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Comment by orwin | Hacker News Reader

> People want fully featured apps, not companion apps

Not my experience. I rock climb, sail and play pen and paper rpgs. I have a companion app for the second, four for the third (2 I coded myself). The rock climbing is the only one that would need a true app (with geo-localisation and maybe a gmap interface). Idem for my work, I don't care, on my phone, about a full feature github, or even email service.

Just forgot, I also have a tuner, it's a full app but it doesn't need to be (I had one of Firefox OS too, you only had web apps on it).

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You code? Then you should know your personal preferences are completely irrelevant. You think 99.999999%+ of apple users care about github or Firefox OS. Why even bring it up? 'I like using these specific apps, so millions upon millions of other users must be identical to me.'.

The initial argument was completely different. This person makes companion apps simply because they don't like Apples business practices. Lovely for him I guess.. for most it makes absolutely no sense financially to ignore your customers needs based on a personal preference. Customer will just use a better, fully featured app thats not bound by the developers inflated ego.

I think the main issue is there then :

> 'ignore your customers'

I'm not a customer of any music app. I'm not a customer of any dnd app. I am a user of music companion app, and in my opinion, but i'm clearly in the majority in my area, full feature tuner/music apps are inferior to companion apps for musicians. And it's the same for character sheet helpers for rpgs, we tried using an app a few years ago, it worked well enough, but companion apps are just better in my experience if you play on a table.

Probably because often, companions app have users, not customers?

Again, why do you keep bringing up personal experiences as a benchmark? It’s completely irrelevant. We are talking about a store with 100s of millions of users, you’re just 1. How about checking what apps are the most downloaded for a start to get an idea what people actually want in an app.

Customers, users… just interchangeable terms to mean the same thing. The whole issue is this particular developer does not build fully featured apps with Apple as they would take too much money out of any generated income (if any). So yeah, this is just about money.

I think I have to requote the part I responded to

> People want fully featured apps, not companion apps

I gave multiple example on why this is false. I thought one example was enough to prove something is false, but okay.

Orwin I advice not engaging further as you'll waste your time. I don't think your parent commenter is interested in a honest debate.

From my experience in a sibling discussion.

Their language is emotional and loaded, and include ad hominem attacks.

Perhaps they are going through some difficult times or something.

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