Transient apps, like for booking a flight or hotel, ordering food, really need to be PWAs.
I mean, come on. Making me go to an app store and installing an app to do a simple business transaction is not a good user experience.
I mean, come on. Making me go to an app store and installing an app to do a simple business transaction is not a good user experience.
Are we just done with the whole web site thing already? Because I kind of liked that bit where I just typed in an address and clicked a few buttons. Worked great, from what I recall.
Let’s not make everything an app of any sort, maybe.
The OPs point is we're now blinded to all these website popups asking for permission, that the web app potential can't truly breakthrough.
Even though I hate it, can see why those "simple" apps exists: the Web still feels somewhat hostile to phones. Unless we create an alternative for the scrolling-page-point-and-click DOM[1], mobile will continue to be a second-class citizen in the Web.
[1] There's WASM, but I'm not sure if the performance will ever match native UI rendering implementations. Or Google would had implemented Flutter in WASM from day one.
GMail is bloody awful. I can hardly stand using it. Been using Thunderbird for a while now and have not many complaints.
The whole "IMAP" purist thing is unnecessary; there are plenty who prefer not using the GMail interface and have no idea what IMAP is.
Telemetry, activity tracking, etc.
NeoMutt doesn't send everything I do to a persistent log accessible to data broker parasites and NSA functionaries.
Not being turned into cattle watched over by an enormous Panopticon is a pretty major Killer App feature.
I like that it has critical features like a sane approach to contact lists and “sweep”. I also like that I can send a message with priority - a feature mysteriously still missing from gmail.
https://blog.pwabuilder.com/posts/publish-your-pwa-to-the-io...
It is Apple that has had issues with PWA support.
> While WebKit is making progress on PWA support, at the time of this writing, PWAs remain a second-class citizen on iOS. The iOS App Store’s support for PWAs is non-existent, requiring a web view-based solution like PWABuilder’s.
> Additionally, because iOS doesn’t allow 3rd party browser engines, your PWA is limited to WebKit’s PWA capabilities, which are currently lagging behind other browser engines.
Those apps are so much smoother to use than mobile webpages, even if the pages are AJAX. (And I say that as a web dev.) PWAs suck, they optimize for dev experience (same codebase) over user experience.
For stuff like buying plane tickets or booking hotels, I much prefer to just use the website itself. I see no benefit to these things being made into PWAs or occupying any kind of permanent space on my device.
For instant-apps you invest all the effort but they don't remain on the device (and are limited in size to begin with)
Also - it doesn't take long to download apps today (games - now that's a different thing)
That's just app hoarding.
Is it really easier to dig through your email than just click on the app and your boarding pass show up? And since it knows that you’re going to probably scan it, the screen automatically lights up
They will still need to know if their gate has changed or whether their flight is delayed.
There have been numerous accounts where someone couldn’t use a credit card overseas because their bank tried to send them an SMS that they were suppose to reply to to verify a transaction.
Also, SMS cost a lot more at scale for the sender than mobile notifications.
But even then, you first need to know whether your bag is at Terminal South or Terminal North first.
Delta will also notify travelers via SMS, Email... it's not app-only.
It’s a much better experience just to look at my boarding ticket in my Apple Wallet that is updated.
When I’m ordering food on Uber Eats, I can see where the driver is in real time.
Another feature of the Uber Eats app is chat and automatic translation. When I was in Florida, I discovered how many people who work for Uber don’t speak a word of English.
United is a phisher’s dream target. No MFA possible, and they spam their customers with zillions of login links on dozens of different domains. I’ll bet you can register unitedcardawards.com and get thousands of credentials without even sending out phishing messages!