14 ms·

“It works better in the app”

• blenderob 20d ago
  Feels like this field has become a lot about doing the easy, visible parts, getting a month of attention, maybe a promotion, then moving on to the next "new project". Meanwhile, the people who stay behind and actually make these half-finished apps work properly, maintain them and deal with all the boring problems rarely get the same credit or benefits.
  • pjc50 20d ago
    Google is notorious for prioritizing new features and new apps for promotion, so yes.
  • baggachipz 20d ago
    Then let the app die on the vine for a while and ultimately abandon it a couple years later.
• lmm 20d ago
  This isn't about the app being unfinished, it's about Google deliberately half-assing support for open standards. They want you to be stuck in their calendar ecosystem so they make sure there's more friction adding a calendar from outside than adding someone else's Google calendar.
• tisdadd 20d ago
  And this is why I usually say, I will look at it when I am in front of my computer again for most things, side from a free does where I mainly am reading.
• arthurezende 20d ago
  It's almost impossible to use social networks on mobile without installing their apps
  • unglaublich 20d ago
    They artificially lock it down, because the app will give them more data to collect than the web app plus a larger surface to annoy the user with notifications, widgets, and other advertisement.
  • onion2k 20d ago
    If you don't install it they keep you from spending time on them. It's a feature, not a bug.
    • nottorp 20d ago
      Not to mention the battery savings when nothing pulls those "engagement" posts in the background...
  • brk 20d ago
    Bug or feature?
  • kelvinjps10 20d ago
    you can with liberedirect or ublock origin and firefox for android.
  • wilkystyle 20d ago
    It's impossible for me to use YouTube with the app. Safari + uBlock origin lite and I never see an ad.
    • surajrmal 20d ago
      Most YouTubers still have sponsor sections on their videos so you probably do see some ads. Also why not pay for YouTube premium to remove the ads while still supporting the creators?
      • CorpOverreach 19d ago
        SponsorBlock is the answer to that.
• unglaublich 20d ago
  Most companies mostly want app access because you get a bunch of APIs with which to annoy users with marketing notifications, tracking, and url handling.
• confusedbucket 20d ago
  If only Google had a UI framework that would let them build apps and target all platforms.
  • davedx 20d ago
    Yeah. The problem is, they have 7 cross platform UI frameworks...
• nonethewiser 20d ago
  [flagged]
• brk 20d ago
  At this point the barrier for me to install an app is pretty high. If you're going to needlessly gate certain functions behind an app that work on a desktop browser (or could work in-browser), then I just won't use those functions. If by extension that degrades the value I get from your site, then I just won't use the site, and I won't be contributing to ADU stats you promote to advertisers. Every single company has turned this into a situation where I cannot trust your apps with privacy or security, and the risk and hassle isn't worth the install.
  • tsylba 19d ago
    I am the same, the sad reality is that companies don't (really) aim to change our (old folk tech peoples) behavior, they are aiming to make a new normal for the next generation of consumers.
  • noir_lord 20d ago
    Indeed, I've no interest in native apps to do something that can be done in a web app and if you don't let me do it in a web app I'll bounce and either find someone who can or do without unless there is a seriously compelling use case (I'm not that dogmatic). As a result the only native apps I use on my phone are Kindle, Authy and Firefox because I trust Firefox to prevent apps doing a lot of the sketchy shit locally a lot more than I trust an app/the host OS to do so.
    • em3rgent0rdr 20d ago
      > "do something that can be done in a web app" I'll bite. What important features can only be done in an "app" but not a web app nowadays?
      • edent 20d ago
        NFC reading is one. That's why lots of Governments publish apps - it's a reliable way to check your passport if you need a visa etc. It might be coming to the web - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_NFC_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_NFC_API
• ebtebt 20d ago
  Then you have other sites/companies that go the opposite way: having functionality that is App-only. As an extreme example: my health insurance provider in Spain (Alan) is app-only. They don’t even have a website one can use. It is maddening for those of us who always prefer desktop over mobile.
  • utopiah 20d ago
    What's even more maddening is that I bet their "app" is actually a WebView and provides no native functionality.
• Thanemate 20d ago
  I recently decided to use my google calendar to track my mood, as part of my CBT therapy. What baffles me is that, there's no way in the web app to assign a default calendar for new events. When I create a new event on the web, I have to scroll through all the calendars that I have and choose the one that I want every time. Meanwhile, in the mobile app, I can simply tap on a new block, the event window appears, and the selected calendar defaults to what I used for my last added event.
  • stronglikedan 20d ago
    I think the bigger issue there is that you're trusting Google with your health data. Surely there's an offline calendar app that could help you track it just as well. Anyway, I hope you benefit from the therapy regardless of how you decide to track it.
    • Quarrelsome 19d ago
      everyone is allowed to take their own risks. I don't pay for contents insurance. I'm up around a $1000 on that bet so far.
      • padjo 19d ago
        If the lose isn't going to dramatically impact your financial wellbeing then insurance is always an irrational bet.
        • Quarrelsome 19d ago
          ye the sums would be different if I had dependents, but I'm fortunate that I don't.
        • avidiax 19d ago
          It's not irrational if you know that the insurance company has mispriced your policy, and filing a claim won't be more trouble than it's worth. Getting a contents policy in a safe neighborhood where you know that there's little risk is likely not a good deal. Getting a contents policy when you've learned that your neighbors are getting into hard drugs is probably a good deal. Paying $19/mo for third-party full coverage + theft on your $1,000 mobile phone is probably not a good deal even if you know you are high risk, for the simple reason that at $19, they game must be that they will find any reason to refuse to pay, and will give you a poorly refurbished phone for your troubles if you make them honor the insurance.
• mrweasel 20d ago
  It made even sadder by the fact that often the "app" is more or less just webview. More and more I'm giving up on apps, and online self-servicing as the structures and scope of what either one can do is increasing narrowing. It's much much easier to just call these days (fortunately AI answering the phone is still not prevalent). Customer service will obviously inform you that "You can just our self-service solutions in the future", even if you literately just called in because you can't due to inflexibility and options you don't understand. Also "you can manage it from your phone" is not the sales pitch it once was, because it's no longer the entire truth. You can in fact ONLY manage it from your phone. If whatever you're selling requires an app, chances are that I'm not buying and if it's a service, I will seek out your store or staff and make them do it for me.
