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Comment by Uchikoma | Hacker News Reader

Not happy with that decision. (We don`t do redirects)

After working for some time with iOS we recognized that an "app" suites our customers on mobile better than a "site". So we have a classic website for ecommerce, and a rich client application for mobile devices (HTML5, Angular). Both have very different domains and layouts, there is no 1:1 mapping possible except for the most basic features. The RIA page is optimized for gestures, orientation changes etc.

Contrary to mainstream opinion we believe mobile (for ecommerce, where people interact with a site, not newspaper sites etc.) is different from desktop (mouse, keyboard, large screen) and not just a "responsive" small version of your site (or desktop just a larger version of your mobile first site).

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How does that matter ? - when a user clicks on a search result they expect to get the content described in the snippet. If you're unable to deliver that content on mobile then it makes perfect sense for you not to show up in the search results.

If a user is searching for a product and they click on the link to that product in an ecommerce store, they want a product page not your app.

That makes sense, but only when searching on a mobile browser. It seems like Google should show different results based on the user agent if penalising for poor support of that user agent.

Exactly.

As a mobile user, if I notice that I'm getting served different content and it doesn't let me do what I could on the full site, it offends me so much that I leave and do my best not to come back. Edit: the other thing that sends me running are bad UI such as attempts at flicking left/right that interfere with vertical scrolling, pages that can't be zoomed, or a page that changes layout on orientation changes and keeps the font the same size. All of these are anti-patterns from people that have thought shallowly about mobile but mistaken it for insight.

Wikipedia has a horrifyingly bad iOS site, but it's the only mobile site I return to; but there's no other site on the Internet that can do that.

I could not agree more. I wish site authors would not waste thier time with poorly mobile optimized versions. Just serve me the desktop version, my mobile browser can handle it.

I honestly wish i could upvote you more than once - exactly my thoughts.

I don't know, but it surely pre-dates the smartphone age when the installed browser wasn't able to cope with a more or less fully featured website.

> Wikipedia has a horrifyingly bad iOS site

Is what iOS gets different than what Android gets, "http://en.m.wikipedia.org/..."?

On Android phone with Firefox, at least, that site seems almost perfect: all extraneous cruft removed, important sidebars intelligently incorporated, the main article text provided in nice readable reflowed form, and all other sections expandable but closed by default. It's easy to read and quick to navigate. I can't think offhand of anything I'd change about it.

I think you missed the point.

It's not about defining what experience people get, it's that as they are coming into your site, they get the right experience for your content on their device, regardless of whether they were given a desktop link on a mobile device or visa versa.

As demonstrated in the diagram, this is punishing people who strip the tails off incoming links so the link example.org/stories/good-news-everyone gets directed to m.example.org and the user is left with the mobile experience, but the wrong content.

Then we should show up in the Google search results with different urls depending on the device used for the search. There is no 1:1 mapping of site to mobile "pages" with a RIA.

I don't know what your particular site is, but unless it's something that I'm going to use extremely frequently, I can assure you I'm not going to be downloading an app to use it.

If it's an ecommerce site, where I'm browsing to see what you've got to offer, and at what price, then you've just lost the chance of a sale by not supporting me on a mobile browser.

If you don't do redirects, what's the problem? If you handle desktop web links and open it in your rich RIA "app", then everyone's happy and Google won't care.

But if I click an email from your email http://you/richclient/whatever and get taken to http://m.you/ I will close the tab and never come back (and apparently Google will slap you around a bit)

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