alt Hacker News“It works better in the app”
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In Google's defense, they weren't the ones that championed the "everything must be an app" movement. My memory of the 2010s is that Google (and while they were relevant, Palm) pushed cross-platform web apps, but Apple ran a successful marketing campaign to convince everyone that everything on mobile must be a native app for reasons[1]. So we end up with a walled garden of native apps that must be approved by and pay a tax to the company that makes the OS.
The result is that instead of building one app that works on all platforms, software companies need to build three apps: Web, iOS, and Android. I'm sympathetic to why most software companies (including my own) choose to just build a web app wrapped in a native wrapper. If a company does decide to build a totally separate iOS app, I dunno, it seems reasonable not to build support for every single niche feature that the web app has. I'm not sure I get the outrage here, especially since Google has a long track record of preferring web apps to native.
[1]The "reasons" primarily are that Apple refused to support PWAs, hamstrung mobile Safari, and refused to allow third-party browsers. So while it's true that native apps can offer a better experience than mobile web apps, that's mostly just because Apple artificially restricts web apps.
"Never let an abuser take you to a secondary location": It's OK to offer an app, but if a site is pushing, pressuring or forcing you to get one, it's almost certainly because they want to do something abusive that they currently can't.
Installing an app is a matter of trust; trying to push me to install one against my will is the best way to demonstrate that you should not be trusted.
(Interestingly, I've heard a stance from technically well-informed iPhone users that don't see an app install as a large trust decision, because they assume that iOS is actually decent at protecting their privacy and rights in general. I don't know if that's true; on Android it certainly isn't.)
I recently had a perfect storm of non-friendly technology.
I made one purchase on Amazon while connected to a VPN.
Amazon froze my account and demanded proof of identity.
Amazon don't accept an existing photo of primary ID for their preferred ID verification check, it must be a photo taken by a camera on-device, and I don't have a webcam on my desktop PC. Once you select the secondary method, it seems you can't go back to the primary.
My bank can't issue a statement on the mobile app.
My bank, even through the website, can't issue a statement that has the required details (name, credit card details - blanked except for last four digits, and transactions) that includes pending transactions.
I had to manually request a statement from my bank (via a phone call) that included the pending transaction, edit it in an image editing app, submit it to Amazon via their web-site.
None of the apps (bank, Amazon, government ID, camera) had the flexibility to solve the problem.
The root cause was using a VPN to make an online purchase of a $12 piece of hobby electronics.
Not only are apps broken, the current state of the internet (and the random ways companies try to enforce "security") is also broken.
I noticed a long time ago that Google apps are designed by people who never actually use them. Here's one example. I'm a big fan of reading, and it happened that I stack dozens and dozens of books on my GDrive, so naturally I use mobile Google Drive to download and send those books to the reader app on my iDevices. Finished books are renamed to have an exclamation mark at the beginning of the file name - that puts those books at the start of the list, so it is easier to visually tell apart once I've read them and have not. Obviously, the unstarted books fell off the bottom of the list. And here's the crazy thing - Google has put a big-ass plus button and a "scan document" button right in the bottom-right corner of the app screen, which effectively prevents me from opening the file menu for the last 2 books in the list. Very nice!
This is a constant argument i have with by business partner. He's always asking me "when are we making an app for our <SaaS>" and I always reply back: "We already have an app! It's just a PWA"
PWA's are freaking awesome for both users and developers. Users don't have to install a massive app and me as a developer can focus on making one platform better rather than 3.
And they are pretty freaking powerful in what you can do. Not to toot my own horn too much but I created an "app"[1] for viewing cities on the other side of the earth from where you're standing. It's got camera, gyro and GPS to determine what you're looking at to the folks I've shown it too, anyone non-technical has been completely fooled and thought it was a proper app.
As a user, I don't want to install an app if I can do it on the web. Most "apps" these days are just web sites wrapped in an app. What's more, they're usually 100% dependent on REST APIs so there's little advantage to having the app anyway.
