Using web versions, not apps, is important because companies keep user device statistics and if enough people insist in using web versions, the the web will continue to be at least partially supported by big tech.
It's also frequently just better. If I'm looking for hotels, flights, apartments, restaurants, hiking trails, ect., doing so in a browser allows me to keep dozens of comparable offers open for direct comparison - just by jumping between browser tabs.
Doing the same in the app means endlessly navigating between offers, favorites, and new searches. It's often very obvious that the app was built explicitly to be less powerful.
I guess it’s my fault for trying to use an Intuit product to begin with when I already know they’re evil.
This is a reason I also like the web is that after the page loads I can just do stuff instead of getting kicked out to have to update the app ... Or even having to re-log in ...
Desktop is fine. Mobile sucks. I have to imagine it's intentional to push mobile users towards the app.
In both cases, requesting the desktop version (i.e. using a non-mobile user-agent string) will give you back the normal, full-fat web version.
You win this round!
My guess would be one of those two:
* AdGuard – Mobile App Banners under AdGuard
* EasyList – Notifications under EasyList
Some corporations just really hate their users, and will never understand why
The linked article isn't enough to convince you? Look up Gab or Parler. (Yes, I find most of the speech there reprehensible. No, I don't think they should be denied the right to publish and distribute an app.)
Using a social media app instead of a website, as most people do, means that everything you are seeing has essentially been pre-approved by Apple and Google.
If the tide swings even a little further to the right on X, expect the X app to be banned as well. I was secretly hoping that it would be banned when Musk took over just to remind the right of why centralized app stores are a terrible idea. But with ICEBlock the left has finally been alerted to that fact as well, which might be even more beneficial to the cause of software freedom in the long run, since the left is generally less afraid of the proper solution to this problem, regulation.
In the meantime, keep using web apps instead of native apps.
As far as X being banned, if you haven’t heard Tim and every other tech CEO bends a knee anytime Trump and conservatives asks him to.
A democratic president also didn’t accept personal bribes from companies to allow a merger to go through (Paramount) or accept bribes from other companies that were afraid of retaliation - Meta, Google, Twitter and Disney.
The current administration has carved out outs for companies that bend a knee when it comes to tarriffs. This is the worse case of false whataboutism yet.
Which reminds us of the difference between AWS and Apple -- Amazon Web Services is the web and the web is an open platform. If AWS denies you, you go sign up at any of their competitors or buy your own servers and plug them into the internet. If Apple denies you, iPhone users can't get your app, and if you go sign up at a competitor or buy your own servers, they still can't get your app.
> As far as X being banned, if you haven’t heard Tim and every other tech CEO bends a knee anytime Trump and conservatives asks him to.
That's because they currently control the government. Now think ahead by more than two days and consider the possibility that the other party might win an election again someday. What should you do right now when you're in control of the government to prevent yourself from getting screwed the next time that happens?
And then your ISP kick you out.
Meanwhile a DDoS attack is a crime, so Apple doing something with the equivalent effect is now something you're equating with the commission of a crime.
And once you start thinking about it, the same thing goes for a surprisingly large amount of apps.
I feel like in the coming years the facade big A and big G put up in order to push everyone into their distinctive walled garden of apps will crumble in public opinion.
It never was "yeah, it needs to be an app because the web platform doesn't have an API standard for it", geez, apple even forced a single web engine. They could have easily allowed access to their APIs on the browser. It just never was in their corporate interest to do so.
Okay, this devolved into an anti corporate rant without it being my intention to... So, go web!
One is where relatively-static content is the priority, deep-linking is important or essential and the web platform is pretty ideal for those. News articles or blogs or Wikipedia pages or those sorts of things. Things where I might want to be switching between tabs or forgetting about for a while and coming back to later.
The other is where the app is primarily interactive or where the content is a lot more likely to be real-time or ephemeral. Not least because if you're on a low-bandwidth or high-RTT connection, navigating between web pages or having interactivity blocked behind a backlog of XHRs (particularly where caching isn't permitted) is utterly miserable. My experience is that native apps usually continue feeling responsive to input even when the network itself is not responsive but that is often not true with many clickable elements in many web pages.
PWAs might be the middle-ground here but they feel a lot like Electron apps to me: still foreign to all platforms, not responsive in the way that native UI controls are, weird/missing "back" behaviours and still no better support for deep-linking than the average app would have.
Sorry for going off on a tangent, but last week I asked Gemini about security and privacy advantages of running Gmail and Google Calendar using Safari and DuckDuckGo Browser - Gemini made good arguments for using the browser versions: ironic!
Of course there are plenty of crappy native apps too, but the incidence and severity is comparatively lower and in many cases, there are well-behaved "handcrafted" small dev alternatives to crappy native apps which are much less common (or at least, more difficult to find) on the web.
I'm a big proponent of browsers including something resembling a traditional UI framework out of the box. It doesn't have to try to be perfect or fit everybody's needs (which is impossible anyway), but it will serve many developers well and give everybody else a solid foundation to build their own (much lighter) stuff on top of.
The real reason is that most of them are afraid it would reduce the number of frontend jobs. But nowadays that is already being eaten by AI...
