Remember how all the largest spying products like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, etc aggressively push you to install their phone apps even though they are (or were) perfectly usable through their mobile websites.
What I don't get is why they put all the effort into maintaining a high-quality mobile site if they hate people using it this much. Just get rid of it and load the desktop version. Pop-ups saying "Reddit works better in the app" would be less off-putting if the alternative was an unoptimized desktop site, rather than a perfectly good mobile site whose only downside was said pop-ups.
for example, you open the comments of a post, it opens a faux-modal with a X button. You tap it, it closes the post but opens the subreddit. It doesn't go back to where you were.
Another example is how to collapse a thread on the comments you need to press the empty space beside the username?!?!
It's so slow and wrong that I've built my own front-end, but it's virtually impossible to load reddit videos correctly...
Twitter on mobile has become almost unusable (unable to see most content without making an account), though I've found a workaround: it's not totally broken in incognito windows, so I guess that's how I read it now.
My only gripe is the upvote, downvote, and " comments" buttons are a little too small compared to the other elements. Oh, and that new slide or multi picture UI sucks.
It loads quickly too. Quicker than the mobile versions, which is ironic.
For example on desktop the top 10% or so of the screen is taken up by the browsers UI and tabs which is normally fine. On a tablet in keyboard mode your left with ~40% of the screen being useable. Native applications sidestep this by not needing the browsers UI.
WebGPU and WebAssembly are getting close to matching the speed and capabilities of older hardware.
Tab UI is possible to hide, and has been for some time. You can "app-ify" a web site into a dedicated window with no browser UI.
ISTR apps that we doing this >10 years ago.
I think the real differences break down to economics. Can't charge an app store fee for web sites or force sites to use your advertising network.
That’s not a solution to the issue though. An independent application is managed by the OS, but websites are generally managed by the browser which has multiple tabs. Users don’t want every tab to be treated like it’s own app, which means websites need to play nice with the browsers UI even if the OS did give them full control.
Now, mobile OS have mechanisms to treat websites as native apps but your still stuck with web baggage. From a users perspective installing this website as a native app is simply worse than installing native app. Basically when you start improving the websites as app enough, such as gracefully handling network outages, you just end up with a native application.
From the other direction anything that would be fine as a website is already fine. You don’t get websites killing huge numbers of native apps because in that case there weren’t any native apps built to be killed.
The options for showing a numpad are also very limited. <input type="number"> exists, but it doesn't work for things that aren't numbers, like codes starting with 0.
Connection speeds in the original iPhone era were low, as was processing power. Spotify wouldn't have been able to provide you with the service it can provide over the web now.
The focus on the web was also a complete break from existing smartphones, where installing applications had been the norm for years. iPhones weren't exactly the first to feature apps, or even app stores, and delivering an iPhone experience that was as smooth as a Windows Mobile or Blackberry experience was going to be difficult without native code. At the same time, everyone already knew that upper and middle management (and all the other departments to convince when introducing new software) were going to buy iPhones because new, shiny Apple stuff often scores well as a status symbol.
At the time, it made complete sense to be mad. It's not that people didn't want to create websites, it's that websites were simply not equivalent to the real deal. A lot has changed since then.
Given the popularity of tools like Cordova and React Native, and the absolute dominance of Electron on desktop, I'd say he wasn't exactly wrong.
That would essentially have been Firefox OS, minus HTML5 that wasn't yet ready back then.
I think this claim is unfounded.
On iOS though you can't do that stuff, and I would tend to think apps are more sandboxed than websites (no cookies, for one). I don't know for sure though; I'd love to hear more from someone who has more firsthand experience.
The web was always limited by JS access, processing power, network connectivity, and a very fragile identity graph that was routinely reset. That's why Safari's battle on privacy is routinely seen as a misguided effort by most of the adtech industry that knows that SDKs in mobile apps reveal a magnitude more data.
It's probably because the specificiation for native apps is always cooked up by a single company, whereas the web specificiation is always under scrutiny of multiple organizations.
Never attribute to purely good engineering and design that which is incentivized by profit.