Re: "Download the app!" gates, banners, etc. Medium does this too.
Why? What's the business reason? What does a native app provide the business that a mobile website doesn't?
Why? What's the business reason? What does a native app provide the business that a mobile website doesn't?
As a result, most Silicon Valley product managers are trained to think that websites are nothing more than the top of a funnel to eventually convert low-value search engine users into high-value app users. Once you realize this, almost every stupid thing websites do suddenly makes sense. They will do almost anything possible to grow app installs even if it makes the website nearly useless.
Sure, it's terrible if you care about the web and user experience. But most PMs only stick around a company for 1-2 years and they'd rather be able to show a hockey stick graph of "high value" app user growth to get promoted or get a new job then worry about what makes for a good user experience.
Another reason is that a local app can spy on you more (track your location, for example) to collect data to sell, harass you with notification spam, and display non-blockable ads.
In the case of Sonos, it is much darker and user hostile because there is no danger of "web consumers being siphoned off by google" - you have to buy the Sonos components anyway. In this case it is all about metadata and traffic and user profiling.
e: Most likely the desktop app has seen declining usage the last decade, which is why Sonos doesn't prioritize it.
It can’t be that high anymore. All the signals seem to be that rooting is trending down. I could be wrong of course as I have no hard data.
The dev team A/B tests a bunch of options until that number goes up, and then double down on the success. They don't really care about what users actually want, they're just pushing that app number up in any way possible. Their job performance is likely based on whether or not that number increases.
Medium does this too and it's a huge danger of taking a data-first approach to user experience. A/B testing on its own isn't bad, but it's often what drives this business behavior.
A huge investment will likely make them push this type of thing even harder because now they have to prove the investment's worth.
Simple: you can’t block ads in a native App (at least not by installing an ad blocker or other methods accessible to normal users, you‘d have to modify DNS responses or similar).
I think another major reason is that if someone is seeking to amuse themselves then in a browser they're as likely to skip over to another website; whilst in an app there's a mental barrier to that. I imagine people are more likely to change and view another subreddit, rather than jump to another website altogether.
There's a censorship angle too, wherein the app operators get greater control over the message their users receive than do website operators.
Until then, not being much of a phone user at all, I'd been convinced that mobile experiences were always worse than desktop ones.
[edit] now that I think of it, probably the same reason Twitch was pushing its desktop app.
Product reason: (potentially) better ux/design, but obviously a lot of people think they went down the wrong route
More often than not, I got redirected to App Store to re-download Reddit app, instead of launching the post in the app.