  • LoganDark 20d ago
    My ISP removed the ability to manage your network with a browser. Not over the cloud -- they stripped the admin panel from their firmware and require you to use the app. The app is filled with dark patterns that try to get you to use their firewall and their tracking and enable their public Wi-Fi hotspot and not do port forwarding or DNS configuration or separate SSIDs or etc. Also, every few weeks it decides it's outdated and blocks you from doing anything until you update from the app store. Also, every time you open it there's an annoying loading screen with an advertisement. And all throughout the app, everywhere you go there are advertisements for tertiary purchases and offers. Like, yeah, I get that the app needs to exist for these fancy special stupid animations of the router with the waves coming off of it, yeah I see the wifi coming off of the router with all the buttons around it, showing all the things I can do with it, and then I scroll right past that and have to go down to the equipment details and then go into the advanced settings to even configure any of the stuff I actually want to configure about my network ever. And yeah, I know it's the super duper app with all the special services, I know I can get superduper mobile phone line and also TV and cable and also free Peacock streaming service! with the purchase of whatever, and also, did I know that fiber speeds are now being offered but not in my area? Did I know that other areas benefit from up to 2 gigabit speeds?! I better check now to see if my area qualifies! (It doesn't, I made an FCC complaint about it and they responded to tell me it might happen eventually and it hasn't happened) Literally bought new networking gear from Ubiquiti because of this crap, and could not be happier with it. Only problem is the ISP literally blocks any modem that's their stupid combo router modem Internet-of-Shit cloud-connected hardware-as-a-service garbage. Modem works for a few hours, then the line goes suddenly dead (even to their own router) until I've called them and gotten told that my modem is faulty even though it was working fine until they cut the line, etc. so I have to deal with still having their router in front of my own gear
• afavour 20d ago
  It’s a shame the web was so slow to adapt to this new mobile world. When it all started things like offline capabilities were very difficult to do on the web and native development felt necessary. These days the web can actually do a lot… but it’s too late. People expect to find something in the App Store, pinning a web site to their Home Screen is just not something they know they can do. So a lot of people waste an enormous amount of money on three different implementations for, often, simple CRUD operations.
  • goosejuice 20d ago
    I think the web did fine. People can't pin a web app because Apple made it difficult for them to do exactly that.
    • tpmoney 20d ago
      Burger menu -> share -> add to home screen is difficult? How do you pin a web app in Android then?
      • bel8 20d ago
        How is "share" intuitive here? I want to pin the app, not share. That seems purposefully misplaced. As usual with malicious compliance. In Android: Menu > Install and create shortcut. Much cleaner, intentional, and visible with a single click for me.
        • tpmoney 20d ago
          It’s intuitive in as much as anything on smart phones is, because the share menu is the OS mechanism for sending data from any iOS app to somewhere else. You use the same menu to save a file to Dropbox, put a photo into a note, add a bookmark etc. Effectively if you want to take something that lives in an app and have it live somewhere else, you use the share menu.
          • bel8 19d ago
• pier25 20d ago
  [dead]
• cooggog 20d ago
  Hah. I was trying to buy something on the BestBuy website. I’m not sure what kinda of bitcoin miner they’re running on that site, but it repeatedly manages to crash the tab as I was trying to browse. I had to eventually just download the app.
• alansaber 20d ago
  So what's the solution again? Everything as a web app?
  • ryanmcbride 20d ago
    The solution is for companies to stop half-assing multiple things, and instead whole ass one thing. It's impossible though. There actually isn't a single company alive that's capable of doing something like that, because it would require a decision maker to say "instead of these two things I want just one thing" and the second that happens it will be the end of the world.
  • aetch 20d ago
    Just let the app that’s clearly a web app pretending to be an app be accessible from the web
• gwbas1c 20d ago
  I've had an issue where, when clicking a "locations" link on a web site, Google Maps "permanently" added a bunch of locations to my map. This was quite unexpected on my part. (I think it was for a chain or churches or a similar civic organization) IE, I think someone made a group of locations in Google Maps, and then for the "Locations" link on their website, just linked to the group of locations in Google Maps. In the browser, this works fine, but on mobile, Google Maps just imports the link to my account without asking.
• gchamonlive 20d ago
  The author said it perself, "the greatest minds of our generation" working at Google, so those jagged edges are surely by design, and it's the rational most efficient solution in a economy of attention where the line between the product and the user is blurred.
  • surajrmal 20d ago
    In some cases it's just because the userbase using the web on their phone instead of the app is incredibly small and it's not worth funding feature parity. It can be difficult to distinguish this case from more hostile takes like reddit and Twitter.
    • Gander5739 20d ago
      In this case the feature wasn't available on the mobile app, either.
    • leot 19d ago
      Reddit has started putting up a paywall of sorts to block mobile web users, saying that instead, users should install the app. old.reddit.com remains as an ugly workaround. The whole thing is nuts: 1. All of reddit's content is UGC. They write literally nothing themselves. There's a strong argument that everything there written by unpaid users should be considered a public good. 2. Tech companies are now, ostensibly, aware of value of having users who engage intentionally instead of compulsively. Mobile apps, with their notifications etc., encourage compulsion. Websites less so. It will be an interesting reckoning when the polity wakes up to the idea that as social media companies don't pay for the content, they should have no right to restrict access to it. LLMs likewise wouldn't work at all without the petabytes of data they either got for free from users or purloined, and so the argument for their weights being public goods is similar.
      • yepyeppers 19d ago
        old.reddit was the only tolerable interface but it is now login-walled too. God forbid you post any comments that deviate even slightly from the Reddit consensus or you will soon find yourself IP-blocked. That’s barely an exaggeration.
• arc_light 20d ago
  [flagged]
• chrisjj 19d ago
  "you must use a computer web browser". Yeah, and I have one on my Android phone!
• OroPla 20d ago
  I don't want yet another app on my phone. My rule for apps these days is that if it is not available through F-Droid, I won't be using it.
• nazgulsenpai 20d ago
  I use LineageOS with MicroG and decided probably 5 years ago to just use PWAs instead of apps for any online service and grab whatever other utilities I might need from Obtanium or F-Droid. Also the experience on my Thinkphone is the exact same as it was on my Pixel XL 2. I know not everyone can do this, and some PWAs are downright terrible if they work at all, but for my usecase it has been great.
• rbreve 20d ago
  Google has a lot of these inconveniences, super easy to fix but for some reason the don't.
