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Comment by folli | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like obvious advice in theory, but in practice you will run into a lot of problems.

Google's Play store has a quasi-monopol on Android app sales, alternative app stores make up a small fraction in the promille range.

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Make a web app in addition to your native apps? Then if they pull the native app you can direct people to the web app. I think Uber has this?

Has anyone actually made a mobile webapp that isn't a completely miserable user experience? People keep talking about how PWAs are the future or whatever but then every time I try using one the performance is really poor.

Twitter for example claims their PWA "Loads quickly on 2G and 3G networks" compared to their native app but my actual experience using it was very much the opposite. Everything takes seemingly 2-3x longer to load.

Uber would be in deep trouble if their app got pulled. It's not that easy to get people to use your web site once they are used to the app.

Could you make an app that just installs your web app in the launcher so the user only uses your webapp directly? iirc that can't be pulled as easily by Google.

I've done that - it's a pretty poor experience in practice.

Why is that? What has been your experience?

I found it harder to make a clean, smooth user interface. Lots of workarounds to make things fit into the right place, to make the right thing in focus for user input. I'm not a professional front-end developer so maybe I just wasn't any good at it, but achieving a basic level of quality was much harder.

True but if that is the case, you have to play by their rules, even if they are idiotic. It kind of is what it is until things change.

That's the the thing - if it's a case of "play by our very specific, unambiguous and consistently applied rules" then I think most people would have no issue. However I know that Apple for example have kicked a few apps off the App Store after they made their first party replacements. And while I have no first-hand experience with Android, a friend of mine has been grousing about some Google Play store ranking or recommendation changes (I don't know exactly what it was) within the last few months that decimated his income overnight. These stories pop up relatively frequently on HN, and I'm sure you'll have seen them if you've been around for a while.

The issue is that you can find yourself completely kicked off (literally or figuratively) a platform with no recourse whatsoever even when you play by their rules. One day you have a business and an income, the next you don't.

+1 was not enough, therefore verbal +100.

(Will be nice once comment systems allow multiple upvotes on a budget)

Then don't be in the Android app business.

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