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Comment by manigandham | Hacker News Reader

Why are you calling it an unverified myth? In reality there are petabytes generated everyday proving the efficacy of mobile apps vs websites. This has been tested and measured in pretty much every possible way at this point with 100s of billions in ad spend.

It's not just real estate on the screen, it's faster on-device processing with lower latency, rich offline abilities, better and more persistent access to more API's from notifications to storage, stronger identity with durable logins, and of course better analytics tracking.

It's not always the correct choice but native apps are the overall winner for mobile UX.

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Having petabytes of stats doesn't mean the interpretation of those stats is any good. The retention for your web app might suck, for example, because you're constantly showing popups to the users telling them to switch to the mobile app and once they leave you no longer see them in "the data".

The problem with data is that you can't see the things that are real but not in the data.

Qualitative data can be valuable data, even in this quantitative age.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_Bias

More often then not, the front end devs responsible for the app are not very good with "normal" web frontends - so they sabotage the competition, to reduce work. Also, web pages, could be repackaged into Apps by others leeching from the products attention.

Its typical to have a different set of engineers responsible for the web app. Certainly the case if you're not a tiny startup.

Sabotage feels pointless given you're still competing against other native apps. Also I don't even know how you would 'sabotage' the competition, your average app engineer doesn't moonlight as a blackhat hacker.

A lot of people I know will simply not use a service if the only way to do so is through an app, due to the dumpster fire that is security and privacy in apps. I understand that such people are a small percentage of the population, but I really do sometimes wonder if companies are even aware that they have a pool of potential customers that they've excluded from even trying their product out.

They are, but they're also aware of the effort vs return on dealing with a "small percentage of the population" as you admit. Sometimes its worth it, often it isn't.

Except that it literally takes more effort to exclude them than it does to not do so. Bolt is the prime example here: they already have a working web app, and they go out of their way to block people from using it instead of the smartphone app, seemingly only in locales where they believe most people have smartphones. Why? What does that accomplish?

It'd be understandable if the smartphone apps came first and the developers decided a web app wasn't worth it, but a lot of these smartphone-app-only developers use PhoneGap and other tools wherein one already has to write a web app.

This thread is about web vs apps in general. I don't know why Bolt does what they do, but generally it's a lot of effort to maintain both interfaces for mobile users, often with entirely different teams, frameworks, language stacks, deployment models and more just to end up in the same place.

Like I said: it's understandable when it's actually a native mobile app. It's far less understandable when it's something like Uber or Facebook or Reddit that's very obviously just an HTML/CSS/JS site in a "native app" wrapper.

Uber and Facebook are not HTML apps in a wrapper.

Ah, right, forgot that Facebook invented React Native... in which case my point still stands, since one of the very selling points of React Native is to use the same code for both "native" and web.

There’s probably more people who won’t use something on their phone if there isn’t an app for it. If it’s for a bigger activity. Not that either population is that big.

But in the context of Bolt, I believe they aren't displaying ads in their app?

My reply was against mobile app retention being a myth. I don't know the reasons for Bolt but it's unlikely to do with ads.

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