• imnotr0b0t 20d ago
  [dead]
• Gualdrapo 20d ago
  I sell stuff ocassionaly on a "local" platform called MercadoLibre (like, I could afford a new handlebar for my bicycle so I could sell there the old one). Mercadolibre kind of wants to be the argentinian Amazon, even lobbying in the argentinian government so they will ban similar platforms from other countries. With time, MercadoLibre has become incredibly hostile and greedy for us small sellers, while favoring corpos. They charge you 25% for each sale you do via their platform, but the latest thing they did was to force you to "identify" you are you via a website where they track your face features and scan your ID "because of security". Yeah, that sounds good, so I did that in 2021. They asked this again last year because of reasons. But this time they won't let you use a regular web browser: they forced you to do this via their app. No matter how much you try, it will always fail citing "compatibility issues" or "errors". I tried to complain but their customer support is incredibly shitty, if you even manage how to find to contact them. But oh surprise, their "app" is just a web wrapper.
  • gandreani 19d ago
    I bet they had to change identity verification providers so that's why you have to re-validate again. It's a shame there's no alternative to Meli. I'm shopping around for a macbook and I would much rather have a marketplace with verified identities and profiles than the shady whatsapp groups and contacts I'm finding.
• Larrikin 20d ago
  If your app can be implemented in React Native with no developer pain, it should just be a website. Native is a much better experience than mobile websites when you actually use the features and power of these fairly advanced computers we carry around in our pockets.
• the_bear 20d ago
  In Google's defense, they weren't the ones that championed the "everything must be an app" movement. My memory of the 2010s is that Google (and while they were relevant, Palm) pushed cross-platform web apps, but Apple ran a successful marketing campaign to convince everyone that everything on mobile must be a native app for reasons[1]. So we end up with a walled garden of native apps that must be approved by and pay a tax to the company that makes the OS. The result is that instead of building one app that works on all platforms, software companies need to build three apps: Web, iOS, and Android. I'm sympathetic to why most software companies (including my own) choose to just build a web app wrapped in a native wrapper. If a company does decide to build a totally separate iOS app, I dunno, it seems reasonable not to build support for every single niche feature that the web app has. I'm not sure I get the outrage here, especially since Google has a long track record of preferring web apps to native. [1]The "reasons" primarily are that Apple refused to support PWAs, hamstrung mobile Safari, and refused to allow third-party browsers. So while it's true that native apps can offer a better experience than mobile web apps, that's mostly just because Apple artificially restricts web apps.
  • moritonal 20d ago
    Oh don't, I remember being at a Google PWA Conference where they showed a world where you walked up to a coffee machine which served you a website over some local Bluetooth beacons, you asked for a coffee and it made it. It was such a hopeful concept looking back.
    • edent 19d ago
      They even called it "Physical Web". It was a lovely concept - even if it did abuse Bluetooth beacons somewhat.
    • chrisjj 19d ago
      I can see why it didn't catch on. The phone user would prefer to use the on-machine UI needed for regular users and bigger.
    • Neywiny 19d ago
      I'm still off and on trying to do this. Would be so helpful for IoT things. Can't figure out with all the PAN stuff what technology to use in what way
• LoganDark 20d ago
  There's another class of problem, websites that pretend to work in the browser but refuse to support any reasonable type of login session. Like, sure, there are login sessions that expire after five seconds of inactivity. Sometimes it even turns out that they don't support passkeys or TOTP, and you have to add a phone number for SMS authentication, which reduces account security by letting attackers prove your identity. I want a browser extension that automatically clicks those "I'm still here" pop-ups on scummy websites like this... But they have an app. And they don't even shove it in your face that the experience is better with the app or whatever. But it is for one and literally only ever one singular reason: it doesn't log you out every five seconds
• pyjarrett 20d ago
  When I was job hunting earlier this year, LinkedIn on my phone told me to install the app. Sure, why not? So I did. It refused to authenticate and never worked. One good point is that at least the mobile web version didn't lock me out with an impassable overlay like some websites are starting to do.
  • inigyou 19d ago
    The "use desktop site" button bypasses at least half of those popups.
• pelotron 20d ago
  This past weekend I was flying on Delta and my first flight was delayed such that I was going to miss my connecting flight, so I rebooked onto a later one. During my layover I visited the gate agent to get a boarding pass with a seat assignment. "Do you have the Delta app?" "Nope." Then he pressed a few keys on his keyboard and printed out a new boarding pass for me within five seconds. I couldn't believe he was trying to kick me over to the app if it was that easy.
  • dingaling 20d ago
    Aer Lingus have introduced app-only self-service bag drops, which are invariably swamped with passengers trying to get them to work while a single staff runs around clearing on-screen errors and directing people to rescan, or reweigh their bags, or move closer to the window to get a 4G signal. Meanwhile non-app users are directed to the otherwise idle staff at the check-in desk. It's bliss.
  • nunez 20d ago
    MLB is the exact opposite of this. You can't get tickets without the Ballpark app. No paper tickets at most stadiums. The app asks for all sorts of personal info too (which I usually spoof). They're even trying for biometric check-in now.
    • snazz 19d ago
      I have managed to print out a paper ticket (from some dark corner of the website) and scan it on the barcode scanner at an MLB stadium. The employees were surprised it worked.
      • nunez 18d ago
        WAIT WHAT I'm going to try harder now!
• ninjahawk1 20d ago
  What’s even worse is intentionally degrading performance for sign-in’s. This is still circumstantial but I’ve been looking into that over the past few weeks. When switching between google accounts on a random app or game, no issue. Quick code, you’re in. When I switch between accounts on Claude on mobile, I have to sign in, enter the code, screen freezes, I sign in again, can’t verify it’s me, I sign again, wait 30 seconds, I’m in. I have to sign in three separate times when signing into a single google account in Claude. For every single other app it’s very quick. I have a sneaking suspicion that Anthropic and google are working together to degrade sign-in performance for multi-account users. I can’t fully prove it yet but I plan to be able to in the week or two.
  • LPisGood 20d ago
    It is possible that Anthropic (and OpenAI for that matter) actually put out some pretty low quality software. If you’ve used Claude Code for any length of time you’re familiar with all of the strange rendering bugs, freezes, etc. OpenAI is even worse, their horrific software makes it difficult to _pay_ them, which should be top priority for a company.
    • thewebguyd 19d ago
      It's weird to me how so many people just put up with crappy, low quality software. If you buy a physical good and its defective, you return it, stop buying that brand, maybe even leave a negative review or contact consumer reports, etc. If it does not live up to what was advertised, you go to the FTC. But when it comes to software, we all just kind of accept that shitty software is the norm and totally fine? Let's start calling it what it is, its defective.
