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Comment by prajjwal | Hacker News Reader

Orkut was our go-to social network as teens, before we all moved to Facebook in 2009. I'm was going to join this out of sheer nostalgia, but it appears to be lacking a web app.

I'm curious as to why they went with ONLY native Android / iOS apps. That will not only drive away people like me, who prefer to use things from a desktop web browser, but also people in developing countries who might not have access to a smartphone. That sounds like straying away from "I want to help connect people" to something more like "I want to help connect people who own an Android / iOS device".

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> people in developing countries who might not have access to a smartphone

I live across a river from Burma, and I can tell you it's at least an order of magnitude easier for people there to get access to a smartphone than a desktop or laptop.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-fa...

I mean, I agree that it's a deal-killer for people like you and me, but the idea that it would make it less suitable for underdeveloped countries is just silly.

I live in a first-world country, I do have an Android phone, but I'm always out of internal storage and need to delete apps. Most people in my friends/family circle are in the same situation. So even if we have Android, services based exclusively on mobile apps have an accessibility problem for us. I suppose this problem will be larger in places like Burma, where smartphones will be cheaper and older on average.

Most devices in the developing world have micro SD slots.

Mine also has one, but the apps just don't want to go there. In fact, some apps like spotify insist on storing even their data in the internal storage. So I have a full internal storage and an almost empty big SD card. I know these things can be solvable via rooting, but most people doesn't root.

I was really frustrated by this for a while. There were some instructions on the Spotify website about re-installing the app when the SD card was plugged in, but it never seemed to work for me.

Recently they added the ability to explicitly choose where you want to store your offline data.

Mobile app means access (due to broken permission systems) to a user's contact, location, mic and camera. Also, captive web browser (user clicks a web link and that web page gets shown inside the app, instead of on the phone's own browser) means the app can track what sites you visit and for how long ("Dear buzzfeed.com, would you like to buy our stats for visits to your website?").

"broken permission systems" is just Android. iOS could offer more fine-grained options, but it's solid.

It's easier to suck up your information, access your contact lists and physical location, when you're stuck on a mobile app.

This, I believe, is the correct answer. I refuse to give most companies that much power.

> people in developing countries who might not have access to a smartphone

People in such countries are actually more likely to have access to a smartphone, specifically one of the myriad cheap Android devices one finds all over the world, than to a desktop web browser.

People use mobile more than desktop on social apps so it makes a lot of sense. Eventually there will be a web/desktop version as well(if it catches on). Shortly said mobile web sucks so a native app is better than a broken website.

Doesn't it suck for anything but simplest forms of communication?

I mean, I just can't stand touch-typing anything but very short messages. Whenever there's any conversation that involves more typing than posting a meme picture and replying with "lol" I run for a real terminal, with a real physical keyboard.

I don't know about others, but for me being significantly slowed down with typing is frustrating. And I hope to believe I'm not an outstandingly slow with touchscreen keyboards...

>> "I don't know about others, but for me being significantly slowed down with typing is frustrating. And I hope to believe I'm not an outstandingly slow with touchscreen keyboards..."

Just anecdotally watching people type I think that the general consumer who isn't typing on a real keyboard all day, is actually much quicker on a phone. Look at teenagers - they spend much of their day communicating on a phone hence they get quite good at typing on it. I'm shocked at how quickly a lot of people I know reply to me from their phone. So I don't think it's that you are outstandingly slow, just that you and I spend a lot of time using real keyboards so we can use them efficiently and a lot of other people spend most of their time using touch keyboards and can use them more efficiently than us.

I've made the same observation.

Services are becoming more and more "Mobile first" in recent times.

I do appreciate the importance of optimizing for mobile as a priority but share your sentiment in the poor experience left for those who us who actually like to use our laptops/desktops for some activities.

Watch the trend reverse once form factors that are both portable and usable as primary workstations (for light work) become the norm (like MS and Ubuntu's vision of a phone that can become your laptop in a dock)

Native app first is the problem, not mobile first.

Web apps designed for mobile first often give you a better desktop experience. Designers making a desktop web app feel obligated to fill the screen with stuff to make it clear that they did a lot of work. But if they start with mobile it stays focused on what's important. Additional interface element for desktop end up as actual enhancements instead of distractions.

Based on the size of the app and the interface, it's not native but some sort of webapp bundled with it's engine which means they could have done a mobile website, but my guess is that they know that if they do this no one will download the app atm.

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