile website is completely unusable. Now ask me if I'm happy to download ther app if their website is a complete POS like thatThe desktop website works "fine" for the most part though

KellyCriterion: Location can also be extracted by JS on a website with these geo functions, IIRC?

tannedNerd: Why though?If only 1% of your user base is accessing your maps through the website, you aren’t going to keep supporting it.

everdrive: And if the only option is an app, then I'm not interested in your product / store / company.

Larrikin: If the app can be replaced by a website the app is useless. The web is not as powerful as an app and you will miss out on emerging tech. Facebook doesn't actually need an app, but I can not unlock my door, tap to pay, or connect to a specific selection of speakers in my home on a website.

ryandrake: If it's really "by design" then you are saying they have a staff of web developers who are told, "No, no, no... all that quality work you're capable of--don't do it. Here are some JIRA tickets to make the web site shitty and slow and eat the user's battery. Go implement them and make everything worse!"What kind of sad, self-loathing software developer sits down and says "OK boss, whatever you say, boss, gonna go make it bad now..." I mean, I know to a lot of people, it's just a 9-5 and you do what your boss says, and "pride in your work" is not really a thing anymore, but come on. Who gets even a shred of satisfaction doing this?I think a better explanation is just incompetence.

mghackerlady: It's usually done in such small portions the developers don't know exactly what they're doing. That, or they've become so numb to it to not really care

cush: It depends. The parking app example is an example of an app I want, for so many reasons

owenpalmer: Alternatively, they could just make the web UI good.

happytoexplain: This isn't an alternative for the user (the person you're replying to).

denysvitali: I can't think of a web app that really feels like a (good) native one. For example, I would never use Google Calendar as a web app / Google Maps as a web app as they're far inferior IMHO

mghackerlady: you can launch it from a comment linking to r/All (with a as upper case) iirc. How long that'll still be available, I have no clue, but I like to imagine the devs who work on reddit realise how braindead of a decision removing it is but have to please the shareholders by removing any obvious access of it

sergiotapia: Mostly I am quite tired of the 30 step onboarding funnel all apps have. I was trying out a fitness app and the second I opened it, I was about step 9 into it and I just deleted the app.

amelius: Can't we run Android inside a browser these days?WASM should be able to handle it now, I suppose.

beardyw: There is also the lack of support for bookmarks. I value the ability to reach a part I am interested in quickly.When Chrome started supporting PWAs you couldn't bookmark the content at all. They seem to have fixed that now.

KellyCriterion: What most people dont get:Most of folks on HN here are much older than todays "first customers" of 16y/17/18For them: The "Smartphone is the internet", while for most of us the "Smartphone is an extension of the internet from our desktops" that we were used to (remember the years before dot com bubble, saying: "I will be down in the basement at the computer to surf on the net little bit" ? :-)But today, the very first touchpoint with "the internet" for younger folks is a smartphone display. The even do homework on this small screens!Companies are seeing this switch, so they adapt.Personally, a service which is "only an app" will be not used by me as I prefer to have a larger screen with more information (actually I use my mobile phone only when Im in public transport or similar, at home I have a notebook laying around if I need something)

SunshineTheCat: This hit the nail on the head.I find much of the HN community insightful and interesting, but in terms of consumer feedback (especially in a B2C environment) I wouldn't touch feedback here with a 10-foot pole.I don't mean that to be an insult, quite the opposite. Most people here are power users. But that is a galaxy away from how the average user interacts with the internet.

KellyCriterion: you mean like in a way of "defending" the user from using the website and just go right away to the app?:)

denysvitali: Not really, more like "just pick whatever works, both usually suck"

amusingimpala75: How much of the native app push is to bypass ad blockers? If you’re just using a browser plugin like AdGuard or uBO it can’t block in a dedicated app unless you replace it with AGH or PiHole, can’t help but wonder if that plays a role as well

everdrive: 100% of the emerging tech you listed either allows for a hacking / warrant / data leakage risk or is else so decadent I don't know how to respond. I don't want any of it.

