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Comment by Sindisil | Hacker News Reader

A website being used in a web browser seems to you like an edge case?! Really?

If that's really a common view, we really did lose the plot.

For a social media site on mobile, yes.

We really lost the plot, then. None of the user-facing and user-benefiting features of the social media apps need native-specific capabilities.

It's never about the technology or if it's theoretically feasible but that tracking, push notifications and ad blocking are much better handled in mobile apps for most platforms.

I'm not sure I follow. Do you think that someone using the Twitter app is more or less tracked than someone using their mobile web browser?

More, as you have the advertising identifiers from Apple / Google on mobile and you are also not able to block tracking scripts / tracking ads like on mobile web (At least not without more effort or installing additional software or a vpn).

Then we are in agreement: native apps are only made to the benefit of the companies, not the users.

This is not true. I’ve worked in this space. Whenever users had the choice, they chose native iOS about two thirds of the time, native Android about a quarter of the time, and web about 10% of the time. This is across all platforms, including desktop, so the actual user preference for web was even lower than that. We didn’t care which platform people used and weren’t pushing people onto native.

Users genuinely prefer native apps. People don’t seem to have any problem accepting this when you compare things like Electron to desktop apps. It matters even more on resource-constrained mobile devices.

You are talking about their choices over distribution channels. I'm talking about who gets to benefit about the features offered by these platforms.

> native apps are only made to the benefit of the companies, not the users.

We literally built the apps because people wanted them. The whole reason the App Store exists is because when Steve Jobs told everybody that to build iPhone apps you should build web apps, people revolted and demanded native apps. The preference for native apps over web apps predates the App Store.

Because the web as an application platform sucked back then.

People wanted them because mobile web sites sucked, and because it was difficult to build a decent mobile UX using early mobile web tech. That’s not true anymore but people still reach for apps by reflex even though it makes absolutely no sense most of the time. I don’t want your native code running on my device if a website serves the purpose just as well.

The “why are you making me use an app” backlash will come eventually and nobody will be saying “people want apps” anymore.

I have zero social media apps installed. Nobody in my family has social media apps. We are not the majority, but we do exist…

I have no idea how Bluesky works as native app, always used the mobile Web version.

Same applies to every other social media web sites I use, and yes I need to click away the banner that regularly asks to install the native app, which would anyway be Electron for mobile.

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