Ask HN: No cynical answers, why do companies push their apps so hard? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: No cynical answers, why do companies push their apps so hard?

14 pointssimonw16 comments

Medium and Reddit are two examples of sites that promote their mobile applications aggressively any time I visit their websites on my phone.

I have my own theories as to why they do this, but I'd love to understand the genuine reasons for this. Is it about analytics? Push notifications for re-engagement?

Asking for non-cynical answers here in the hope of getting to the truth... though maybe the truth here is pretty cynical?

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Engagement statistics basically.

The first cause is that in general users use more their phone than their computer.

The second cause is a corollary of the first cause and the existence of tools such as push notifications.

You get to collect a lot more data. Both Reddit and Medium don't earn much from most users directly, so they supplement income by selling data about it's users.

They do? What data and to who?

It may be along the lines of wishful thinking trying to have a more captive audience than in a browser. A browser has things like a home page, back button, bookmarks etc that are easily accessible. When you're in the app, everything points to more stuff in the app. One large metric appears to be engagement, its harder to track engagement in a browser than a dedicated app. Anything that keeps you engaged is good, anything that may lead you away is not. But its just as easy to hit the home button on a phone as well to get to the next thing.

I think you're right, but you don't go far enough. I think you're missing a mechanism. The browser doesn't notify you. With the browser, you got to reddit (or whoever) when you think of them, and not before. But with the app they can pop up a notification, and have a chance of you looking at reddit before you would have thought of it on your own.

LinkedIn. I removed shortly after installing it because it kept want to tell me that I may have missed some recruters update.

What a shitty default, they think they are increasing engagement but it made me uninstall the app, and use LinkedIn less.

My top theory is that this is about login: keeping users signed in allows for a genuinely better user experience, and staying logged in for an app is way easier than in mobile web - especially given that in-app browsers as seen in Facebook and Twitter and so on don't share cookies with the main browser (at least on iOS).

That theory seems likely to me.

There's a large amount of architecture-and-effort debt built up as a result of it though: duplicate feature implementations, redundant app build and deployment infrastructure, silo'd marketing channels, end-user experience inconsistencies.. the list goes on.

Would there be a way to make applications always-available to users (achieving that goal of reduced friction) at a web address without resorting to this strange attempt to end-run around the browser?

I assume it's more data collection, stronger engagement, and less server load when using the app.

> data collection

seems this would be worse in a post-ATT world

ATT?

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apptrackingtranspa...

Push notifications, which platform owners decided should go through Firebase (Android) or APNS (iOS) for "power saving reasons" (only one connection open all the time)

There are no ad blockers in the apps. There's a higher percentage of people who will allow notifications from an app.

Because apps can send notifications, which serve as a reward mechanisms that keep you addicted to the app.

In addition to the other answers ad blocking and content access are two others.

The barrier to block ads in an app are higher than blocking it in a browser.

Circumventing paywalls is generally harder in-app than via a browser.

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