Larrikin: Then all your interactions on the computer in your pocket that is more powerful than the computers that took us to the moon are just a bunch of JSON and REST calls. I will locally map out my home in 3D for renovations while you let social media dictate how you use your computer.

karimf: This. I posted this on my other comment, but there's a meme that "Gen Z Kids Don't Understand How File Systems Work" [0].There seems to be a disconnect between some developers and the younger folks.[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30253526

Imustaskforhelp: (17 yo here), I think that I am eternally grateful to my cousins who convinced my parents to give me a desktop computer which is still working right now (it had a minor hiccup in the processor recently but it works), before that, I was having a 1 gb crt monitor win7 on which I somehow ran Vscode smoothly.I am very frugal (to save money on webcam, in online classes, I had droidcam /wo-mic setup with one of my phones) but spending money on a decent personal computer is genuinely one of the best investments personally.One thing my cousins did which I am sorta grateful in retrospect is they didn't buy me a gpu so my computer was really nice/smooth in everything but gaming, I still ran some games like portal series , inscryption and many other games like valorant and it was playing valorant when I started realizing its chinese company roots and kernel level access meaning that there was no proper way to guarantee to have piece of mind unless I reinstall itSo I felt like if I was reinstalling, I was watching some the linux experiments video anyway and was fascinated by linux, so I just decided to choose myself to use nobara-linux for the first time which was another one of the best decisions that I made as it opened me up to the terminal.

mghackerlady: I can say for certain this is true. People my age look at me like I have 3 heads if I ask them to do anything more complex than open a web browser

quaintdev: I'm in India, people give me same looks when I ask them to open browser.Internet to my parents and other old folks is YouTube and WhatsApp

mghackerlady: There's a reason the "small web" is having a revival among these kids, because they increasingly haven't experienced a real web to begin with. Circa ~2010, the web effectively died in the mainstream since Google decided it wasn't worth showing. Platforms become a thing, and despite being web-based, are practically their own intranets that use the web as a cross platform zero install delivery platform

Waterluvian: I saw a television advert the other day that specifically called out Millennials and how, yes, you can book a vacation from your phone and you're going to be okay, dad.I think, "I'm not downloading your app" is of course a perfectly fine perspective. I rarely do. And blogging about it is playing one's role in the techno-cultural tug-of-war. But I'm consciously aware that I'm in the dying minority and the world is changing regardless of how much I choose to yell at the clouds.

KellyCriterion: Sure, I can book on the smartphone!But its super uncomfortable! :-)And: Typing - I learnt in school to type perfectly with 10 fingers, on a smartphone only using my thumb is just too slow

bartilg: Even on mobile I find the requirement for app installation to be an irritating requirement. Many of these mobile apps are much larger than they need to be, and clutter the user experience. Throw in excessive push notifications, and in many cases I would like to just go to a website for services I use infrequently.

rickdg: For years, Apple has muffled PWAs under a pillow. No one knows that you can add them to your homescreen or how that unlocks the possibility of getting push notifications. You also lose any stored data when you go from Safari to an homescreen web app.

bombcar: How do you add them? I am using https://actualbudget.org as a Safari page, and it works surprisingly well when "off network" - but a button on the home screen would be nicer.

pitbred: We're all here debating the friction of downloading apps versus the convenience of the mobile web, but we might be missing the bigger picture. Both are UI-heavy paradigms designed for humans to click things. In a few years, we won't care if a service has a slick React app or a native iOS build. We’ll just tell our AI agents: 'Book that flight' or 'Fix my billing issue,' and they’ll talk to the APIs directly. The era of 'interfaces for humans' is peaking; the era of 'headless services for agents' is just beginning. Interfaces are becoming a legacy tax.

nkrisc: > But today, the very first touchpoint with "the internet" for younger folks is a smartphone display. The even do homework on this small screens!I saw a tweet recently that perfectly encapsulates this: for most people over 30, certain things are "big screen tasks". I use my phone for a lot, but for some things I put the phone down and use my computer instead. I am most comfortable using a large screen and a keyboard for anything that requires writing more than a few words or using any interface for more than a few clicks.For example, I read your comment on my phone and went to my computer to type this reply.I personally find the idea of doing homework on my phone horrifying but I suppose kids today are either used to it and comfortable with it, or they've simply never used a computer and don't know what they're missing. Though I'd wager they probably aren't comfortable typing on a keyboard.Honestly I think Apple perfectly captured it with their "what's a computer?" ad for the iPad. I seem to remember them getting some flak online for it but I think they were right on the money with regards to the younger generations.