Many of the ones that require a server side connect to your self hosted server instead of some central server on the cloud, which is a reason they will never get popular, but sounds perfect for you. There are some that use central servers, and this fact will be clearly stated in the antifeatures section. Many other F-Droid apps just work offline. And hardly any have ads.
Also Web apps are basically the 21st century version of timesharing like in the good old days, where we had one server for everyone.
Even better for censorship purposes.
If it were the case that phone apps weren't networked and could only sync through another channel like icloud/syncthing, then you'd be onto something.
But right now most apps are "web browser but worse".
Web apps require networking
What you want is a better (and easier to use) sandbox for native apps, so that users can feel as comfortable installing an app as visiting a web page as long as the app doesn't have any more permissions than the web page would have, and then you don't need central gatekeepers approving them.
Web tech is much closer to where I want than the native app stack on every device reaching parity which will never happen.
Lol, you must be from the 90s. There's like 10 now.
I've been asked why, and it's not really fear of surveillance (although I'm not a fan of it) or making a difference or whatever, just because it's one of the few ways I'm able to give the finger. Sure, noone will notice but it makes me feel better :)
I'm also old, cranky and turning into a crusty CLI guy as I get even older and crankier. If you kids need more than a TUI, get off my lawn!
Unfortunately both Google and Apple very early on identified that it was in their best interest to keep the concept around in a half-dead state and ensure nobody really built on it...
You get notification. You can autoplay video/audio. You get whaterver video or element full screen with all necessary UI. You get rotation lock. You have a fullscreen to do what ever you want for any purpose. You probably can't touch hardware APIs(for example: bluetooth/nfc) like native app. But that isn't really needed for most apps either.
On the other side. Apple seems sabotage the PWA as much as possible. You can't autoplay video/audio. You can't even fullscreen anything other than video, and when fullscreen video, UI is ignored. Also there is no way to disable gesture so your app will misfire system gesture. And you can't lock the rotation either. There is no way to auto rotate the video player or whatever when maximized either.
It's really a golden example for pretend to do something while actually not. It seems you can do pretty much everything with ios pwa. And when you try to do it. You will figured out it will have a worse experience than native app because all sort of issues.
So if you wanted to use a different browser or install a PWA without a connection to the internet, or without Google Play, all you get is a bookmark.
In my personal experience, it only validate whether manifest is malformatted though. Although it's still up to google if they want to do something wonky.
YMMV, it never lasts.
Right now Firefox cant, at least not on any of my android phones.
I've never had an issue with it, and have been using it for years. I use it for X (Twitter) so that I can avoid ads.
Looks like support for installing a PWA on Android was added in Firefox 58 back in 2018:
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/progressive-web-apps-firef...
Video demo:
https://youtu.be/heSvwQgEMLM?si=5X0iky_uVDAS6eE1
Developer and user documentation: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-web-apps-firefox-an...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
They were also highly incentivized to develop the APIs that make it all work as Chromebooks are basically hosts for browser apps. Apple, as well as the other tech giants involved in the W3C had no such incentives and were dragging their feet.
Sure, you could build "better (installable) websites" but even to get standardized stuff like background execution or notifications working was either impossible or a long series of jumping through hoops. Even installation prompts bugged out way too often.
But to be clear, if that isn't the case any more I will be positively surprized by either platform provider.
(Unless you are on iOS, where a variety of capabilities are only given to PWAs.)
PWAs require a ton of JavaScript junk to simulate that.
A network card is not required for:
- Loading local HTML files into a WebView
- Packaging an app that embeds the WebView (e.g., WinUI WebView2, macOS WKWebView, Android WebView, blah-blah)
- Running JavaScript, CSS, DOM APIs
- Using local storage, IndexedDB, etc
- Accessing file:// resources
- Communicating with native code (e.g., JS <-> native messaging)
Linux apps like GNOME Notes, Foliate, ReText, Liferea etc use the system webview.
Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Podcasts, App Store, Dash, etc use WKWebView
Can keep going on and on...
I'm not installing my electricity providers app with any permissions when their website shows the same.
let's say for the ICEblock or whatever - pull up a map pin (geotag), that can be done in a web app.
the things most people advocate apps for e.g notifications are nuisances that some of us permanently turned off. My phone is always on do not disturb, I get 0 notifications. The only time I prefer notifications is something actionable - I pay online then the bank says open app to approve in-app notification (pop up) not those things (notifications) that just come to your phone asynchronously and bother you.
I have a smartwatch (if at all) garmin it's not hooked up to my phone for notifications.
unless you're making games / hell now games can leverage webgpu - no reason to make native apps at all for 96% of things. just make a web app - service workers enable offline access for some things.
- my simple take -> do what the porno companies do in regards to tech. simple & effective. but please don't copy their ads thing.
The standard layman, on the other hand, wants to be able to trust that they can trust people.
For every person in tech that knows who Stallman is and what he stands for, there's a person in tech that believes that NFTs and AI will bring about world peace and end poverty.
ahem, heard of cloudflare? web hosters and developers are voluntarily centralizing themselves.