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Comment by dmart | Hacker News Reader

The sub-rant about every app having its own browser really rang true for me. I never gave it much thought until now, but wow, what a horrible experience. Frequently I click a link to a private GitHub repo (404!) or a news article (paywall!) inside an app and then have to clunkily "Open in Safari" to actually apply my session cookie.

To non-developers this must be even more confusing ("why am I only logged in some of the time?") Terrible UX.

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I agree so much! I was puzzled when Google introduced that feature to android and even advised it as the recommended way for apps to open links.

Can someone explain to me the reasoning behind that feature?

I mean, I can sort-of understand that individual apps want me to stay inside the app as long as possible. But why would the platform vendor actively support or even push that pattern?

It probably has to do with the (lack of) window management on mobile platforms and the coupling of which window is foreground to the (often also lack of) behavior of the application.

Man I don't miss owning a smartphone, this stuff is really pants on head retarded.

I imagine it was that apps were doing it anyway, and it was better to use the system browser that might actually be up to date security wise than have the apps bundle their own which was was based on nine month old code and horribly insecure more often than not.

The confusing part for non-developers is how to get back from Safari to Twitter. Very few people are actually jumping between apps and so they don't know the swipe left/right gestures.

And so they end up going Home, getting distracted by some other app and not going back to Twitter at all.

That's why in-browser UIs exist. Because it makes a big different to keeping users in the app.

> Very few people are actually jumping between apps and so they don't know the swipe left/right gestures.

I mean, maybe that could be an indication that cryptic and completely arbitrary swiping gestures without any sort of discoverability or visual feedback might not be the best interface for fundamental user actions like navigating the history.

> The confusing part for non-developers is how to get back from Safari to Twitter. Very few people are actually jumping between apps and so they don't know the swipe left/right gestures.

I always use the (small) button in the top left of the screen that appears left of the clock, e.g. “◀ Twitter”.

More frustrating still is often they remove the option to opt-out of their in-app browser so you have to do it on a link by link basis as you mentioned. Even more annoying on Android is it then breaks "smart" app links like opening Youtube for those links instead of the browser.

But it lets the app developers track engagement! How will the poor app developers know exactly which sites you choose to browse to otherwise?

(/s, since that’s not obvious on the internet anymore)

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