      • rovr138 19d ago
        What's your alternative to these examples? In my case, I use both, for different reasons, and continuously test other.
    • rovr138 19d ago
      Anthropic finally added the ability to sort by spend. I have thousands of people on an org. I had to go through every page to extract the top spenders. Openai... you captured the sentiment.
• RichardChu 20d ago
  The problem is that at big companies such as Google, it can take months to plan out features and put them on the roadmap. That is, if they even get prioritized above other things to begin with.
• MarkusWandel 20d ago
  I don't like paying $1K for a phone. My current one was CAD$140 at Costco three years ago. It has 32GB of built-in storage which is always 90% full regardless how diligent I am at moving stuff to the SD card, and it has 3GB RAM which was fine three years ago, but is now insufficient to run certain apps at all. Without anything else (that you have control over!) running, start the app, immediately killed due to out of memory. These are apps which were snappy and reliable a few (forced) updates ago. No new features, maybe some UI restyle, but now too bloated to use. Time to upgrade to the latest cheapy? Well, thanks AI boom, there aren't really any cheapies any more. And even $600+ phones now come with... drum roll... 5GB of RAM. OK, which maybe covers me for another two years of bloat until I'm right back where I started. Yes, it's possible to stay ahead of the bloat if you pay $1.5K+ for your phone and upgrade somewhat regularly. A colleague has hundreds of apps on his phone and they all work. Me, I use a desktop browser. Except for certain things that are only available as an app. The xda-developers types say no problem, just unlock and root the d*mn thing and then you can run debloating tools and if you jump through all the right hoops the banking app will still work. Bleech.
  • gandreani 19d ago
    I have moved out of the U.S. into South America and one of the nice side-effects of this is that apps from local companies are well optimized here. It's not that there's an extreme level of competency or an optimizing culture. It's simpler. People have cheaper phones here, so devs are naturally more exposed to low end hardware. It's been awesome for me! I have a fairphone 4 which isn't top of the line at all anymore but the apps work MUCH better here on average than when I was in the US. Websites also load quicker too for similar reasons.
• hermannj314 20d ago
  I charitably assume if something can't be been done on a mobile it is because someone was granted an "on a phone" patent or clicking that button on a phone somehow will entitle Apple to 30% of my revenue stream in perpetuity. I usually don't attribute it to malice or incompetence from hypothetical devs, instead I blame malice or incompetence from hypothetical lawyers.
• emursebrian 20d ago
  As a user, I don't want to install an app if I can do it on the web. Most "apps" these days are just web sites wrapped in an app. What's more, they're usually 100% dependent on REST APIs so there's little advantage to having the app anyway. As a developer and (web) app vendor, I understand that many users still want apps. I just had a user ask when we'd be releasing our app for iOS. I explained that we did have an app and that it would be identical to what we'd release for iOS. Then I explained the maze of submenus she'd have to click through to get the icon on her home screen. Apple and Google hate the open web so they make it excessively difficult to "install" PWAs and then in some cases, they're less functional than the website itself. More blame lies at the feet of Apple and Google than on web-first vendors who release sub-optimal apps as a delivery workaround. We're not releasing apps yet precisely because I want us to be focusing on features. Having to target two additional platforms increases the surface area for testing and takes time away from developing features with the potential cost of releasing a "sub-optimal" app.
  • badc0ffee 19d ago
    > Apple and Google hate the open web so they make it excessively difficult to "install" PWAs On iOS, is it not just a matter of tapping the "send" button and tapping [+] Add to Home Screen?
    • emursebrian 16d ago
      On my iPhone it's just 5 easy clicks: Kebab Menu > Share > View More > Add to Home screen > Add Android - Firefox: It's 4 clicks Android - Chrome: 3 clicks (Menu > Install App > Ok)
• ChrisMarshallNY 20d ago
  > This isn't the most complex software engineering task known to humanity. Add a + button. Pop open a text entry field. Validate. Save. Done. I'm sure even the shitty Gemini model can vibe code that in a couple of months, right? Sick burn. I tend to prefer using the browser, where possible, eschewing bespoke apps, but I would expect an app to have more functionality than the browser. It's sad, when it doesn't.
• dvduval 20d ago
  I don’t understand all the technical challenges, but I sure hope we can close the gap between what we can do in the browser versus an app. What apps do is gate communities and gate information and gate people and this is the opposite of an open Internet that should be a benefit to humanity.
• jokoon 20d ago
  the problem is that HTML is so bloated nowadays, that medium phones cannot deal with it, so apps always have better performance
• vova_hn2 20d ago
  > Many companies want a permanent presence on your homescreen and think you're too thick to use your browser's bookmarks feature. I thought that they just want to collect more data about you.
• daemonologist 20d ago
  The no-Google-calendar-sharing-on-mobile is an absolute classic. I have personally seen multiple clumps of people huddled around a phone trying to figure out how to share a calendar with each other - fruitlessly until I butted in, because normal people don't know about desktop mode and even if they did would have no reason to think it necessary. (If you didn't read the post, it doesn't work in the app either. It only works on "desktop.")
• iamkeithmccoy 20d ago
  Unfortunately it's the norm in large companies to never polish anything. Google has gotten worse and worse at this. But Microsoft is king. They bring a team together to build a new thing and then as soon as they can check that feature box on their sales deck they move that team off onto something else. Loop is a good example of this. Microsoft started building a Notion competitor and then just stopped. The Loop component model got pulled into Copilot and integrated everywhere. But you still cannot move a document between workspaces - one of the most basic pieces of user functionality ever. I also look at Application Insights / Azure Monitor w/ their OTel SDK, Teams, SharePoint, Visio, <insert MS product here>. Basic functionality is missing and requests are left open for years or decades. Nothing is ever polished. Nothing is ever finished. Everything is good-enough.
• _fat_santa 20d ago
  This is a constant argument i have with by business partner. He's always asking me "when are we making an app for our <SaaS>" and I always reply back: "We already have an app! It's just a PWA" PWA's are freaking awesome for both users and developers. Users don't have to install a massive app and me as a developer can focus on making one platform better rather than 3. And they are pretty freaking powerful in what you can do. Not to toot my own horn too much but I created an "app"[1] for viewing cities on the other side of the earth from where you're standing. It's got camera, gyro and GPS to determine what you're looking at to the folks I've shown it too, anyone non-technical has been completely fooled and thought it was a proper app. [1]: https://earthview.sunny.gg https://earthview.sunny.gg
  • azuanrb 19d ago
    Imo, you already lost the argument when you have to explain that PWA is the "app". For most users, app is something they install from App Store or Google Play. I get the point of view from developers point of view, but unless the majority of the users are technical people, there's no reason to use PWA these days.
