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Comment by pj_mukh | Hacker News Reader

The flip side is: I have an Audioguide app with reams of fancy of AI features. Even a basic non-AI one is we use GPS in the background to auto-trigger when you approach certain checkpoints on your tour, and we don't want you staring or constantly manually fiddling with the phone when you're on a tour in a neighborhood. This is all stuff just not possible with the web app

I get it, "I'm just traveling, why do I need to download an app which will be useless when I'm done traveling". Just delete it then, takes two steps!

Our reviews between our Web App and iOS app are like 2 sigma apart. Un-intuitively, our web app users are out fiddling with the app 2-3x more than our iOS app.

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Sounds like gratuitous over-use of technology.

Please just put placards on your exhibits, then I can take as long ( or as quickly ) as I need to digest the info.

People can then use their phone to translate into other languages, if needed.

No need to litigate this again, digital audioguides are now 20-25 year old technology and very popular.

> gratuitous over-use of technology.

That describes silicon valley tech culture to a tee.

The issue is that people often forget to uninstall these apps almost all the time. Apps like Delta, Southwest etc. are the perfect candidate for this. We require something similar to ephemeral apps that exist only for a limited period and automatically get deleted later. If the OS could provide such a feature by default, it would be a blessing. However, this again contradicts the commercial interests of many companies and services, so Android and iOS will likely never implement it.

Appclips in iOS are a decent shot at that. But require it to be under 15MB, which is really hard to hit, especially if you use RN, but we'll be dumping RN to make this happen as a next step.

>>The issue is that people often forget to uninstall these apps almost all the time

Fundamentally though, iOS will auto-offload the unused apps for you (you won't get any notifications). For all intents and purposes, it is an ephemeral app already.

When it comes to airline tickets I've been able to check in to a flight through a web page and then add the boarding pass to my Google Wallet without having to install that airline's app before. I'm pretty sure Apple has had some similar kind of a workflow but I wouldn't know for sure.

My android phone will put apps into "deep sleep" and remove all their permissions if I haven't opened it in a month or so. I just toss travel apps into a folder in my launcher and they are there if I need them but become just a consumer of drive space on their own.

Deep sleep is a great option. Archive is a couple steps beyond that, it essentially makes it equal to the app being uninstalled, at the cost of a bit of a disk space.

location services are available to web browsers on pretty much all consumer platforms

Not persistently, the user has to constantly bring the phone up and re-enable, which as you can imagine gets really annoying really quickly.

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