btilly: That's not new.I read a UI book in the early 2000s that cited research showing that most users didn't understand filesystems. They would seem to, but then the idea that the same filename in two places was two unrelated files would just lead to a mental block. Those who got it, didn't find it hard. It's just that some people can't get it.The disconnect is not between some developers, and the younger folks. It is between some developers, and most of the world.

ragnese: I'm especially angry that if you go to reddit.com in a mobile browser, it will sometimes fully block you from certain subreddits (not just NSFW ones) and tell you that you can only access it from the app. Meanwhile, you can easily visit the exact same subreddit by typing old.reddit.com/r/whatever. The outright lying bothers me so much. I refuse to be desensitized to lying just because everyone is lying all the time; it's still really wrong, and they really should be ashamed of themselves.

duped: I think they took the wrong signal from the people avoiding the default feed since it's filled with days-old posts you've already seen from subs you haven't joined.

1970-01-01: My analog is something along the lines of "please build a small room in your house, closet-sized at first, but with enough room to grow to twice that as we add features, so we can give you the best possible temperature and weather information. Also, we need access to your full contacts so you can share how you feel about the weather more easily, with just a push! Also also, we need a hot microphone in your closet, so you can shop our umbrella store by just talking to our AI assistant! Also also also, your privacy is important to us."It only needs to be "an app" if it is using hardware to do it's main job. There is never another reason to make it an app.

IshKebab: I've found that the apps often just entirely miss out features that are available in the web versions. That's why I don't have the GitHub app.

nkrisc: I think a lot more people than most HN readers realize simply struggle significantly with abstract thinking and reasoning.It's natural that people who enjoy programming and hacking and related fields are very comfortable with such abstract types of thought. But I really think that isn't all that common amongst most people. I think the average person has to learn such thinking abilities with difficulty (though they can). I'm sure many people here got into programming precisely because abstract thinking came easily to them.> the idea that the same filename in two places was two unrelated files would just lead to a mental block.Which is actually why the "files and folders" metaphor is apt. In a filing cabinet in a school office (once upon a time) there were likely hundreds of documents labeled "Report Card" in many different folders, each labeled with a different name.

Sophira: > Which is actually why the "files and folders" metaphor is apt.It's a starting point, but I certainly wouldn't say it's the best metaphor that there could be. The idea of subfolders just doesn't make sense in a filing cabinet analogy, because you have to consider paper size - any folder which could fit into another folder is not going to be able to contain your regularly sized documents.That said, I can't think of a better metaphor.

prosaic-hacker: I will cast my vote for mobile websites over apps on phones. For personal choice reasons I have always had a "budget" phone with less memory and storage (and less cost) than a flagship phone. I also kept them running for years.At the end of the cycle I can barely run the base phone let alone the menagerie of apps the world would like me to run.I have opted out of app only service such as a Loyalty programs that forced me to transfer point from a partner only if I installed an app on my phone. They have enough info on me from purchase, they don't need more. (I even offer my card to strangers in the grocery cash if they did not have the loyalty card so they would get a discount and I would get a list of products I never buy in my loyalty list. Its a small, willful act of rebellion )

troupo: > I will cast my vote for mobile websites over apps on phones. For personal choice reasons I have always had a "budget" phone with less memory and storage (and less cost) than a flagship phone. I also kept them running for years.Then, unfortunately, apps are a better choice for such phones (unless the app itself is just a thin webview wrapper). These days too many websites would fry a budget phone.

pcorsaro: I've been running a video game collection site for years. The number one request I get from people is to build an app. I've worked so hard on making the mobile version of the site to be just as functional as the desktop version, and I don't really understand why people want an app over just using the web version. I sometimes wonder if I should just do it to see if I'm missing out on market share, but I don't really want to have to maintain two different user interfaces.

