“It works better in the app”

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

[1]: https://earthview.sunny.gg

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.

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.

* 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Like, I think that the instinct to make everything a web app is what partially leads to things like what this article complains about. Well, besides laziness, of course.

Yes, I know some apps wouldn't make it in the browser. These are sacrifices I am willing to make.

I thought that they just want to collect more data about you.

To be fair, bookmarking is easy but browsing and locating a bookmarked URL is far from easy. To bookmark in chrome on desktop requires pressing an obvious star button on the right of the address bar (it's always there, so easy to locate). But browsing/locating a bookmark requires clicking on the vertical ellipses on the right-most of the browser, finding 'Bookmarks and lists' amongst a lot of wordy options, then the fun starts: you can scroll bookmarks but cannot even see the full bookmark (only the first 40 characters and favicon) and they're not even in alphabetical order. If you have several hundred, like I do, that's a lot of work, and consequently, I approximately never do it. Easier to copy the url into an email and send it to yourself.

For folks like myself who use different browsers across operating systems, it's even more convoluted for obvious reasons (e.g. I use safari on iOS and chrome on macOS, so something bookmarked on iPhone doesn't make it to macbook and vice-versa).

tl;dr bookmarks are a mess, even for the tech-savvy

My rule for apps these days is that if it is not available through F-Droid, I won't be using it.

I usually don't attribute it to malice or incompetence from hypothetical devs, instead I blame malice or incompetence from hypothetical lawyers.

Sick burn.

I tend to prefer using the browser, where possible, eschewing bespoke apps, but I would expect an app to have more functionality than the browser.

It's sad, when it doesn't.

Yeah, and I have one on my Android phone!

(If you didn't read the post, it doesn't work in the app either. It only works on "desktop.")

"Do you have the Delta app?"

"Nope."

Then he pressed a few keys on his keyboard and printed out a new boarding pass for me within five seconds. I couldn't believe he was trying to kick me over to the app if it was that easy.

Sometimes… well sometimes there’s no dev resources available to make an app work in a way you’d expect. Google is just a tiny startup, be reasonable in your expectations.

Point is: if you actually want to reach a large audience — you want both. Also, don’t expect good experience if you use Google’s products.

Native is a much better experience than mobile websites when you actually use the features and power of these fairly advanced computers we carry around in our pockets.

At least Google makes an attempt at usability. It’s not like the product team has a choice.

Obviously, the bulk of it is noticeable in notoriously crapware software like management systems, but it's increasingly emerging just about everywhere.

I wonder how long it will take to understand even just this small slice of the problem, without even getting into "anything apps" and the need to return to the OS as a single integrated application/framework with end-user programming—a trend of which we're only seeing a few hints.

Like, sure, there are login sessions that expire after five seconds of inactivity. Sometimes it even turns out that they don't support passkeys or TOTP, and you have to add a phone number for SMS authentication, which reduces account security by letting attackers prove your identity.

I want a browser extension that automatically clicks those "I'm still here" pop-ups on scummy websites like this...

But they have an app. And they don't even shove it in your face that the experience is better with the app or whatever. But it is for one and literally only ever one singular reason: it doesn't log you out every five seconds

Meanwhile, the people who stay behind and actually make these half-finished apps work properly, maintain them and deal with all the boring problems rarely get the same credit or benefits.