This but unironically
First, there was web browsers which you could use to access most everything on the net. Then came apps. Then people started getting sick of having too many apps and started wanting all-in-one apps
on the other hand, stop putting apps in webpages
- Apps were not supposed to be given a constrained execution environment that is years behind what the hardware can do
- Years of internet and no real world use-case for using anything other than Lotus 123
- Wanted to do something else for a laugh? We had a tool for that: It was called “Games”
- “Yes please let my hardware be useless without internet access” - Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged
Bold of you to assume that the websites wrapped up as apps are in any way useful if you lose internet access.
Service workers are supported by every web browser and enable websites to work offline. They can even do periodic background pushes/refreshes.
My dream is that one day PWAs replace 90% of apps in existence today.
Love running apps in a worse operating system running on top of my operating system
depends what the app is. If its proprietary trash I’m forced to interact with because capitalism, you know I want it in firefox with ublock and as locked down as possible.
If it’s something relatively trivial I use once or twice and never think about it again? Better to not have that lingering around on my device.
A good web app is leagues better than several bad native apps, but good, standards-based native apps are almost always better. I’m taking libreoffice over google docs any day, but for more obscure stuff a web-app means I can run it on any device with a browser, not just whatever single OS it was developed and maintained for.
The browser is a tool designed to give the user control over how pages are rendered. Capitalists hate that.
Apps" are bazinga shit and any economic or social pressure pushed on me to use them pisses me off.
This makes me sad because phone apps should just be touch-friendly programs that you use on your phone, which should be as useful as any program you install on a PC.
Right? A computer is a computer. I can theoretically run any arbitrary program on this thing. So why is every phone app so objectively shitass?
There’s momentum on phones to make programs that aren’t for the existing user, they’re for the new user, the potential next user. They go so far as to define first time users’ experience as “user friendly”. Well I’m a user too and it certainly isn’t very friendly to me when I have to go hunting for a feature you took away last week and hid somewhere.
Also, any time a UX designer says the word " cluttered" they should be immediately shot because that word means “this app is too useful and it might scare grandma if she sees three too many buttons”
I think with the cluttered thing, it really depends on what the app is trying to do. Sometimes it works sometimes it just results in too many taps to get where you want.
But you’re right, there’s this tendency to do minimalist design for minimalism’s sake. I think it’s mainly to do with the corpo influence on tech, especially with mobile apps.
Clutter is a real thing, but it’s something that’s present all the time when it really should not be and is so in an obstructive way, such as ads, locked out premium features, reminders of premium features they want you to buy, wasted empty space, etc. In contrast something like a settings menu definitionally cannot be cluttered (at worst it can be disorganized or poorly labeled) because it’s something that’s rarely touched and which needs to be exhaustive in its contents.
So apps tend to be actually extremely cluttered in bad ways (because monetization is real clutter), while also being infuriatingly barebones. They’re the actual worst thing and should simply stop being a thing.
Well I’m a user too and it certainly isn’t very friendly to me when I have to go hunting for a feature you took away last week and hid somewhere.
At some point it should be punishable by law to change shit.
Like imo someone should hang for the slow steps Reddit is taking to kill old.reddit.com when people CLEARLY FUCKING LIKE IT AND PREFER IT TO THEIR FUCKING APP.
I’ve used old.reddit.com for years because the mobile site is just fucking garbage. And it just works, so much better. It’s infinitely faster. The app is even worse than the mobile site.
Like all this fucking time and energy wasted on work making shit nobody wants
