However, if you have the iOS app installed, it opens the app when you click the link, loops twice (never loads the listing) and lands you on the Amazon US homepage. I've tried everything to stop this behaviour (changing regions, loading in logged out state etc), but to no avail.
It finally frustrated me so much yesterday (especially in the lead up to black friday) that I outright deleted the app to stop those links being captured by the native application.
It feels so liberating to click a link and get the desired result.
My experience as a user of the Amazon iOS app is that the developers deeply care about these kinds of quality issues. I have seen the looping behavior before in other contexts; I reported it, and it was eventually fixed.
In the app there is a customer service link in the hamburger menu, with a “contact us” option if you’re willing to spend a couple of minutes telling them about your problem.
However, that stupid popup of their or suggestion to install an app is beyond bad.
In fact, even when somebody submits a completely just-google-it question you can answer comprehensively by just looking at Wikipedia or the first ling in the search results or something everybody is supposed to know it doesn't irritate me, whenever I can provide a useful answer to somebody's question it floods my brain with dopamine and serotonin so an easy question is just an opportunity to get the reward easily.
Whatever (from a sophisticated scientific question to a rhetoric question/joke) I would ask on Aardvark I would almost immediately receive an interesting answer (better than those you usually find on Quora) to and some more answers during the following hours. That felt so cool. Then my imagination has ran out of questions and then Aardvrk got terminated. Now I know and so much more things and gave so many new questions but there is no Aardvark any more :-(
It's annoying because if you open a bunch of these links in the background, you would not be happy if your browser crashes, because then you lose all the links.
Or they insist on sending redundant notifications. Or there's a mysterious number and no way to see that actual notifications. Or the notifications won't go away. Or the notifications go away instantly. Or, naturally, the notifications are abused for spam.
As to why... I think it's one of those features that tends to get neglected, and because users are way too forgiving of broken software.
But this is the regular desktop version of their site. Whenever I link of a link in their digest on my phone, their website is a completely unusable piece of crap. None of the buttons work, most of the content is empty.
It's a good thing I have a moral compass.
It's a good strategy to make users hate your product. This isn't clever - it's just value extraction from a product people used to find useful.
"Engagement" - corporate