As a developer and (web) app vendor, I understand that many users still want apps. I just had a user ask when we'd be releasing our app for iOS. I explained that we did have an app and that it would be identical to what we'd release for iOS. Then I explained the maze of submenus she'd have to click through to get the icon on her home screen.
Apple and Google hate the open web so they make it excessively difficult to "install" PWAs and then in some cases, they're less functional than the website itself. More blame lies at the feet of Apple and Google than on web-first vendors who release sub-optimal apps as a delivery workaround.
We're not releasing apps yet precisely because I want us to be focusing on features. Having to target two additional platforms increases the surface area for testing and takes time away from developing features with the potential cost of releasing a "sub-optimal" app.
What’s even worse is intentionally degrading performance for sign-in’s. This is still circumstantial but I’ve been looking into that over the past few weeks.
When switching between google accounts on a random app or game, no issue. Quick code, you’re in. When I switch between accounts on Claude on mobile, I have to sign in, enter the code, screen freezes, I sign in again, can’t verify it’s me, I sign again, wait 30 seconds, I’m in.
I have to sign in three separate times when signing into a single google account in Claude. For every single other app it’s very quick.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Anthropic and google are working together to degrade sign-in performance for multi-account users. I can’t fully prove it yet but I plan to be able to in the week or two.
The author said it perself, "the greatest minds of our generation" working at Google, so those jagged edges are surely by design, and it's the rational most efficient solution in a economy of attention where the line between the product and the user is blurred.
I recently decided to use my google calendar to track my mood, as part of my CBT therapy.
What baffles me is that, there's no way in the web app to assign a default calendar for new events. When I create a new event on the web, I have to scroll through all the calendars that I have and choose the one that I want every time. Meanwhile, in the mobile app, I can simply tap on a new block, the event window appears, and the selected calendar defaults to what I used for my last added event.
Gmail mobile app doesn't let me search in the "trash" or "spam" folder.
Opening Gmail in mobile browser does not work too.
I have to open it in the browser - then "request mobile website" - then try to search there - aaaahnd it still reset to the mobile version ever other request.
Unfortunately it's the norm in large companies to never polish anything. Google has gotten worse and worse at this. But Microsoft is king. They bring a team together to build a new thing and then as soon as they can check that feature box on their sales deck they move that team off onto something else. Loop is a good example of this. Microsoft started building a Notion competitor and then just stopped. The Loop component model got pulled into Copilot and integrated everywhere. But you still cannot move a document between workspaces - one of the most basic pieces of user functionality ever.
I also look at Application Insights / Azure Monitor w/ their OTel SDK, Teams, SharePoint, Visio, <insert MS product here>. Basic functionality is missing and requests are left open for years or decades. Nothing is ever polished. Nothing is ever finished. Everything is good-enough.
I don't mind apps, even apps that are basically just browsers showing a web site. The biggest reason is that apps, at least on iOS, just behaves better. It might be that the auth persists longer or that there are notifications or whatever.
It's not without issues obviously. Most of the time the first thing I have to do is update the damn app just to order a burger or park my car or whatever it is I'm using it for. And it's dumb that we need to have a 150 meg download (per update...) for what's basically a bookmark.
But still, the better integration with my phone's native stuff like keychain etc usually means I'm more satisfied after using an app to do something, than using the _exact same web page_ in my mobile browser.
It's almost impossible to use social networks on mobile without installing their apps
My UK based bank ringfences some processes behind the app, and some behind the website. Setting up an automatic direct debit? Browser. Want to approve a one off payment? App. Absolute nonsense.
I've had an issue where, when clicking a "locations" link on a web site, Google Maps "permanently" added a bunch of locations to my map. This was quite unexpected on my part.
(I think it was for a chain or churches or a similar civic organization)
IE, I think someone made a group of locations in Google Maps, and then for the "Locations" link on their website, just linked to the group of locations in Google Maps. In the browser, this works fine, but on mobile, Google Maps just imports the link to my account without asking.
