Native phone apps are more invasive and can therefore be used for more extensive tracking and spying, which is good for ad revenue.
Remember how all the largest spying products like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, etc aggressively push you to install their phone apps even though they are (or were) perfectly usable through their mobile websites.
Reddit is a really weird one to me. Their mobile site is very nice - so nice that I don't feel any desire to install the app - aside from the fact that they desperately want me to stop using it and push the app at every opportunity. (Recently they even decided to block NSFW-flagged content from the mobile site unless you're logged in - you get a box telling you to install the app to see it.)
What I don't get is why they put all the effort into maintaining a high-quality mobile site if they hate people using it this much. Just get rid of it and load the desktop version. Pop-ups saying "Reddit works better in the app" would be less off-putting if the alternative was an unoptimized desktop site, rather than a perfectly good mobile site whose only downside was said pop-ups.
You must be using a different reddit website, the one I know is horrible. It's slow, it's buggy, videos don't always work without a refresh after waiting 10 seconds to be able to click play. The UI is all wrong:
for example, you open the comments of a post, it opens a faux-modal with a X button. You tap it, it closes the post but opens the subreddit. It doesn't go back to where you were.
Another example is how to collapse a thread on the comments you need to press the empty space beside the username?!?!
It's so slow and wrong that I've built my own front-end, but it's virtually impossible to load reddit videos correctly...
Maybe they mean old.reddit.com. I use it on mobile and it's fine. Fast, not too many pushes to change to the app, r/friends/comments works.
Twitter on mobile has become almost unusable (unable to see most content without making an account), though I've found a workaround: it's not totally broken in incognito windows, so I guess that's how I read it now.
I actually use the old desktop version of Reddit on my phone, because I find all other versions of the site worse. All of the other ones have a bloated UI with giant elements while hiding useful elements.
My only gripe is the upvote, downvote, and " comments" buttons are a little too small compared to the other elements. Oh, and that new slide or multi picture UI sucks.
It loads quickly too. Quicker than the mobile versions, which is ironic.
The more users who download the app, the higher their rankings are. The higher the rankings, the more users see and download your app. It's very obvious why they're doing this
I think the anger was justified at the time. The rich web experience back in those days was extremely limited (as it still sometimes is, on iOS). There was no way anyone was going to write a music player that could compete with the built-in one using just the "rich web experience".
Connection speeds in the original iPhone era were low, as was processing power. Spotify wouldn't have been able to provide you with the service it can provide over the web now.
The focus on the web was also a complete break from existing smartphones, where installing applications had been the norm for years. iPhones weren't exactly the first to feature apps, or even app stores, and delivering an iPhone experience that was as smooth as a Windows Mobile or Blackberry experience was going to be difficult without native code. At the same time, everyone already knew that upper and middle management (and all the other departments to convince when introducing new software) were going to buy iPhones because new, shiny Apple stuff often scores well as a status symbol.
At the time, it made complete sense to be mad. It's not that people didn't want to create websites, it's that websites were simply not equivalent to the real deal. A lot has changed since then.
As I recall, the "rich web experience" that Jobs was pushing for didn't mean it would be mobile Web for everything. Wasn't his idea that apps could be installed locally, but would be written in JavaScript and use a Web stack for the UI?
Given the popularity of tools like Cordova and React Native, and the absolute dominance of Electron on desktop, I'd say he wasn't exactly wrong.
The web isn’t a first class citizen on desktop as you can’t run new AAA games in one. The real difference is the web is a more limited UI that breaks down when your also forced to use the more limited interface of mobile.
For example on desktop the top 10% or so of the screen is taken up by the browsers UI and tabs which is normally fine. On a tablet in keyboard mode your left with ~40% of the screen being useable. Native applications sidestep this by not needing the browsers UI.
AAA games are a weird example. It's one of the few app categories that really needs full native performance, although a lot of them can also scale nicely to run on older hardware.
WebGPU and WebAssembly are getting close to matching the speed and capabilities of older hardware.
Tab UI is possible to hide, and has been for some time. You can "app-ify" a web site into a dedicated window with no browser UI.
ISTR apps that we doing this >10 years ago.
I think the real differences break down to economics. Can't charge an app store fee for web sites or force sites to use your advertising network.
For me, the big thing I can't do with a web app is work around the keyboard. If I try to write a chat app, the keyboard will often cover the text box, and there's often no way to prevent this. There's no APIs for "tell me where the on-screen keyboard is so I can move the app UI out of the way" or even "automatically resize the window to exclude the keyboard".
The options for showing a numpad are also very limited. <input type="number"> exists, but it doesn't work for things that aren't numbers, like codes starting with 0.
That’s not a solution to the issue though. An independent application is managed by the OS, but websites are generally managed by the browser which has multiple tabs. Users don’t want every tab to be treated like it’s own app, which means websites need to play nice with the browsers UI even if the OS did give them full control.
Now, mobile OS have mechanisms to treat websites as native apps but your still stuck with web baggage. From a users perspective installing this website as a native app is simply worse than installing native app. Basically when you start improving the websites as app enough, such as gracefully handling network outages, you just end up with a native application.
From the other direction anything that would be fine as a website is already fine. You don’t get websites killing huge numbers of native apps because in that case there weren’t any native apps built to be killed.
This is a very important point. Mobile web apps primarily don‘t feel right because of the browser UI and also because the interaction with scrolling/tapping is never quite as perfect.
People say this a lot, but really, what can a native app track that a web app can't? To track location, you need to give the app permission, just like the web. To receive push notifications, you need to give the app permission, just like the web.
Native apps have much more access to lower level APIs and had fixed identity that could be shared with all other apps.
The web was always limited by JS access, processing power, network connectivity, and a very fragile identity graph that was routinely reset. That's why Safari's battle on privacy is routinely seen as a misguided effort by most of the adtech industry that knows that SDKs in mobile apps reveal a magnitude more data.
Computers are kept in a fixed or limited number of locations. Phones are tracking devices that follow you throughout the day. The data they generate is far more valuable for building a consumer profile.
A mobile app can get location updates every 15 minutes even when you're not using it. A web page can only request location when the browser is processing its requests.
To give you an idea, web apps can't track location while running in the background no matter what permissions you give them. Native apps can track you while running in the background
On Android an app can do all kinds of crazy stuff without permission like draw over other apps; I assume some of that could be useful for tracking
On iOS though you can't do that stuff, and I would tend to think apps are more sandboxed than websites (no cookies, for one). I don't know for sure though; I'd love to hear more from someone who has more firsthand experience.
On the web you can browse most sites without even logging in. Not so in mobile apps. This is makes a huge difference in terms of data gathering. And no, you can't just force everyone to login to your web app since then your search ranking will tank. Some sites tries to work around this, but so far most sites people use lets you browse without logging in.
It's not spying, it's the first party revenue. It's easier to collect a fee for an app install and for Apple to take a huge cut. App dominance was very deliberately engineered by Apple. It didn't happen organically.
> Native phone apps are more invasive and can therefore be used for more extensive tracking and spying, which is good for ad revenue.
It's probably because the specificiation for native apps is always cooked up by a single company, whereas the web specificiation is always under scrutiny of multiple organizations.
Yes, the conflicting incentive angle was implied in my comment, and is imho an important reason why these specifications should not be written and imposed by a single actor.
Remember how all the largest spying products like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, etc aggressively push you to install their phone apps even though they are (or were) perfectly usable through their mobile websites.