KellyCriterion: > I'm sure many people here got into programming precisely because abstract thinking came easily to them.Counter here: When I wanted to switch from TurboPascal during school (14y/15y) to C++ (because it was "more cool" and that was the tool that the 'big boy' game-dev-pros were, we thought), it was so damn hard for me - really! I was struggling so massivly, I head massive problems with this pointer stuff - it took me years to fully understand it.And I was hell-bad at math in school (or maybe just too lazy), the only thing to which I a relation was all this geometric stuff (because this was needed for .. game dev! :-D )

ape4: Can the "app" just load the mobile website. Then everyone is happy?

Imustaskforhelp: > Most of folks on HN here are much older than todays "first customers" of 16y/17/1817yo here, I know that I might be a bit of an exception here but atleast within my privacy conscious friend circle, I feel like they prefer websites more than apps and I feel like that plays an impact, (Obviously this might make a difference as well that for some of my generation, they only use phone so phone applications feel more intuitive to them)I used to say to my elder brother that I wish to make websites not apps if I do because websites are more portable etc., but he said that websites are hard to monetize etc. rather than apps which are easier to monetize. I think that one of the reasons is also that app are easily monetized and this has become a norm to many people outside of HN/privacy-conscious sphere in general.I really wanted to make f-droid applications sometime ago but I don't know Java and I really love how easy it is to make an applicaation in golang/python/any lang in desktops usually but I tried making an tauri android rust application from my desktop Linux and it was really frustrating, I feel like there are some very low hanging fruits privacy win where open source tools can be converted into just bare minimum-ly good UI/UX android/ios apps (which works) and be published to something like f-droid.

KellyCriterion: > I feel like they prefer websites more than appsThe fact that you are here on HN tells me: You and your friends are tech savy, most in your age are not :-)Edit: Regarding monetization -> yes, either carrier billing (if available) or just by iTunes account is much much easier and higher conversion, just becaues of the fact that people do not have to remember their payment details :-D

Imustaskforhelp: I mentioned privacy savvy friends because most of my friends aren't privacy savvy :DI can only count two (one offline, my former classmate/friend who we studied together for 11 years from KG to 10th grande) and some other peopleI have convinced my same offline friend I mentioned to use Linux, specifically hyprland so its a win :D> most in your age are not :-)So I agree in that sense. To be honest. I am saying out of all my friend/peer/former classmate circle, only 1-2 people are some that I consider to be privacy conscious.

bryankaplan: Did they also struggle to understand that some people have the same name yet are not the same person?

technojamin: I think that's perfectly understandable. File systems require the user to remember a hierarchy in their head (even if there are tools like breadcrumbs to help you out), and many people aren't willing or aren't able to hold an arbitrarily complex structure like that in their head. A name is a flat piece of information, no extra structure to imagine.

mysterydip: I worked with a professor one time that used floppies for all his files (after they had been surpassed by thumbdrives) because each floppy was essentially a single folder, and he could wrap his head around that conceptually.

libria: Not without my knowledge or your knowledge sure. But I'd bet there's significant percentage of the population who is tired of thinking about permission popups and just hit yes yes YES to get the App started. Especially if it forces retries before going forward.I think they're counting on these popups wearing people out.After GDPR made these incessant annoying cookie popups mandatory, I just robotically click any button to dismiss it as fast as possible. Some website could probably write "Give root access" in that box and I'd probably click it without thinking.

fuzzy2: No. There is a disconnect between domain insiders and those that are not. This is not specific to any one domain. It's also not about age.Some insiders know about this disconnect and fewer still can bridge it easily.Those that cannot even sense this disconnect, they're a bit of a pain in certain situations. You know, like talking to project stakeholders or customers.

agdexai: The restaurant QR menu situation is peak 'we installed an app for the app' energy. I scanned a code expecting a menu and instead got a Play Store redirect. Just let me see the food.The worst offenders are services that literally work fine in mobile Safari but pop a banner saying 'for the best experience download our app' covering half the screen. The web version is already the app, you just painted a door on the wall.

sloum: Nah: https://www.magicbell.com/blog/using-push-notifications-in-p...

