With responsive design becoming mainstream I'm fine with using my browser for 90% of my internet work. In some cases like Google docs it's painful to use the web version so I just use the app.
EDIT: I wish they'd add a console to mobile web browsers though.
for me, this is signal that i wasn't supposed to be visiting that resource in the first place
Why would someone try to force me off of my browser (that has ad-blocking and tracker-blocking mitigations) and on to a locked-down app that may want permission to run in the background, display notifications, access my files or camera, etc?
Maybe it really is to "improve my experience"... yeah, right.
There are several sites I use regularly for which I refuse to install the app. There are a lot more sites that I visit only occasionally because someone links to it, and that site immediately wants me to download the app and refuses to show me the content that was linked to. Fuck off with that.
I default to building web applications. Actually getting people to install your special app is in any case a race to the bottom. Some will, most won't. It's onboarding friction. If you can shave a few steps of your onboarding process, the chance that somebody comes out the other end is simply higher.
As a user, I rarely install apps to begin with and frankly the appeal of "native" is limited to well guarded APIs into jealously magical device capabilities that phones have that most applications don't actually need. I know how the sausage is made and there just isn't that much there.
As someone who worked on this "jerk" position (first as tier 1, (T2 was team lead), later promoted to small team tier 3s to actually judge the ambigous cases and discus enforcing the rules with the store head honcho) before they downsized our team from 200 to 20 people through multiple rounds by automating the system, it was not really up to me to decide whether app will pass or not.
We had to follow strictly the rules, if you would not follow them and someone found through random check you have issues, even if I though many of these rules were stupid and I was frustrated to have to reject app for stupid reasons.
And you are not allowed to reach to the dev outside the system to let them know how to circumvent the system and tell them the reason why their app was rejected. If you try to do this, dev will still reach to the company saying someone told him this, they will investigate it and find out it was you and you are again in trouble for trying to help the dev fight the stupid rules.
I also think app development requirements are too high. Just to compile your app and run the build process you need a very high end computer. I could never do it with my modest laptop and therefore gravitated towards web programming and more backend work. Thankfully I avoided all the pain of building apps and getting them approved by store owners. But I do have respect for people who have to deal with this bs.
It may sound too opinionated and may hurt some feeling but I don't like android at all. I think it sucks. But I have little choice. So I grin and bear.
That's already the norm.
Facebook seems to be in this game. Constant notifications to install the app, and as well increasingly degraded experience in the web version (both desktop and mobile).
It's kinda there. You just need to connect with adb and then use chrome://inspect. It's actually a really nice feature and I've used it quite a bit over the past two years.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/remote-debugging/...