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Comment by gcanyon | Hacker News Reader

I refuse to use Facebook's app. It's been years, I don't remember why, don't ask me.

Their web app is fundamentally broken in half a dozen ways, and has been for years. A couple examples (not all):

If you are in the middle of typing a comment and switch to another app, when you come back, it will reload the display, losing your comment.

Video shorts load in a way that hides the video after about two seconds. Editing the URL to remove the parameters fixes this.

The layout of comments/posts often breaks, forcing me to switch to "ask for desktop version" to make one feature work, then switch back to "mobile version" to make another feature work. Neither is completely functional.

As I said, there are more. As I said, I don't even remember why I rejected their app, but at this point, if they can't make a mobile web site, why would I trust them to make an app?

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>If you are in the middle of typing a comment and switch to another app, when you come back, it will reload the display, losing your comment.

This is the rule for a lot of apps and mobile websites now. I don't understand why - we have so much RAM available - but they love to refresh whether there's a reason to or not. And even if there's a reason not to. I can't count the number of times I've tapped on a tab that has a minature version of all the information I want, only for it to be replaced by a loading screen or 404.

A while ago I noticed my battery usage had gone way up. It was because any time I was distracted from my phone (or lost internet connection on a train), I would just leave the display on. Locking the phone meant that I'd lose whatever context I had.

> I don't understand why - we have so much RAM available

It’s not even that. There are APIs to persist state beyond app termination. Even if your app gets killed due to memory pressure, it should continue where it left off.

It's probably refreshing because iOS is aggressive about killing websockets, even if you only backgrounded safari for a few seconds. And it's easier to do a reload than determine which messages were missed. It's hard to even tell if the websocket is dead since it just stays open but is unable to receive / send messages.

Or at least this was my experience working on a mobile PWA a few years ago. I don't even own an apple device, it's just the ios bugs were always the most painful / memorable.

Companies intentionally make their web experiences worse because they can track you better in apps. Even if the trackers are technically the same, even somewhat savvy people using blockers or browser protections generally don't use them on their phones.

This is a satisfying narrative but I feel like you are overestimating the technical competency and/or malice of these companies. The more likely explanation is that they have simply bitten off more complexity than they can chew.

Of the tech companies I've worked for, I can't even imagine how the web team would react if they were instructed to intentionally nerf their website.

Why are people still using Meta's products? Their products are among the most unbelievably user-hostile things I come across on the web; I wonder why there hasn't been a revolt yet against them

Because people are stupid and do not realize how the choice to support a user-hostile company is going to bite them in the long run. They make it worse for the rest of us who refuse to support companies that feed off of peoples data without recourse.

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