AstroBen: Do you really think developers are going through the hellish pain of dealing with Google and Apple for no reason? Real world users prefer and expect apps as opposed to web versions for many product categories.

ragnese: One of the most enraging things about life since 2005-ish is that no matter how private and careful I am, it doesn't even matter because every other inconsiderate fool I know and interact with will HAPPILY let some random company have access to THEIR contacts--which includes me--in order to play Farmville for a month until they get bored of that and offer up my private information to the next bullshit ad company that asks for their contacts.It used to frustrate me that people didn't care about their own privacy, because I genuinely didn't want evil people to hurt them. But, it's even more angering that people don't have the common decency to consider whether their friends and family would want them sharing their phone numbers, email addresses, photos of them, etc.

RajT88: Famously, that's how shadow profiles got created for Facebook and LinkedIn and many others.

Zak: Phones are perfectly capable of accessing websites. I think a lot of the shift here has to do with companies aggressively pushing apps because apps are more profitable, which in turn trains users to expect apps.

KellyCriterion: Sorry, there are by faaaar not as much useable mobile websites than crappy mobile websites - most mobile websites are not really optimized, more like "just let us deploy some custome mobile CSS and people will use it" style

mint5: Wrong. While I agree about younger people’s impression and experience with apps and the internet, that is not what companies are responding to - in fact it’s backward.Companies have for ages pushed apps due to more control and data. That’s why younger folk grew up with apps.The push to apps was absolutely not due to companies responding to consumer sentiment. Yes now it has been ingrained so now there are expectations, but those are due to companies pushing people to apps for years and years

RajT88: > Unless the website is completely broken or the devs force me to download the app by blocking features on the website I prefer the web.Facebook seems to be in this game. Constant notifications to install the app, and as well increasingly degraded experience in the web version (both desktop and mobile).

sloum: You could add features to make it a PWA and explain to users how to save it t their desktop. I used ProtonMail for years that way (I do not have a smartphone anymore, so no longer do so).

63stack: Yes you will download the app because we will not offer a web version.

bigstrat2003: No, in that case I won't do business with you.

63stack: Unfortunately you won't be able to submit any expenses then, because the company uses this other company who only offers an app for accounting.

maccard: But most of the time it’s really, really not.

ranit: > What most people dont get ...The OP Blog post is comparing web versions vs applications. Both on the phone. And arguing that browser representation is often better than app functionality. Using desktop vs small screen phone is a different matter.

mixtureoftakes: reddit browser behavior got me into using frontends for various sites, such as redlib dot privacyredirect dot comthere are surprisingly many of them for pretty much every social media website.

jillesvangurp: As a developer, I resent having to go beg for permission for getting my app published. It just rubs me the wrong way to have to play approval roulette with some bored jerk working for Apple or Google. I've had both reject things that were previously alright, then weren't, and then were again.I default to building web applications. Actually getting people to install your special app is in any case a race to the bottom. Some will, most won't. It's onboarding friction. If you can shave a few steps of your onboarding process, the chance that somebody comes out the other end is simply higher.As a user, I rarely install apps to begin with and frankly the appeal of "native" is limited to well guarded APIs into jealously magical device capabilities that phones have that most applications don't actually need. I know how the sausage is made and there just isn't that much there.

ChadNauseam: Same. My app is a PWA. Most users won’t install a PWA and won’t repeatedly navigate to a website so it limits the reach. But the advantage is that I can deploy instantly. I love when someone sends a bug report and I can tell them it’s fixed ten minutes later. Pretty great, compared to “it’ll be fixed in there business days” you get with the iOS app store

dariosalvi78: not even the older generations. My parents save files on the Whatsapp chat, and my father is one who bought the first IBM PC when it came out, so someone who has touched these things for decades (tho very superficially).I think that the software industry, especially operating systems, have completely failed to provide a balanced product between the overly bloated and messed up (Windows), the overly complicated (Linux) and the overly simplified (Android/iOS).Maybe some Linux distros are now at the right spot, I was positively surprised by PopOS to give an example, but it's too late. With AI this is only going to get worse.

neutronicus: > My parents save files on the Whatsapp chatThat's becoming dangerously true of my wife and I as well, to be honest.The friction is just so much lower than Google Drive or whatever. As long as I handle it right away. It's just finding something from more than an hour ago that's intolerable.