    • calgoo 19d ago
      The problem is if we dont have it available, we can't get the users to use it even if we wanted to. <
    • xboxnolifes 19d ago
      Idk if its not in their best interest or something, but app stores should just allow installing an "app", which is really just a bookmark to website and hides all of the normal browser UI without having to bundle the entire browser with the app.
      • flyingshelf 19d ago
        The point of app stores is that they somehow curate the experience. They can't do that if you just ship a bookmark. Also I don't think web views in most app stores (namely mobile stores) ship an entire browser. As a matter of fact you're literally not allowed to ship browsers in iOS and that's a huge slice of the market on its own.
• virtyaluk 20d ago
  I noticed a long time ago that Google apps are designed by people who never actually use them. Here's one example. I'm a big fan of reading, and it happened that I stack dozens and dozens of books on my GDrive, so naturally I use mobile Google Drive to download and send those books to the reader app on my iDevices. Finished books are renamed to have an exclamation mark at the beginning of the file name - that puts those books at the start of the list, so it is easier to visually tell apart once I've read them and have not. Obviously, the unstarted books fell off the bottom of the list. And here's the crazy thing - Google has put a big-ass plus button and a "scan document" button right in the bottom-right corner of the app screen, which effectively prevents me from opening the file menu for the last 2 books in the list. Very nice!
  • deleted 19d ago
    [deleted]
  • jinimojkg 19d ago
    Yep. Google’s apps are the prime example of astonishingly bad UX and terribly nonsensical UI. What’s funnier is that they all somehow manage to feel like both a badly realised rip-off wannabe native iOS app all the while feeling like a complete alien to the entire system. It’s just BIZARRE. Google apps and services are such a travesty; I detest that people have become so accustomed to them they’re basically the norm. Google sucks. Period.
  • inigyou 19d ago
    In general, Google hates having customers at an institutional level.
  • munificent 19d ago
    I think this is much less about Google developers not using their apps. My experience as a Googler is that people are actually quite good about working on apps they themselves use frequently. "Dogfooding" is a common term around the office. What I think is going on here is: * You have some app developers working on an app and caring about its particular user experience. * Then you have framework UX designers/developers working on new design systems and rolling them out across hundreds of apps. Those two have limited coordination with each other. So when a new design system like Material drops into every app, unconsidered interactions between the design system and the app's specific UI go sideways and no one is in a good position to notice or address it. Google certainly takes the blame in this case, but I don't think it's a problem unique to Google either. There is always a tension between wanting a consistent user experience across many products and features and wanting a user experience that makes the most sense for one particular product or feature. Yes, it's annoying that you can't get to stuff under the plus button. But users really do learn that "oh, the plus button will always be on the bottom right" and that provides real value to them for that to be consistently true across many apps. It makes each app easier to be productive in. User experience design is hard and I don't think there's a silver bullet, though obviously this case is particularly annoying.
• pyrale 20d ago
  Humanity would progress leaps and bounds if every app was deleted, and people just made websites that worked for phones instead. Yes, I know some apps wouldn't make it in the browser. These are sacrifices I am willing to make.
• ulyssys 20d ago
  The most painful part of this is that, at a certain point in mobile app development, many of them switched to using web frameworks instead of native. We're literally figuratively building web apps to replace native apps that replaced web apps, and hoping to performance optimize them back into near-native.
• alkonaut 20d ago
  I don't mind apps, even apps that are basically just browsers showing a web site. The biggest reason is that apps, at least on iOS, just behaves better. It might be that the auth persists longer or that there are notifications or whatever. It's not without issues obviously. Most of the time the first thing I have to do is update the damn app just to order a burger or park my car or whatever it is I'm using it for. And it's dumb that we need to have a 150 meg download (per update...) for what's basically a bookmark. But still, the better integration with my phone's native stuff like keychain etc usually means I'm more satisfied after using an app to do something, than using the _exact same web page_ in my mobile browser.
  • ryukoposting 19d ago
    > Most of the time the first thing I have to do is update the damn app just to order a burger or park my car or whatever it is I'm using it for It's interesting how different things bother people in different ways. Because when this happens to me, I want to throw my phone into the sun. It's a viscerally irritating experience that sticks with me for the rest of the day. I have my essentials (browser, email, Signal) of course. But besides that, nearly all my apps fit into one of the following 3 categories: transit (airlines, rideshare, city bikes), finance (banks, brokerage), and... baseball. MLB has put a shocking amount of effort into their apps. The ticketing experience is genuinely really good, so much better than any ticketmaster trash. All apps are trash, unless you're a baseball fan, in which case all but 2 apps are trash. I guess.
• huflungdung 20d ago
  [dead]
• Quarrelsome 19d ago
  Oh I'm so glad it works this way round too. Kinda sick of the web being ruined by http pages that tell you to download a binary. Is anyone bothering trying to narrow that gap between native and web on phones so we can resume the process we were undertaking back in 2010 before smartphones re-promoted binary applications for whatever reason?
• petepete 19d ago
  I listen to Radio 4 quite a bit and occasionally want to check the schedule (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/schedules/bbc_radio_fourfm https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/schedules/bbc_radio_fourfm) On mobile, Googling 'radio 4 schedule' is the quickest way, and the only negative bit about the entire experience is the popup that tells me 'it's better in the app'. It's not. Not by any metric. My search and opening a webpage takes a second or two. Opening the app takes several seconds, then navigating to the Radio 4 page and scrolling down the schedule takes several more. I submitted a bug report on the topic and they basically told me "we hear you but shush and use the app".
  • prism56 19d ago
    If you use brave or Firefox and ublock origin. You can just block the elements. I do this on so many sites now. While ads are blocked I still remove tonnes of needless elements on websites I frequent. Hide little banners or app reminders.
• NaiveBayesian 19d ago
  What really gets me is when an app highjacks a link to the site, and then doesn't know what to do with it, when just opening the link in the browser would have been perfectly functional. Email unsubscribe links are a particularly annoying example of this.