I don't like paying $1K for a phone. My current one was CAD$140 at Costco three years ago. It has 32GB of built-in storage which is always 90% full regardless how diligent I am at moving stuff to the SD card, and it has 3GB RAM which was fine three years ago, but is now insufficient to run certain apps at all. Without anything else (that you have control over!) running, start the app, immediately killed due to out of memory. These are apps which were snappy and reliable a few (forced) updates ago. No new features, maybe some UI restyle, but now too bloated to use.
Time to upgrade to the latest cheapy? Well, thanks AI boom, there aren't really any cheapies any more. And even $600+ phones now come with... drum roll... 5GB of RAM. OK, which maybe covers me for another two years of bloat until I'm right back where I started.
Yes, it's possible to stay ahead of the bloat if you pay $1.5K+ for your phone and upgrade somewhat regularly. A colleague has hundreds of apps on his phone and they all work.
Me, I use a desktop browser. Except for certain things that are only available as an app. The xda-developers types say no problem, just unlock and root the d*mn thing and then you can run debloating tools and if you jump through all the right hoops the banking app will still work. Bleech.
Then you have other sites/companies that go the opposite way: having functionality that is App-only. As an extreme example: my health insurance provider in Spain (Alan) is app-only. They don’t even have a website one can use. It is maddening for those of us who always prefer desktop over mobile.
So I love good old fashioned desktop-oriented websites, and the most complex thing I do on my phone is Google Maps... but I also recognize this is not true of the general population.
Almost no one else except the PC gamers I know really like using desktop (or laptop) computers. Most people love being able to sit on the couch and use apps on their phone. Its not like massive portions of the population were loving their desktops until smartphones arrived and they transitioned, no - smartphones are what helped the internet revolution really inseminate into the general population.
The anecdote in the article is at odds with the title.
* In the anecdote, the problem is that the web version works better and the app is missing functionality.
* The title pays reference to an annoying observation about many products where the web version lacks functionality the app has.
Both are frustrating. If a company is going to bother to have both an app and a website, users deserve an experience where both are fully featured. It should be an professional embarrassment for a company to have to route users from the app to the site or vice versa because one is half-baked.
Have some God-damned professional pride and do it right.
I use LineageOS with MicroG and decided probably 5 years ago to just use PWAs instead of apps for any online service and grab whatever other utilities I might need from Obtanium or F-Droid. Also the experience on my Thinkphone is the exact same as it was on my Pixel XL 2.
I know not everyone can do this, and some PWAs are downright terrible if they work at all, but for my usecase it has been great.
IDK to me this is the opposite of the usual problem, which is that some features are only available in the app. I will happily use the desktop browser.
To me the most common issue for apps is that they don't have tabs. Damn we solved this issue in IE7 and I'm still limited to "one window" on my supercomputer-level pocket PC. Inconceivable. I'll keep using the app in the browser.
The most painful part of this is that, at a certain point in mobile app development, many of them switched to using web frameworks instead of native. We're literally figuratively building web apps to replace native apps that replaced web apps, and hoping to performance optimize them back into near-native.
The thing is that mobile browsers fill fight you tooth and nail against providing a good experience to your users. There is the obvious stuff like lots of API not being available, but the bigger issue to me is how many common convenient UI patterns that users accustomed to native apps expect are really painful if not impossible to provide, e.g. there is no reliable way to react to the keyboard opening, or how scrolling will expand and shrink the browser UI. CSS Houdini being abandoned also makes it really hard to properly do really custom UI. I really wish there was platform with the distribution and security model of the web that was designed for apps from the ground up.
I listen to Radio 4 quite a bit and occasionally want to check the schedule (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/schedules/bbc_radio_fourfm)
On mobile, Googling 'radio 4 schedule' is the quickest way, and the only negative bit about the entire experience is the popup that tells me 'it's better in the app'.
It's not. Not by any metric.
