It's been 13 years of "no, you can't do in the phone's webbrowser the thing you can do in a PC's webbrowser, you need to install a fucking app". People just accepted it. The fuckers accepted it.
The browser represents a political statement that the rendering of the web page ought to be under the control of the user. The app is a capitalist reaction to that statement.
Browser communist
Apps capitalist
Cappitalist :kelly:
use firefox
I weirdly get depressed about this a lot. Like I just imagine some programmer guy, with the best intent in the world, adding in code to let websites know you're using a phone so that you can make super good content that fits a phone perfectly and increase experience to every user.
Only for the next day some rich monopoly company being like "lol let's use it to block access to our website, and force people onto our app". :(
NO! YOU WILL FEED ME IDIOT FASCIST TAKES FROM MY LOCAL CITY SUBREDDIT ON MY MOBILE BROWSER, AND YOU ARE GONNA LOAD IT!
Having to keep using the "desktop site" setting on mobile Firefox so that every website can just work without needing an app.
It's so fucking anti-user that you can't just permanently force the setting or have it on a per-site basis
Even worse nowdays is shit like react native apps. Some of them are so slow and buggy it's unbelievable. I installed one of these apps for a supermarket chain (only because they said I'd get free stuff if I install their app, and free food is free food), and it said my balance on my supermarket card was NaN. And it scrolled though the catalogue of groceries at around 15 frames a second. To think this is the delivery and purchasing app for the biggest supermarket chain in South Africa!
"Download our app"
fucking Electron
"Looks better in our app"
app is just repackaged website
> browse the web
> "I'm sorry, this feature is only available on our app"
> talk to customer service: "is it an Electron app or native"?
> they don't understand
> "It's a good app sir"
> download app
> it's fucking Electron
I miss when absolute cranks had their own websites. Give me ten Time Cubes over any website app
I keep a list of the weird guy home pages I find in the wild so I can check up on them.
What's a Time Cube?
It's hard to explain. It was a website written by a very strange man based around a central idea that all science is wrong because one rotation of the Earth should be considered 4 days instead of 1 day. The website itself was a long string of text explaining his positions in very strange language, but since it had no home page or anything, the information wasn't separated. And it was formatted poorly so the most basic information was at the bottom and subsequently added updates were at the top, making it impossible to read.
Warning though, Time Cube guy used a lot of slurs for some reason
I am waging protracted people's war against installing apps and creating accounts in order to do things that shouldn't require a fucking app or account. I have used my browser's console to scroll wepbages with JavaScript when shitty sites would disable scrolling to force me to sign up. Death to enshittification.
Obviously, have the uBlock addon, but then make sure all the 'Annoyances' boxes are ticked, and even better install the webAnnoyances ultralist - https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances
Far from perfect, but it will override a lot of website's faux disabling of your scrolling, to save you the trouble of F12-ing.
I swear by uBlock, gonna need to check that list because as I run it now, there is the occasional soft wall that requires manual F12 intervention. Thanks, comrade.
oh yeah it's so fucking cool we had a perfect system for representing hypertext and then they added multimedia (cool) and interactivity (okay) and eventually just decided that it should have a cross-platform language for sending any and every possible computer application over the internet and simultaneously it become so totally unusable that developers needed 999,998 different frameworks to make anything with it and they just gave up and made shitty reduced functionality versions for toddlers and called them "apps" and now the web browser takes up 14GB of RAM and no one can ever program a new one again unless they have 20 years and a billion dollars.
you dont need frameworks at all, devs are just lazy and execs are happy to shove garbage code out at breakneck speeds
I used UAS on Librewolf specifically to say I'm on Firefox and Linux (which I am). I want to properly represent what I'm using and not support the Google/Microsoft monopolies, even if that means some websites throw around unsupported browser or OS errors.
does that work for sites like twitch? i haven't figured out how to get past twitches "supported browser" log in detections
Thank fuck early desktop GUIs used the resizable windows multi-tasking paradigm.
Potentially having tiny browser windows means that every website will have to be somewhat responsive just to get usage in corporate offices. I'd much rather have to spoof being a smol bean chrome window than install every shitty app.
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Wow, that's a very good point, I've never considered that before.
This very simple thing you said would stop global warming AND cure cancer with no downsides whatsoever!
Posted from the Hexbear app™
remember when "apps" were called programs?
The modern push for PC 'Apps' are just PC 'Secret Browser Windows' because a good portion of apps nowadays are just webpages packaged with 30MB web engine.
RIP apple's program store
I remember when they were called widgets and everybody googled how to delete them.
The "app" also has extra built-in user tracking capabilities, beyond the dreams of what they can deliver with a mere webpage.
Remember the water fountain app?
No. But that sentence makes me want
Threads is a good example. I'm a hog for scrolling, so obviously I wanted to check out threads... but am greeted with a QR code to download the app. Why the fuck can't I just look at it my desktop web browser like literally every other one of these?? The obvious answer is: the actual purpose of these apps is to just sell more advertising data, and a browser version doesn't have the same access to the panopticon.
