Hacker News Reader

Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

> Let’s think of it this way: would you switch to a phone that didn’t have a native Gmail app? Or Twitter? TikTok? Instagram? It would take an inordinate amount of time just for those companies to port over their software — and they’re some of the best-resourced organisations in the world. “

The funny thing is, these services all have fully functional websites and have no specific elements that need to be native. A PWA would be enough, except perhaps for Instagram and the camera/movie filters, and TikTok for the movie editor which could need to be separate apps.

View on HN

> would you switch to a phone that didn’t have a native Gmail app? Or Twitter? TikTok? Instagram?

Yes. I don't use any of those services. Occasionally friends link me to Twitter and I read the web version. The fact it makes that experience shit with pop-ups and limited message history is actually benefit.

I sometimes use G-suite apps, but they're also better as web apps on a desktop/laptop than phone apps.

> Yes. I don't use any of those services.

Same for me but that's missing the point. I don't use those particular services but I don 't have to look very far to find apps for which I wouldn't buy a phone lacking them. For me that's Spotify, Whatsapp, Google Maps, my banks, 1password, etc.

The even funnier thing is, Gmail supports standard mail protocols, and can be interacted with using just about any mail client, and Twitter has a billion custom clients for it as well. The problem is that Google is hiding the SMTP/IMAP options deep behind needing a 2fa and "app passwords", and all the others are actively rejecting or working against letting people create custom apps for the services easily. There's no need for any of these companies to create any new software for any new OS, they choose to prevent people from doing so, and that's actively harmful in the current walled garden of an ecosystem we've created.

No one wants to do POP3 in 2023. And Gmails IMAP set up is weird. A labeling system being represented as folders is not a great experience.

I've been using IMAP for Gmail since forever, and it's ... fine? I don't know what you find weird about it?

If you put 2 labels on an email, then it is represented twice over IMAP.

IMAP is folder based, not label based.

And what this means is that if you remove an email from a folder, you don't actually remove it completely, you just remove the label, and the email continues to exist elsewhere.

(I might be wrong about this behavior: the behavior of deleting an email over IMAP depends on whether it has labels left or not).

Update: good read about how the system doesn't behave like you think it does

https://www.tomscott.com/fix-gmail-labels-threads/

Yeah I was aware they're doing some black-box stuff to make it work, but wasn't too fussed as long as it did.

I have the issue you describe with ProtonMail's labelling, but not Gmail's.

> Twitter has a billion custom clients for it as well

Not anymore

I intentionally don’t use the gmail app on my iPhone because it’s terrible and never seems to work well. Their mobile website works better than their app.

Interesting! Had always worked flawlessly for me. iPhone user FWIW

WhatsApp would be the only thing you couldn't replace with a web version, since you need to use WhatsApp on your phone to verify your session.

Sites like Instagram will also become increasingly aggressive in pushing you towards the app as you use the mobile web version until it eventually denies you new content. I believe Twitter and TikTok are the same.

There's a bunch of other social media services (Line does something similar, mixi does too) that force some anchoring to a mobile phone, probably to guarantee access to the phone number and be sure to have you use the service on the go.

I think they care less about being native than having direct access to your phone and data. An alternative OS giving similar privileges to PWA could probably be rubber stamped by these services. (do we want that though ?)

I use Instagram mostly through the web interface (because uBlock Origin), and while it works pretty well on desktop, on mobile Firefox its super buggy and generally not a great experience. It's worth it for me to see what's going on without adds, but I can't imagine most people would accept the tradeoff.

Whatsapp does have a PWA variant though, used in India for KaiOS (which is pretty much FirefoxOS)

> WhatsApp would be the only thing you couldn't replace with a web version

Well you _could_, they just don't want you to. I very rarely use Whatsapp on my phone. Then again, I very rarely use Whatsapp :P

> would you switch to a phone that didn’t have a native Gmail app? Or Twitter? TikTok? Instagram?

There are people who would love that, but they are a very small minority. I for one would love to do that, but I need most of the popular apps to do my job.