• altern8 19d ago
  Ryan Air just introduced the super-annoying requirements of needing the app to download your boarding pass (which of course they could just provide from the website). I think they do it to be able to send you notifications and sell you more flights, but I don't understand why they need to be so anti-user. I try to NOT fly Ryan Air unless there is no other airline available. I'd rather pay twice as much than support their poor and sometimes borderline-criminal business practices.
  • Cabbache 19d ago
    That's why I made https://github.com/Cabbache/ryanair-cli https://github.com/Cabbache/ryanair-cli
    • altern8 19d ago
      Very nice
    • alex_suzuki 19d ago
      The Aztec-to-half-Blocks renderer is neat! :-)
  • GJim 19d ago
    # Me too I recently chose to fly with a MUCH more expensive airline than deal with this (and yes, I was spending my own money). Ryan Air is the pits.
• rkunde 19d ago
  The Google Calendar app has a long standing bug where the search view will not show the latest calendar entries unless you manually scroll to the bottom and hold the scroll view there. It’s been like this for years despite repeated bug reports!
• massimodeluisa 19d ago
  Calendar on Android already talks to the network...the same URL only subscribes from desktop. So is that missing webcal/text/calendar handoff, or a Play-release hole?
• adzm 19d ago
  The simplest barrier to using an app for me is that most do not implement tabs. Tabs are extremely useful! Even when the app interface may be better than the web interface, I will usually find myself opting for web specifically for this reason.
• IvanK_net 19d ago
  I just tried to make an Instagram post at www.instagram.com. It was possible a year ago, but they removed this option recently :(
• VCFundedGenYer 19d ago
  On an iPad, the web version is almost always objectively better. Since about 2018 or so, most apps have failed to properly support rotating the device. When you load the same service in a web browser, you gain that feature back. Facebook is a big example. Other apps actually have MORE functionality in the browser than their app version. This is why PWAs are now much more preferable than before.
• thegrim33 19d ago
  In reality I see the anti-app sentiment as mostly a scheme to get more data into the cloud, more traffic that can be collected and spied on, less power and control for the user, and demonizing local computing and users having control over their data. A scheme to give companies and government more complete control over everything you do. Basically further enshitification of computing infrastructure.
• nomilk 19d ago
  > and think you're too thick to use your browser's bookmarks feature To be fair, bookmarking is easy but browsing and locating a bookmarked URL is far from easy. To bookmark in chrome on desktop requires pressing an obvious star button on the right of the address bar (it's always there, so easy to locate). But browsing/locating a bookmark requires clicking on the vertical ellipses on the right-most of the browser, finding 'Bookmarks and lists' amongst a lot of wordy options, then the fun starts: you can scroll bookmarks but cannot even see the full bookmark (only the first 40 characters and favicon) and they're not even in alphabetical order. If you have several hundred, like I do, that's a lot of work, and consequently, I approximately never do it. Easier to copy the url into an email and send it to yourself. For folks like myself who use different browsers across operating systems, it's even more convoluted for obvious reasons (e.g. I use safari on iOS and chrome on macOS, so something bookmarked on iPhone doesn't make it to macbook and vice-versa). tl;dr bookmarks are a mess, even for the tech-savvy
• ziofill 19d ago
  Reminded me of this https://xkcd.com/1367 https://xkcd.com/1367
• plantain 19d ago
  Looking at you Reddit.
• kkfx 19d ago
  These days, applications (whether they're web, mobile, or desktop) with absurd shortcomings in terms of UI/UX are a daily occurrence, yet most people seem to have become incapable of noticing, or at least of giving sensible feedback on the matter. Obviously, the bulk of it is noticeable in notoriously crapware software like management systems, but it's increasingly emerging just about everywhere. I wonder how long it will take to understand even just this small slice of the problem, without even getting into "anything apps" and the need to return to the OS as a single integrated application/framework with end-user programming—a trend of which we're only seeing a few hints.
• LastTrain 19d ago
  IDK to me this is the opposite of the usual problem, which is that some features are only available in the app. I will happily use the desktop browser.
• revolvingthrow 19d ago
  App vs website is purely taste. Some people will never install an app but will use your website. Some people love apps and will never use your website. Some people prefer apps to PWA when the app does thing, because what if it changes and enshittifies or just vanishes - an app doesn’t need to be updated. Some people prefer PWAs to apps because why would I bother with the endless updates just fix it on the website, in fact I don’t even want your shitty app at all why in Lord’s name is this an app?! Sometimes… well sometimes there’s no dev resources available to make an app work in a way you’d expect. Google is just a tiny startup, be reasonable in your expectations. Point is: if you actually want to reach a large audience — you want both. Also, don’t expect good experience if you use Google’s products.
• tescreal 19d ago
  If the barrier to entry is "own a smartphone", there will inevitably be people who will be excluded. Lots of fantastic reasons to unplug in 2026, year of our plague. Even if you don't go so far, conservative allowances for data collection are one of the few digital freedoms left.
  • GJim 19d ago
    Puzzling to see your factual comment downvoted. I myself do not have a personal smartphone (and my work smartphone is powered off the moment the clock says 5pm). Frankly, my life is better for it.
    • tescreal 19d ago
      I never know unless somebody thinks I was(n't) being sarcastic or glib or something. I try to be straight forward because fundamentally, I don't like the "obligation to be online" for how much I personally enjoy tech. C'est la vie!
• synalx 19d ago
  One thing that annoys me to no end is when a mobile app can't even load without an internet connection. There's a plague of apps that are thin veneers over a web view. I get that this is easier to deploy and manage, but I find it a really poor experience compared to a well-designed mobile app.
• equake 19d ago
  Why isn't AI filling all those gaps?
  • hombre_fatal 19d ago
    You still need the organizational conditions (the will, structure, processes) for someone to care, do, approve, and land the solution.
• ratelimitsteve 19d ago
  a native app's job isn't to parallel the web app's feature set. a native app's job is to get you to accidentally opt in to all sorts of invasive surveillance and allow for a constant stream of attempts to grab your attention.
  • indidjdjendk 19d ago
    No, a native app’s job is to provide a cohesive, speedy and MUCH better interface to users; something that is quite impossible with a website.
• tgsovlerkhgsel 19d ago
  "Never let an abuser take you to a secondary location": It's OK to offer an app, but if a site is pushing, pressuring or forcing you to get one, it's almost certainly because they want to do something abusive that they currently can't. Installing an app is a matter of trust; trying to push me to install one against my will is the best way to demonstrate that you should not be trusted. (Interestingly, I've heard a stance from technically well-informed iPhone users that don't see an app install as a large trust decision, because they assume that iOS is actually decent at protecting their privacy and rights in general. I don't know if that's true; on Android it certainly isn't.)