They launched without even having a desktop website and a lot of people couldn't paste images in the phone app, so they immediately hamstrung the people trying to upload actual fucking content, like oh wow I have a video I didn't shoot with my phone camera, time to upload it to Google Fucking Drive and then download it on my phone slowly and THEN upload it onto threads. So fucking dumb
But then you get deep enough into the app and find some function you need to do isn’t available through the app and then you’ve got to go back to their website to do it.
Yeah it sucks and I've been against appification since it began.
responsive web design has brought this back a little. I can do almost everything I need to on my linux phone natively or through the browser. it is a hassle tho. frequently need a user agent switcher, etc
Responsive web design is obnoxious. If I'm using a desktop user agent on my phone, that means I want to see the desktop site, even if I have to zoom and pan to see everything. I don't want the site's CSS to decide from my screen's width that it's a mobile device and show me the mobile version anyway.
This is objectively better than the app situation. I'd rather have to scroll horizontally than be forced to install battery-sucking spyware just for the few times I need to use your service.
This was actually Steve Jobs original idea for the iPhone. Instead of native apps everything would be a web app.
I’m torn because I do hate responsive design to the max. But I also hate how the web has evolved into a pseudo os with everything in JavaScript. Don’t get me started on electron.
I like the native app approach so I can actually use the is as intended it many apps these days are just a wrapper for the webapp anyway
these days are just a wrapper for the webapp anyway
The Bank of America app on my iPhone is a 400MB behemoth designed just to slowly load a bunch of webviews. Also, at one point not long ago the Square/Block Cash App was around 700MB for some reason, but they have managed to bring it down to a trim 318MB.
These apps suck so much.
It's the worst of both worlds. Half the point of a webpage is it gets automatically updated every time you visit it!
It is cool that Apple is integrating PWAs to macOS more, which is the right approach. Web applications really should not use Electron.
Uber Eats on my Android is 280MB for some reason.
Strangely, my largest app is Samsung SmartThings at 822MB. Maybe they include every driver for every possible device or something.
the web has evolved into a pseudo os with everything in JavaScript
I'm not an expert on these matters, so probably have this all wrong, but I saw someone on Mastodon yesterday lamenting that he has to bump the RAM on older computers purely because the web has got so bloated with java everywhere, and that made me angry, because my old, perfectly good Mac mini has 8gb of soldered RAM and work I need to do in Google Docs frequently takes up a huge chunk of that.
I had the first iPhone pre-app store and lemme tell you, those web apps sucked.
Even if you wanted to play a simple game like darts, you better hope your Edge connection was up to the task. There was zero offline utility to be had with the webapps, and back then reception just sucked everywhere, even metropolitan areas.
Some apps are genuinely useful to have offline. Some apps can go to hell and be a web page.
Firefox/Fennec with add-ons is really so much of a relief.
Tho I don't use (classic) social media which afaik enforce apps the most ... I think that battle for web pages & privacy is lost anyway, at least until we as a society decide to go FOSS.
Honestly I wish PWA's were used for more stuff. They're literally just the website in shortcut form, without the window chrome. They'd work for a bunch of shit if Apple would support them more fully, and not everything needs to be a native app anyways if people are just using a web browser.
Never accepted it. Won't accept it
Tbf as a mobile and web dev, it's hard to compare native or js apps to mobile website / progressive web apps. It's way easier to do stuff from a mobile app and the user experience can be better. Just don't abuse and exploit being installed on a device to destroy privacy any more (we see you)
Worst thing on mobile app though is versioning
If I can do a thing in my PC web browser, I demand to be able to do it in my phone web browser.
If you tell me I can't, but if I switch the "see as desktop" option and I do can, I'm gonna find you and kill you with a rock.
Last warning.
Yes I totally agree with you on that (minus you have to let some time to bring features to mobile version if it's still under development). I was just saying for certain things it's easier to implement in a web app.
same ppl use chrome and safari,sub spotify or still lurk reddit.
i have a deep and irrational hatred for the fact that some people call computer programs "apps" now of days
"Some people"? The operating systems themselves call them apps now.
And it's really not that unreasonable. What the user thinks of as an app could be more than 1 program. It makes sense to put an abstraction between users and programs because lots of sophisticated software use separate programs that the end user doesn't care about, just the whole.
I regret to inform you it's joever
The l33t w4r3z d00dz were calling applications 'appz' since at least the '90s. Then there was that brief period where Apple tried to claim "app store" was short for "apple store" so no one else could say it..
Actually the proper nomenclature of the time was 'warez'.
It's software, and I will not change.
Same, but for appetizers as well.
"Some people" includes almost all devs who actually make the apps applications programs though.
Many of the projects I work on use app to refer to the main object or entrypoint.
Same!