My search and opening a webpage takes a second or two. Opening the app takes several seconds, then navigating to the Radio 4 page and scrolling down the schedule takes several more.
I submitted a bug report on the topic and they basically told me "we hear you but shush and use the app".
I thought this was going to be about Yelp. Yelp.com from a phone-sized browser constantly screams "It's better on the app!". That's because the browser interface has been made very bad, with popups and other screen-obscuring junk using up much of the small screen.
(Yelp is mostly useless now, because they're not effectively purging dead businesses. About a third of listings in popular categories seem to be dead.)
If only Google had a UI framework that would let them build apps and target all platforms.
Google Dev are incompetent it seems. Had "highlights" for June and July in photos. Guess what is disabled in my account? I had to set two dates explicitly: one in the early past and one in the distant future -- now I seems to work.
And the new icons of their apps look like a kindergarden project. Can't they just leave the design alone, or ask the user? Seems impossible.
On an iPad, the web version is almost always objectively better.
Since about 2018 or so, most apps have failed to properly support rotating the device. When you load the same service in a web browser, you gain that feature back. Facebook is a big example.
Other apps actually have MORE functionality in the browser than their app version. This is why PWAs are now much more preferable than before.
If the barrier to entry is "own a smartphone", there will inevitably be people who will be excluded. Lots of fantastic reasons to unplug in 2026, year of our plague. Even if you don't go so far, conservative allowances for data collection are one of the few digital freedoms left.
I sell stuff ocassionaly on a "local" platform called MercadoLibre (like, I could afford a new handlebar for my bicycle so I could sell there the old one). Mercadolibre kind of wants to be the argentinian Amazon, even lobbying in the argentinian government so they will ban similar platforms from other countries. With time, MercadoLibre has become incredibly hostile and greedy for us small sellers, while favoring corpos.
They charge you 25% for each sale you do via their platform, but the latest thing they did was to force you to "identify" you are you via a website where they track your face features and scan your ID "because of security". Yeah, that sounds good, so I did that in 2021.
They asked this again last year because of reasons. But this time they won't let you use a regular web browser: they forced you to do this via their app. No matter how much you try, it will always fail citing "compatibility issues" or "errors". I tried to complain but their customer support is incredibly shitty, if you even manage how to find to contact them.
But oh surprise, their "app" is just a web wrapper.
On the other hand, the existence of alternative implementations in the form of mobile apps can on occasion be a saving grace when web apps are halfassed the other way. It's so frustrating when a poorly made web app that e.g. eats way too much memory, keeps cores spinning for no reason, chokes its tab process, doesn't handle history correctly, etc is the only option available and you have no choice but to live with it.
It makes me wish it didn't become the norm to lock down site/service APIs are reserve them for private use only so crappy web apps would have to compete with superior third party alternatives.
Something I didn’t see in the comments is highlighting the actual, very real, fact that the user was incensed by the app.
This is one instance, with one vendor, but our day is made up of thousands of interactions across multiple vendors. And all big (major) vendors seem to have these kinds of issues.
That's a problem because these interactions add up. To the point where I’ve personally been accused of “[liking] being angry”
I’m not sure what the answer is. But for me, I’ve been trying to find and use tools that don’t piss me off, paid or otherwise. So for mail and calendar, for example, I tried out https://www.hey.com/ and it not only does it not piss me off, but I like it for how I use calendar and mail.
I don’t know if anyone here has read Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich, but the book comes to mind every time I run into these kinds of frustrating interactions.
> To subscribe to a new calendar, you must use a computer web browser. You can't subscribe to a calendar in the Google Calendar app for Android, iPhone, or iPad.
Isn't this likely because Google Calendar was abused a lot in phishing? e.g. fake "CLICK TO PROCEED" links as ads -> redirected to Google Calendar named "CLICK [+] SIGN TO CONTINUE" -> "URGENT: re-enter your credit card number at https://scam.example/buy-us-bitcoin" fake schedules recurring every x minutes etc.