  • inigyou 19d ago
    It isn't.
    • tgsovlerkhgsel 19d ago
      That would be my intuition, but can you elaborate what specifically the app (if not given extra permissions) can do? Assuming the user doesn't change settings, web sites (at least if used semi regularly) can store a persistent cookie, so keeping the user identified is possible with both. The only thing I can think of is regular background pings to track the user through IP geolocation.
      • inigyou 19d ago
        Unpermissioned access to all sensors like battery, acceleration. Hardware IDs. Background pings (as you said). Push notifications. Seeing which other apps are installed (maybe, I think that one got locked down). All kinds of fingerprinting.
        • tgsovlerkhgsel 19d ago
          Push notifications are the most likely abuse vector but are gated behind a separate permission. I think they locked down installed apps, and fingerprinting isn't really relevant if they can just set a cookie. Acceleration is also available on the web. Not sure about battery, but most apps (aside from Uber that increases the price if they think you're desperate) can't really do anything bad with that. So I don't see much left tbh.
• tonymet 19d ago
  Reddit is the worst. Their app-transition code is 10+ years old and still full of recursive loops. 30% of the time i drop into the App Store even when i have the app installed. 75% of the time I lose navigation. And there’s no “remember this” button. At least Google makes an attempt at usability. It’s not like the product team has a choice.
• K0IN 19d ago
  Me and my wife share calanders both ways between Google cal and iCloud cal its an absolutely shit show to setup, and I also rember having to use the Web app for certain settings how can we not have solved this by now?
• brianzelip 19d ago
  ClassDojo.com, a platform for students/parents/teachers, is a major offender of this.
• GuestFAUniverse 19d ago
  Google Dev are incompetent it seems. Had "highlights" for June and July in photos. Guess what is disabled in my account? I had to set two dates explicitly: one in the early past and one in the distant future -- now I seems to work. And the new icons of their apps look like a kindergarden project. Can't they just leave the design alone, or ask the user? Seems impossible.
• mococa 19d ago
  For me, to install an app it must be very very important. Like banking. Otherwise… Gone, gone gone.
• duckydude20 19d ago
  google cloud
• Intermernet 19d ago
  I recently had a perfect storm of non-friendly technology. I made one purchase on Amazon while connected to a VPN. Amazon froze my account and demanded proof of identity. Amazon don't accept an existing photo of primary ID for their preferred ID verification check, it must be a photo taken by a camera on-device, and I don't have a webcam on my desktop PC. Once you select the secondary method, it seems you can't go back to the primary. My bank can't issue a statement on the mobile app. My bank, even through the website, can't issue a statement that has the required details (name, credit card details - blanked except for last four digits, and transactions) that includes pending transactions. I had to manually request a statement from my bank (via a phone call) that included the pending transaction, edit it in an image editing app, submit it to Amazon via their web-site. None of the apps (bank, Amazon, government ID, camera) had the flexibility to solve the problem. The root cause was using a VPN to make an online purchase of a $12 piece of hobby electronics. Not only are apps broken, the current state of the internet (and the random ways companies try to enforce "security") is also broken.
  • inigyou 19d ago
    Just make a new account at that point, right?
    • rovr138 19d ago
      Not OP Unfortunately for me, a lot of my books are tied to them.
      • inigyou 19d ago
        They come into your house and take your books back if you stop using your account?
        • rovr138 19d ago
          Kindle / Audible.
• ethin 19d ago
  Hot take but I think the entire concept of a "web app" needs to die. My web browser does not need access to my GPU, OpenGL/Vulkan, USB, MIDI, HID, <insert whatever other weird invocation of Cthulhu that exists here>. All of those are things a native app needs, not a website. IMO if you need that kind of access and your instinct is to do it as a "web app" your doing it wrong. Same thing, I would argue, for things even like WebAudio or WebSpeech. At this point my web browser is so complicated that it might as well be a mini-OS of it's own. Like, I think that the instinct to make everything a web app is what partially leads to things like what this article complains about. Well, besides laziness, of course.
  • mrweasel 19d ago
    For many of these things we're not talking about a web app though. It's frequently just a form, disguised as something more. I agree that the browser should be stripped back, but none of those things prevent my banks website from allowing me to do a payment. E.g. your fitness tracking app or your parking app, they don't need any of those features. They can work perfectly fine as simply forms, they aren't "apps".
    • ethin 19d ago
      I know, but my point was that this should just not be a thing. Our web browsers have become way too complicated and then you get outcomes like what tfa talks about.
  • xboxnolifes 19d ago
    I largely disagree. The web, and the browser by extension, is a multimedia platform. Thats text, images, videos, animations, interactivity, video calls, etc. At the very least, I disagree about GPUs, OpenGL/Vulcan, and various audio and video related things.
    • ethin 19d ago
      > The web, and the browser by extension, is a multimedia platform. Says who exactly though? The big companies and web devs who think your browser needs raw access to HIDs? Why exactly does a web browser need this level of access when a native application is far superior (and doesn't need to deal with the limitations of a web browser)? All this does is require that browsers be more and more complicated and be more and more invasive so that we can pretend that the web browser is our operating system. That in turn makes it harder and harder for web browsers to even be implemented in the first place.
• numpad0 19d ago
  > To subscribe to a new calendar, you must use a computer web browser. You can't subscribe to a calendar in the Google Calendar app for Android, iPhone, or iPad. Isn't this likely because Google Calendar was abused a lot in phishing? e.g. fake "CLICK TO PROCEED" links as ads -> redirected to Google Calendar named "CLICK [+] SIGN TO CONTINUE" -> "URGENT: re-enter your credit card number at https://scam.example/buy-us-bitcoin https://scam.example/buy-us-bitcoin" fake schedules recurring every x minutes etc.
• cosmic_cheese 19d ago
  On the other hand, the existence of alternative implementations in the form of mobile apps can on occasion be a saving grace when web apps are halfassed the other way. It's so frustrating when a poorly made web app that e.g. eats way too much memory, keeps cores spinning for no reason, chokes its tab process, doesn't handle history correctly, etc is the only option available and you have no choice but to live with it. It makes me wish it didn't become the norm to lock down site/service APIs are reserve them for private use only so crappy web apps would have to compete with superior third party alternatives.
