Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

Yeah, it can be, but who'd take care of distribution and making money?

The terrible thing is that everything is moving to apps so that the developers can get more access to the user's fingerprint and get more data. Get access to photos, location ect. All webpages that suddenly have an app, which in my experience ends up having less functionality than the website, are quite simply there to get data, and be able to push notifications. They are parasitic. I miss the days when an app was the better offering but it isn't anymore.

And then there’s websites that should be apps

Fantastic work! It's always nice to see the method, in case anything is out there making this stuff easier. But the result is the real prize. There's way too much nonsense out there that is an app when it should be a webpage. I'm so tired of all of these apps.

One criticism, though: I wish you would have made a simple form-based alternative to the app's population mechanism, rather than just make the one-off consumer for yourself(/those you shared with). Definitely way more work and not something you should have to do. But that would have been a cherry on top. Not only prevent needing the app for viewing, but also removing future incentive for an organization turning to an app like that in the first place.

Your app could have been a webpage with a cookie banner

does not load for me

> something that could have been a (smaller, faster, more universally-accessible)

Full circle.

I remember when people were complaining that native was smaller, faster, and had richer accessibility integration.

Why they would have password in the URL?!

Unless the app is better than Chrome or Safari, make it a website. The world is a difficult place because of dolts that think others are as dumb as they are. People are okay to use a browser. Nobody wants your stupid app.

> With only a couple of minutes experimentation I discovered that the app works by concatenating the username and password5 and using it in a URL of the form:

yikes

One of the most annoying things about hacker news is these random hills it dies on. people like apps, they prefer the experiences they provide. not everyone wants to use vim to interact with the internet

Preach!

> Either a 43MB app (ballooning to 124MB when it’s finished downloading extra content) with tracking and advertisements… or a 0.05MB web page (with an optional extra 35MB of images)

That ought to work better for people who don't have fancy phones and data plans. I've heard they exist somewhere.

"I did not like the app and their service, so I am breaking the law because I am so smart"

Amazing. Love the dedication to fix this minor annoyance, which I also share. Would be great if there was a kind of universal tool for this, as I am sure many of those shitty apps share the same internals.

The reason people want an 'App' instead of a website is purely marketing related. Apps are sexy and native, and have better distribution. Websites are old, crappy things where you can't always control exactly what the user is going to see very well, and sharing a slick URL isn't always easy.

Love this

YES!!! I fucking hate all these stupid web-pages-as-Apps

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The question is: Why would anybody prefer a web-app over a native app in any kind of system or on any kind of device?

I think the answer is "only when there is no native app for the system I use", ie Linux.

So FOSS people want for apps to become much worse for everybody else, so that they can have the apps also through a web browser. Remembering that everybody else is who pays for the apps and all development, while FOSS people will never pay a dime to software developers.