I’m having a decent experience with progressive web apps. Even posting now with a PWA for Lemmy. It’s given me a bit more control over the bloat and background processes that might be there unwitting to me. Or requiring me to investigate . I don’t enable background notifications or anything like that however. I also direct my DNS traffic thru PiHole but that’s another conversation.
I am the head of a large banking app / web in Europe. We have about 40 MiO logins per month, 39 (edit: millions) are done with the app.
Personally I would prefer the web version of everything important like banking always - but the customers are all preferring apps. So yea guess where I allocate my budget.
My doctor’s office has done this to me when I’ve called in to get help with a prescription issue I was having. Literally just gave me instructions for how to message my doctor through the app. 🫠 Mfer I’m calling because I don’t want to use it! It sucks ass too because it always takes like a week to get a one sentence reply that only addresses half of what I asked.
I tried to contact my doctor through the online portal and it wasn’t working because those systems have zero quality control. I called them and had to listen to a long-ass pre-recorded message urging me to use the portal that WASN’T FUCKING WORKING before I could go on hold to eventually talk to a person. It’s infuriating.
Most of us would probably just be fine with PWAs, but the marketing branch says no… They need everything possible about you, need the app to run at startup and send you notifications at least every 4 hours…
There’s the info you are willingly sharing through the app, no permission for that. There are really a few apps that require no permissions, usually they always need access to something. E.g. the LG app for washing machines that will only run if you register and account AND give permission to make phone calls, when you only want to download washing programs…
They for sure dislike secure browsers. Also the UI in general is horrible, of the website on Desktop too. Its blurry? The App on the other hand looks good
Really? I haven’t seen that. No Captchas ever I think.
The phone number could be for the 2FA but no idea, I don’t think I have seen it, for 2FA I have the usual authenticator, that said they have my phone for sure at least for shipping but maybe I did get asked for it and I don’t remember, they have it for shipping anyway so…
But logged out… no issues there if anything it works like Facebook where not sure what they have but the session last forever…
Of course I am using my Amazon from Spain there might be differences, like just due the laws alone I expect differences on the American one.
Delete all cookies but exceptions in the firefox privacy settings
Set security mode to strict
Use noscript and you know what they do, remove all the allowed ones and all scripts from default, disable “LAN” and “others” from “trusted” and opt-in manually
Privacy is manual work. Noscript is great, but for sure takes getting used to.
Thankfully there aren't as many great mobile webpages left anymore that I would really care about if they made me use their app. Pre-Edit: I think thankfully is the wrong word.
Still, it’s storage and heckin’ executables on your device. Everyone should get an option to use a website, even if just a poorly laid-out one, unless the vast majority of users only interact in a way that only works with local executables (like video calls). You should not need an app to check an IKEA order status on your phone (yes, they do that, see my other comment).
And I’m aware that video calls on some platforms can - and do - work in browsers but I won’t blame anyone who rejects their boss’s proposal to create a video call app in HTML/CSS/JS.
Agreed. My comment was more meant as an affront towards what mobile webpages are becoming in general. I only ever browse on my phone if there really is no other option at all.
Years of using the Links browser in my youth might have shaped my views though.
I regularly use apps that haven’t been updated for longer, and 20-year-old PC programs. The worse thing is if old versions are purposefully deprecated too early, I don’t have Play Store.
This is fine for apps that don’t use remote APIs and aren’t actively having breaking changes made to them on a regular basis, but that doesn’t apply to most of these nagging “use our app!” companies.
Side rant: I refuse to download the McDonald’s app. That’s the first question they ask (and increasingly, any fast food joint asks) when you roll through the drive through. “Are you using the app today?”
No I’m not fucking using the app today. I just want an ice cream cone. Ok!? I don’t need or want to download another goddamned app and manage another set of credentials when it takes me less time to say, “Can I please have an ice cream cone?” And for you to respond with, “I’m sorry but our ice cream machine is broken.” than it does for me to order a fucking ice cream cone on the stupid app.
I mean hells bells I’m a software engineer. I make my living designing [often unnecessary] software [which provides little tangible benefit]. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to have an app to go through a fast food drive through or use household appliances. I will die on this hill. Ok, maybe not die, but I will be severely wounded on this hill.
