My life has improved immeasurably since I gave up iOS dev and went back to the web. My baseline frustration level is so much lower.
I love the web, but users and companies just want apps, and I want to get paid.
Of course if you're doing client work you have to build what your clients are asking for and yeah the web is not a substitute for native in all cases.
Is it just for telemetry? Just for push notifications? Just because their competitor/idol has an app and they want one too?
It's not for telemetry (at least at the scale/size of companies I deal with). As far as I can tell it's the prestige. I know this because our initial app had no push notifications and the clients who paid for it wouldn't stop asking about an app and didn't even touch the (identical) web version.
Push notifications are part of it for sure but I just wanted to give an example of a case where there were no features that were app-only but all they cared about was the app. I'd say "Yeah, we have that new feature and you can see it at yourbrand.ourcompany.com" and they'd say "Ok, when will we have an app?", felt like I was taking crazy pills but I've seen this exact same conversation repeated at multiple companies, multiple clients. And lest someone thing this is a subdomain-related thing, it's not, I had the same questions when we setup the web version at theirdomain.com.
And then there is there is the polish level. Apple has spent god knows how long polishing each and every native interaction. All the animation curves are perfect. You lose all of that polish when you build a web app.
I think it is not primarily related to notifications and telemetry, although that's obviously part of it, or to access to your contacts or whatever, like in the case of FB. My theory is that it's much simpler and dumber than that: that "number of app installs" has simply become a metric that managers can use to promote themselves inside a company, and that companies can ultimately use to sell shares. It's an engagement metric, and since there is no metric for "home screen bookmarks made", there is no way for companies and managers to gamify the web site. Therefore, they simply don't care about the website, except as a means to get you to install the app. It's all a bullshit numbers game.
I know the users can create the icon themselves by saving a bookmark to the home screen, but for some reason they seem not to.
1. It puts an icon on your phone's home screen which reminds you it is there and encourages reuse.
2. They can put notification counters on said home-screen icon.
3. It is generally easier to convince people to enable notifications on the app than on the website.
4. User perception. Some users expect an app and look down on a website. (Even if functionally identical)
5. Blocking ads on websites is much easier than blocking them on mobile.
6. It can provide better tracking and analytics.
7. The app can provide a better experience.
7a. The ability to pre-download the application makes it less costly to provide more features and code. The just-in-time downloading of web applications means that the size of code, data and resources generally needs to be more carefully considered. Of course you can do careful code loading for webapps but it requires custom code instead of being managed by the store.
7b. Native apps generally have access to more APIs especially without needing to request special permission (contacts, device sensors, large amounts of storage, etc)
7c. Access to native UI toolkits can make the application fit into the expected UX better.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...
*Interviewee exits, pursued by a door*
Interviewer: “HR? Yes, please make a note not to offer that candidate any other roles, thanks. Yeah, for some reason they seemed to think their personal preferences were more important than solving our customer needs. Would be a terrible fit.”
Places which make me feel the way that you’re describing, I don’t even reply to the recruiter.
I'm still not sure if the PWA push was the plan and they changed to the app store or if it was always something to tide people over. I believe the reporting has said they honestly thought PWAs would be good enough and then reversed course but it didn't take them long before they just went all-in on apps.
All that said I'm not really a "the web should be able to do everything apps can do"-guy, I think the constant permission requests would be incredibly tiring while browsing the web. Though maybe you, as a user, would need to first "promote" or "whitelist" a url before it could even ask. Idk, just sounds like hell.
1. Make the web a suitable platform for application delivery
- or -
2. Allow third-party alternatives to the App Store
Apple doesn't like it. No shit, their shareholders would throw a riot if they abandoned their 80-billion/year cash cow. Unfortunately, that exploitation is a very real consequence of first-party vendor abuse that we shouldn't have allowed to happen in the first place. Microsoft tried making the web into their "App Store" a few decades ago, and they were rightfully sued into oblivion and beaten with rolled-up newspapers. We should have done the same thing to Apple before they became so self-entitled.
If you don't want to use the web for apps, then don't. I'm sure Apple would be happy for you to spend that money on the App Store instead, where they can happily take their cut. But consumers need the option. That's just not up for debate. Apple will kick and scream and make it as ugly as possible, but that's purely because they're facing technologies that threaten their business model as they know it. How long can they continue to do this before the dam bursts?
This idea that web applications only “count” if they can send push notifications is bizarre. You know everybody was building web applications just fine without push notifications before 2009, right? And that native iPhone applications didn’t have push notifications either to begin with?
Just because Apple added push notifications to native iPhone applications, it doesn’t mean that all web applications suddenly ceased to be “real” applications because they couldn’t do it yet.
As for building apps for clients - I find just the opposite to be true. They don't want to be subject to the whims of the review process. They just want to deliver their service to their users.
What users think is not really relevant. They'll use it if they have to or if their friends are using it.