> would you switch to a phone that didn’t have (...)

Of course, I already did. I've been using GNU/Linux smartphones since 2008: first Neo FreeRunner, then Nokia N900, now Librem 5. I don't feel like I'm missing anything at all.

Will it run Android or Apple banking apps? Does it have a good camera? It's great that it suits you but I think it would not suit most people.

What strikes me is, these questions have already be solved: our desktops have access to banking, and they can have good cameras.

Inherently, these are not technical problems. On the other hand, they become social problems when the services firmly cuts off web access and anything that's not iOS or Google's android. IMHO generic customer banks shouldn't be allowed to do that.

I run a banking app in an Android container (Waydroid) without problems, and the camera is certainly good enough.

Sounds good. Now all it needs is a dramatic reduction price; it's about ten times what I paid for my Moto G30 a couple of years ago which has more RAM, more storage, more and higher resolution cameras.

I'm not against the idea, but as it stands it's very much a niche product for people who can afford, and are willing, to pay considerably more than average for less capable hardware.

Not included in the list but unfortunately the mobile-focused browser version of Google Maps does not have the same functionalities as the desktop-focused version of the same app. More exactly I cannot access the "Saved Maps" (or whatever it's called) menu/section on mobile via the browser, the same way as I can when using my desktop computer. I don't know why that happens.

Funnily enough, the functionality has recently stopped working for me on desktop, too, I get a "Server error" message whenever I try to access any of the maps from the "Saved Maps" menu.

> I don't know why that happens.

Surely Google wouldn't intentionally release a crippled mobile website to force you to use their app and lock you out of competitors' OSes.

I do not use any of those apps. I do use Gmail and used to use Twitter. There is and was zero reason to use Twitter app. Or youtube app, website is literally better.

And I don't use Gmail app, because it was taking too much space.

Youtube apps can interact with TV Youtube apps, which are otherwise a pain to use. That’s the one reason I have it installed.

May be. For me, it does not have tabs, so I found it super annoying whenever it opened up. I like tabs.

Yeah, I only use it for “casting” videos to tv, not watching on the phone. This is all true for most content-focused apps: they are more usable as a website, which has possibilities of tabs, in-page search, deep bookmarks, … Apps, as a general rule, suck.

Good performance, UI and other nice features don't "need" to be there, really. But an audience of real people will choose a product that has a lot of these pesky, not really necessary things.

This is the approach that Windows Phone pushed. When they realized they were late to the party, pushing "standardized" PWAs made most sense. They even had quite a lot of tools to make it easy to encapsulate a normal website in a PWA and submit it to their store. But still it didn't catch on... I don't really see why this time would be different.

Because this is not the approach they're taking? If you read the whole article, you learn this project is AOSP-based So it runs android apps

In the hypothetical situation that it was needed though, PWAs are probably more common now than when Microsoft tried that

But then how would they get your contact list, geo-location, track you, and other things which generate profit?

Funny thing is, I haven't used any of those apps ever except gmail at least 5+ years ago. Maybe that's just me but in Europe I don't know if people are as dependent on these apps as the author suggests and europe is big and there are other popular social media

I think there might be room for a phone that only has those top 5-10 apps on it, out of the box, even if just a PWA at first. Instead of trying to be everything to everyone and adding a ton of complication that non-technical people don't like anyway.

But everyone still wants their banking app, maybe a local public transport app, their favorite newspaper, a few simple games maybe, some local government apps if we're talking about the EU... (Looking at my non-technical family members.)

This. I have a phone precisely for a few specific apps that will not be rewritten for a new platform (e.g. WhatsApp, Signal, public transport).

I am happy with /e/ OS (which is Android, I don't get why they talk about a "separate OS"), but the only way I could imagine using e.g. PostmarketOS is with waydroid. Which kind of emulates Android.

Is PWA the solution? I don't know: will WhatsApp/Signal/<those apps I need> write a PWA app and test it on exotic OSes? I would guess not, and therefore PWA do not seem to solve this problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com