I’m currently in a whole thing with the marketing team where we’re basically forced to do an app version of our website because bookmarks just aren’t done that well in mobile browsers. If you make the user install an app, then it’ll be on their home screen and they’ll be more likely to return to your site, whereas if you’re web-only there’s a chance they’ll forget about you after the first visit.
It’s going to cost us tens of thousands to develop the mobile app, $100/year for Apple’s developer fee, and 30% of our subscription revenue, all whilst providing no actual technical benefits or making it easier for the user.
Apple and Google have made billions of dollars just off the back of nothing more than websites wanting to have their link appear on the mobile’s home screen.
And the app is just the mobile website in a sandboxed web browser.
Yeah, but in the backend, they can now better track you.
Sandboxed, you say? So no adblock without a pi-hole-ish solution? Sold!
I block 99% of all trackers and social media.
I can’t even order a fucking pizza online.
fuck this commercial world.
It’s a fucking war zone…
24k sweet baby Jesus they want yer precious bodily fluids m8.
Why the fuck does BBC sounds have so much tracking???
Probably to collect all that it can to sell the data. Or they fucked up the feature and it triggers a connection attempt each second or sth.
I mean, even for your average commercial app, that’s an absolutely insane rate. I’m betting it keeps retrying whenever it fails or something
Yeah, honestly that almost looks like straight-up incompetence, like a ton of polling going on.
Yeah, I wondered that but I’m no tech expert.
What do you use to block attempts?
Looks like the duckduck go app for android
Thank you. I knew they had a browser but I didn’t know it could also block tracking from other apps. Definitely useful.
As someone who uses a Linux phone, this becomes more and more true everyday
As someone that doesn’t want to give my IMEI, location, and list of installed apps to anyone that asks, same here.
looks inside
shitty frontend for the website
looks inside website
It’s a Wordpress wrapper over an autogenerated CSS wrapper on their 2002 website written in HTML-1 and Perl. On Angelfire.
And requires access to your contacts and precise location for some reason.
Isolated dummy contacts and fake geolocation.
Yes, Chinese company I am the king, can’t you see how my eScooter is parked at the royal residence 24/7?
when you use their “app” but it still asks you to install the app…
The app login launches the browser to handle the login, since the app is just a front end for the webpage.
Maybe it’s not so much the business as the consumer. Commented before on travelling to a new client’s shop and having the employees asking for an app to access their payroll.
Told the manager that our site would automatically optimize for phone, works great as-is.
“These people are not going to understand that unless they can download an app.”
“No problem. I’ll show everyone how to put a shortcut on their home screen. Done! I’ll even write up directions for Android and Apple.”
<manager shaking her head>
Understand, a load of these people were illiterate, embarrassed to need help filling out the online hiring docs.
If this was your experience as a business, would you not wrap your site in an app and push it? Plus, imagine the talk, “Yeah, site’s OK but they don’t have an app.”
I consider your request to download your app as a hostile act.
Luckily you can set the browser into desktop mode and see everything super tiny (sometimes).
It’s becoming more and more common to not even design a website for desktop
I can’t count how often I go to a website on a 1440p screen and I can see only like three things at once. I fucking hate that shit
I do the web stuff for a very large news company, and over 80% of traffic is mobile, so product people don’t care about desktop. It’s being treated the way IE support used to be: an annoyingly necessary fringe user group. I imagine it’d be even worse in a company whose target demo didn’t skew sharply towards the elderly. We’re finally starting to move away from the idea of “websites exist to push people towards apps”, but it’s contentious and experimental. If I win, our sites will be far less annoying next year.
My PC is driving a 40" monitor, imagine my pain. Even worse on the extended 55", but that one’s just for movies.
SITES BE LIKE
CTRL + - all day long. And I’m old and blind, hence the monster monitor.
Back when I was young I was an ergo assessor and helped all the old people in the office actually use their computers painlessly. That shit has not changed at all and is paying serious dividends.
Your link format needs to be parentheses () instead of curly brackets {}
Me: Where’s the menu?
Waiter: “In our app.”
Me: Guess I’ll starve.
I’ve left two restaurants for the bullshit app-menu thing.
Fortunately haven’t run across one since.
you can’t even get a ride from the ‘taxi’ here without their ‘app’… and an existing account, with a verified payment method saved.
Where is “here?”
You know, here. The internet.
Ye I was typing fast and hit the wrong thing and then realized I was on my side account and not the main one im starting to use so I switched off and didnt even noticed until I decided to check notifications.
Its fixed now.
Would you like a cookie?
Are you 18?
How it feels browsing AliExpress as of late…
I’m using piefed on Firefox via my phone lol. Oh no.
Sounds like Serializd. I love that site so much, but the dev clearly cares way more about the app than the site cause there’s so many basic features on the app that have no plans to ever come to the site (or at least none announced).