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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Folks: there's a built-in technology on your phone that allows you to load and run an app on-demand over the internet without dedicating any internal storage at all! It allows clean integration with many of the "native" features you expect like camera and notification and timers and stuff. And it's based on completely open standards with multiple, competing open source implementations.

No, seriously: uninstall that junk and just run stuff in the browser. It works much better than you think, the biggest annoyance being all the nag screens sites throw at you to get you to install their apps.

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the biggest annoyance being that these are even less integrated and fine tuned to the environment than all those bloaty corporate apps. The best apps still are made by small indy developers, feeling right at home in their OS. Take for example Instapaper, Fantastical, Outbank, Due, Reeder.. You just can't make web apps so polished, so well integrated into the OS..

I'm afraid it's exactly as bad as I think. I use web sites instead of apps whenever I reasonably can, but most stuff I use frequently is much better as an app.

What is it that keeps online web apps from turning into the bloated monsters that Electron apps are on the desktop?

They don't need to bundle their own copy of Chromium and Node, presumably.

Facebook in particular likes to break their web apps to push you to use the native one. If you ever need to use Facebook in the browser try mbasic.facebook.com(it even includes their messenger).

Also, relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1367/

  > It works much better than you think

Thanks, but we do have smartphones and we are aware of this thing called browser. We are also aware how it works. Not "much better" for sure, if better at all.

"It works much better than you think"

It still doesn't work as well as a native app.

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