KellyCriterion: I met a business partner who is doing some work for SME retail investors last week for lunch:He showed me his WhatsApp: People are sending _ALL_ type of critical documents by WhatsApp to him. Everything. (and bank statements are among the class of "less critical" documents in his case)My theory here is: "If you have any function in your product, people will use it for anything appropriate to them in a given minute"

sdfjkhdfjkdhs: I witnessed a cop attempting to manipulate some files I provided to him on a thumb drive. It was a slow laborious process of dragging files one at a time from the Windows image viewer to shared folder. I would have liked to just do a Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, but that was way above his level of thinking and he didn't seem like the type who wanted an education. So I just sat there through the long, painful process--and then at the end he completely screwed up the report. Idiot.

moring: By that logic, operating system developers struggle to understand that putting two files with the same name into the same folder(1) is very much possible in the physical world.(1) or referencing them from the same directory, which was the earlier metaphor.

dingaling: I can't blame them. We've been force-upgraded to Windows 11 at work and that OS and its apps do their upmost to obscure where files are located.I've frequently saved on OneDrive instead of locally, by accident, and then been perplexed when I try to reopen the file later.And I've been using filesystems for 35+ years, so I feel sympathy for those who don't understand the abstraction.

ghaff: I was somewhat shocked a while back when a coworker told me that they offered their kid a laptop for school work and the kid apparently said : Thanks but I’ll stick with my phone.

sdfjkhdfjkdhs: > Most people here are power users.As an actual power user, I take exception to this comment.Most people here are NOT power users. I've lost count of how many arguments I've seen for example where someone Just Can't Believe anyone would have a good reason to have more than 5-10 browser tabs open at a time. Meanwhile I've got a list of thousands and growing.Or look at the dogged adherence to Windows even to this day after decades of Microsoft abuse, and long spiels about the difficulty and complexity of the Linux command line. Especially when it comes to systemd for example, where one of the most common complaints against sysv is "eww, shell scripts? yuck!"I don't call these people power users, or recognize them as peers in the realm of technology. The difference between them and me is like the difference between them and the commoner who knows nothing at all about tech.Maybe we need a geek ranking system or something.

sumtechguy: Honest question do you really use all of those tabs? As a small handful of tabs user I use the bookmark feature to hold things I want to keep for later. ctrl-d and it is in the list. Even then 99% of the time I open it again and go 'why did I keep this'. I get it that it is your workflow. Just sort of curious why you would consider that a 'power user' thing? Would not saving them to the bookmark list be more of 'power user' sort of thing to do?

sdfjkhdfjkdhs: The whole bookmark/tab system really needs to be completely revised. I have a new system I'm thinking about for my Chromium fork which will be radically different. More like a full-page "new tab" screen where everything can be visualized and sorted into different projects etc.Just look at how most people do a search, for instance. These days for me it often involves 20-30 tabs, or even more, due to the horrific state of internet search. Many results have to be explored, many links from those results also explored, more searches done to narrow in on the precise keyword needed to bring up some hopefully good results, etc. And I can't close all that until the answer is found, as I may need to backtrack, so they just pile up.Compare with the typical person who just does one search with some suboptimal keywords then clicks on the first link, or starts dutifully absorbing the AI-generated garbage. Orders of magnitude difference.I have dozens of projects I'm actively working on just for my Linux distro. Dozens of tabs open for things like X11 window management, for instance, or some info on C++ modules for another project. Lots of tabs open for a hardware project. All kinds of balls are up in the air here. Why put any of this stuff in bookmarks, which is a waste of time and energy to manage, when I can just leave it in the tab list, organized in multiple windows spread across different desktops? (I have 64 desktops on my 55" plasma display.)(lol @ the other guy's reply. That didn't age well.)

SoftTalker: I've never explored 20-30 search results. Not since Google anyway. If I don' find what I want in the first few I rephrase the search or try a different search engine.

carlosjobim: A better metaphor would be trees and branches. Which is already somewhat used for computing.

saltcured: People understand hierarchy. That named file is in a folder in a particular drawer of a particular cabinet in a particular room of a particular building in a particular neighborhood in a...What some people struggle with is recursive hierarchy where each step doesn't change the kind of container. I guess they never saw a Matryoshka doll when they were little.