The Google Calendar app has a long standing bug where the search view will not show the latest calendar entries unless you manually scroll to the bottom and hold the scroll view there. It’s been like this for years despite repeated bug reports!
When I was job hunting earlier this year, LinkedIn on my phone told me to install the app. Sure, why not? So I did. It refused to authenticate and never worked. One good point is that at least the mobile web version didn't lock me out with an impassable overlay like some websites are starting to do.
Ryan Air just introduced the super-annoying requirements of needing the app to download your boarding pass (which of course they could just provide from the website).
I think they do it to be able to send you notifications and sell you more flights, but I don't understand why they need to be so anti-user. I try to NOT fly Ryan Air unless there is no other airline available. I'd rather pay twice as much than support their poor and sometimes borderline-criminal business practices.
Yes, the AllTrails app does this. You can't send a route to your Garmin watch or whatever in the app, you must do it in the browser version.
And since having the app installed at all sort of hijacks AllTrails links, you really don't even want it installed at all. Yet you constantly are told to install the app...drives me up the wall.
An app is a way to bypass the privacy protections that a browser might layer on top, and gather yet more data about you, show ads, etc, etc. That is the real motivation.
It’s a shame the web was so slow to adapt to this new mobile world. When it all started things like offline capabilities were very difficult to do on the web and native development felt necessary. These days the web can actually do a lot… but it’s too late. People expect to find something in the App Store, pinning a web site to their Home Screen is just not something they know they can do. So a lot of people waste an enormous amount of money on three different implementations for, often, simple CRUD operations.
Oh I'm so glad it works this way round too. Kinda sick of the web being ruined by http pages that tell you to download a binary. Is anyone bothering trying to narrow that gap between native and web on phones so we can resume the process we were undertaking back in 2010 before smartphones re-promoted binary applications for whatever reason?
For me, to install an app it must be very very important. Like banking. Otherwise… Gone, gone gone.
It made even sadder by the fact that often the "app" is more or less just webview.
More and more I'm giving up on apps, and online self-servicing as the structures and scope of what either one can do is increasing narrowing. It's much much easier to just call these days (fortunately AI answering the phone is still not prevalent). Customer service will obviously inform you that "You can just our self-service solutions in the future", even if you literately just called in because you can't due to inflexibility and options you don't understand.
Also "you can manage it from your phone" is not the sales pitch it once was, because it's no longer the entire truth. You can in fact ONLY manage it from your phone. If whatever you're selling requires an app, chances are that I'm not buying and if it's a service, I will seek out your store or staff and make them do it for me.
Most companies mostly want app access because you get a bunch of APIs with which to annoy users with marketing notifications, tracking, and url handling.
And this is why I usually say, I will look at it when I am in front of my computer again for most things, side from a free does where I mainly am reading.
I have 200+ apps installed on my phone.
I deleted 150ish.
I have no issues.
I will delete another 30 to see how it will go.
What really gets me is when an app highjacks a link to the site, and then doesn't know what to do with it, when just opening the link in the browser would have been perfectly functional. Email unsubscribe links are a particularly annoying example of this.
The simplest barrier to using an app for me is that most do not implement tabs. Tabs are extremely useful! Even when the app interface may be better than the web interface, I will usually find myself opting for web specifically for this reason.
I don’t understand all the technical challenges, but I sure hope we can close the gap between what we can do in the browser versus an app. What apps do is gate communities and gate information and gate people and this is the opposite of an open Internet that should be a benefit to humanity.
At this point the barrier for me to install an app is pretty high. If you're going to needlessly gate certain functions behind an app that work on a desktop browser (or could work in-browser), then I just won't use those functions. If by extension that degrades the value I get from your site, then I just won't use the site, and I won't be contributing to ADU stats you promote to advertisers.
Every single company has turned this into a situation where I cannot trust your apps with privacy or security, and the risk and hassle isn't worth the install.