• Boxxed 19d ago
  Yes, the AllTrails app does this. You can't send a route to your Garmin watch or whatever in the app, you must do it in the browser version. And since having the app installed at all sort of hijacks AllTrails links, you really don't even want it installed at all. Yet you constantly are told to install the app...drives me up the wall.
• hnrprtlpdb 19d ago
  Thanks, genuinely helpful
• mohamedkoubaa 19d ago
  A lot are saying that they prefer websites over apps but at least apps can't force you to upgrade to the latest version while a website will always serve you the latest version. Ofc that doesn't address all the downsides of an app
• broof 19d ago
  Another example, although this was from a year or two ago and I'm not sure if it's still the case: duolingo's website functions differently than the app and is just hands down better. turns out I could just export it as a PWA and so I could have my cake and eat it too.
• munificent 19d ago
  The anecdote in the article is at odds with the title. * In the anecdote, the problem is that the web version works better and the app is missing functionality. * The title pays reference to an annoying observation about many products where the web version lacks functionality the app has. Both are frustrating. If a company is going to bother to have both an app and a website, users deserve an experience where both are fully featured. It should be an professional embarrassment for a company to have to route users from the app to the site or vice versa because one is half-baked. Have some God-damned professional pride and do it right.
  • flerchin 19d ago
    The post is pointing out the irony. Corpos will tell you that "it works better in the app", and that is dubious at best.
• neverkn0wsb357 19d ago
  Something I didn’t see in the comments is highlighting the actual, very real, fact that the user was incensed by the app. This is one instance, with one vendor, but our day is made up of thousands of interactions across multiple vendors. And all big (major) vendors seem to have these kinds of issues. That's a problem because these interactions add up. To the point where I’ve personally been accused of “[liking] being angry” I’m not sure what the answer is. But for me, I’ve been trying to find and use tools that don’t piss me off, paid or otherwise. So for mail and calendar, for example, I tried out https://www.hey.com/ https://www.hey.com/ and it not only does it not piss me off, but I like it for how I use calendar and mail. I don’t know if anyone here has read Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich, but the book comes to mind every time I run into these kinds of frustrating interactions.
• nullc 19d ago
  I take "It works better in the app" as confirmation that the app steals your data, tracks your location, etc. I wasn't going to run an 'app' in any case, but pushing confirms the decision.
• Night_Thastus 19d ago
  An app is a way to bypass the privacy protections that a browser might layer on top, and gather yet more data about you, show ads, etc, etc. That is the real motivation.
• YmiYugy 19d ago
  The thing is that mobile browsers fill fight you tooth and nail against providing a good experience to your users. There is the obvious stuff like lots of API not being available, but the bigger issue to me is how many common convenient UI patterns that users accustomed to native apps expect are really painful if not impossible to provide, e.g. there is no reliable way to react to the keyboard opening, or how scrolling will expand and shrink the browser UI. CSS Houdini being abandoned also makes it really hard to properly do really custom UI. I really wish there was platform with the distribution and security model of the web that was designed for apps from the ground up.
• yipinwong 19d ago
  I have 200+ apps installed on my phone. I deleted 150ish. I have no issues. I will delete another 30 to see how it will go.
• Animats 19d ago
  I thought this was going to be about Yelp. Yelp.com from a phone-sized browser constantly screams "It's better on the app!". That's because the browser interface has been made very bad, with popups and other screen-obscuring junk using up much of the small screen. (Yelp is mostly useless now, because they're not effectively purging dead businesses. About a third of listings in popular categories seem to be dead.)
• liampulles 19d ago
  So I love good old fashioned desktop-oriented websites, and the most complex thing I do on my phone is Google Maps... but I also recognize this is not true of the general population. Almost no one else except the PC gamers I know really like using desktop (or laptop) computers. Most people love being able to sit on the couch and use apps on their phone. Its not like massive portions of the population were loving their desktops until smartphones arrived and they transitioned, no - smartphones are what helped the internet revolution really inseminate into the general population.
• flyingshelf 19d ago
  To me the most common issue for apps is that they don't have tabs. Damn we solved this issue in IE7 and I'm still limited to "one window" on my supercomputer-level pocket PC. Inconceivable. I'll keep using the app in the browser.
• arakas4488 19d ago
  [flagged]
• Blazara 19d ago
  My UK based bank ringfences some processes behind the app, and some behind the website. Setting up an automatic direct debit? Browser. Want to approve a one off payment? App. Absolute nonsense.
• jitbit 19d ago
  Gmail mobile app doesn't let me search in the "trash" or "spam" folder. Opening Gmail in mobile browser does not work too. I have to open it in the browser - then "request mobile website" - then try to search there - aaaahnd it still reset to the mobile version ever other request.
• Andrex 19d ago
  I have a weird personal theory that whittling down the number of app vendors on your phone is just a good thing to do. As a Pixel user, I've gotten my phone to just having four (4) third-party app vendors. - Duolingo (I've never seen an app be so annoying in a positive way, I appreciate it) - Nintendo (obvs) - Caffeine (quick setting tile that keeps the screen on--should really be a native feature, and I hope that day comes soon so I can ditch this) - Super Productivity (saved my life) Having a banking app installed seems way riskier than using a website. If someone had access to my phone, the banking app stands out like a spotlight. But if it's not installed, they have to open the browser, guess which bank I'm using, and enter the right URL (possibly aided by autocomplete, possibly not). It just feels like a safer, additional step. My bank's mobile website is junk but I'm not spending all day on it. In summation, fuck your app, give me a website.
• paradox460 19d ago
  I recently got a Seattle ultrasonics knife, and it was mentioned in the email associated with my purchase it might need a software update I rolled my eyes and braced for the inevitable pretty but buggy and slow app. It didn't use an app. It used the Bluetooth functionality built into chrome and it's derivatives to talk to the knife, update it, and perform a calibration I've only ever used the Bluetooth and serial for flashing esp32s and similar before. It was a wonderful experience
  • randfish 18d ago
    Yeah, we have one, and same thing. Bluetooth to a web URL on the phone and boom, new sharpening angle calibrator just works! Love not having to download a separate app.
• holgerschurig 19d ago
  But it DOES work better in the app. Binding the user in endless loops. Tracking his exact behavior. Avoiding pesky thinks like uBlock. All of that works way better in an app than on a website.
• MetroWind 18d ago
  It's better to break the app than to break the web.