Ironically, I find McDonald’s has one of the better reward systems in their app. I also enjoy being able to punch in my order on a screen with any modifications I want such as extra pickle, no lettuce, etc… instead of relying on the shitty speaker to pick it up only to hear a guy be like “Did you say cherry coke?” “No, diet coke” ugh
My view as a sys admin is I’m not going to risk the security of my mobile device just so they can scour my personal information and collect marketing data on me and send it god knows where and claim its to “make ordering easier”. I just want to order my fucking food, not have my fucking identity stolen because I wanted a cheeseburger.
I’m GenZ and seeing this shit makes me feel like the boomiest of Boomers. I don’t want your goddamn motherfucking app, you can shove it where the sun don’t shine and take my order the old-fashioned way or not at all.
That is, unless I’m at home ordering delivery and using a centralized app. Having the same interface for every restaurant is so much fucking nicer than trying to figure out the weird quirks of every website or having to call them.
Building a great mobile website is much harder than building a great mobile app, so I understand when they just don’t build a great website to begin with, but taking away an existing website, yeah, that sucks.
I have doubts. Great website developers often make a half-assed app by wrapping the website in a crippled browser. The T-Mobile app is not even subtle about this, there was a URL bar in the version I last used.
You’re talking about Cordova. Cordova can actually be pretty good, if it’s made well (for example, the Voyager Lemmy app is a Cordova app), but no, I make apps with native UIs.
(Numbers and some strings were changed but the gist and 604-character length remains.)
The main function of such a long URL is to redirect desktop users to https://order.fart.cum/cz/cs/purchases/4206913372/ to see the tracking info while mobile users get directed to the app store to get an app (or view the link in the app if they have it). These are (probably) Google Firebase links and they’re absolutely terrible. While they make life slightly easier for existing app users (saves one click but only if they go through the email), this implementation makes it way harder for others to reach the content. Either you get the app, log in there and part with fucking 300 MB of storage, or if you have no mainstream App Store, storage or time, you are forced to do a workaround: Desktop Mode (that may or may not work), rewriting the URL (difficult because it’s so long and includes https: several times, may require hex-decoding), or finding a computer. All this just to check one order from a store you’ll forget about next week.
I have demonstrated that instead of just getting sent the desktop-friendly URL (and perhaps seeing a floating “Open in app” button at the destination), most users are put through extra nuisance that took effort to implement. Sure, some customers are frequent enough to use the app while most are happy with a website but once the business invests in the app, they will absolutely make sure everyone is pushed there despite it being less convenient for both parties.
Most apps would do fine without a website. Most everyone has a phone, but a fair number of people don’t have a desktop or laptop. And pretty much everyone who has a desktop or laptop also has a phone.
A number of currently popular apps don’t have a website, let alone a mobile friendly website.
A webapp sometimes works fine for phone users. There are things that websites can’t do on mobile. For example, on iOS, only the latest OS version has support for push notifications from PWAs, and even then, they can’t make noise or vibrations. They are always delivered silently. PWAs are also always rendered with WebKit on iOS. WebKit doesn’t support a number of features.
Yes, a mobile app doesn’t help desktop users, but there are waaaaaaaay more mobile users than desktop users.
Only if you absolutely need some crucial bit of information the moment it arrives, in which case, email isn’t for you, since messages can take up to 3 days to arrive.
You are not 100% alone. I technically have a smartphone but use it as a mini (5") tablet. My SIM is in a feature phone because greedy T-Mobile (Telekom in Deutschland) will not give me more than 1 MB/day for a decent price.
I think this point needs to be stressed more. It is dead simple to write a website that works well on mobile phones. In fact, the first ever website, without CSS, without any JS, without fancy HTML5 features, is mobile friendly: info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
It’s only when you start adding useless bells and whistles like floating shit in from left and right, tons of animations, side-by-side displays, overlays and whatnot that you need to start being competent to make it work on mobile.
You are correct. I once tried to develop a multi-platform web app and getting the touch events right was a pain. But a somewhat basic ESP32 setup website worked on mobile without extra effort.
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