Seriously. I don’t want to install something on my phone when the dev is just using a WebView, if that’s what it’s called. When the app is basically just a website with the browser hidden.
What’s the reason for that? To attach the customer? To sell the app for money? Is there more ad revenue that way? Do you reach more people?
(Are there any good reasons for it, too? Security, maybe?)
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I cannot speak for them, but I can relate to the idea. There’s one called Nobly that was based on a great idea but eliminated itself due to this.
ITT: No good reasons for these apps!
So they can make your phone go bingedybeep and show you more adverts, while slurping up any data the browser doesn’t usually let them access.
This, and also so they can avoid your plugins that kill browser tracking for ads and shit.
And you know the rest of the reasons when at the first start your minesweeper app needs to have access to your photos, location, camera and microphone.
Some people are missing the forest for the trees here
Having a businesses app on your phone is better regular advertising than anything they could ever pay for.
They just want an excuse to make you look at their logo and think about their business as regularly as possible
Lemmy has a real problem with this. It’s like all of the angry people from Reddit came here and now we just have an angry circlejerk about anything the crowd doesn’t like.
Username checks out
This is true
people tend to develop liking or disliking for things merely because they are familiar with them
and it’s amazing that basic psychological principles have been decoupled from mainstream awareness of marketing tactics (obviously intentionally).
This is not a problem with the olauncher
Thanks I’m trying that
They can make money off the downloads I would think.
Unless they’re charging for the app (and if it’s just a webview probably not), it actually costs them money to be on the App Store or the Play Store.
We had a project once that ran completely fine as a website except for the ability to scan bar codes. That one thing forced us to create an app and the rest of the app was just showing the website.
Can’t you use camera on browser? I actually seen a project that does some complex things using camera [1] and it ran in browser. I’m confident scanning bar codes is possible.
There are JS barcode libraries out there, some better than others, some free, others paid. A few years back at a corporate job I built just the thing - a web app designed to replace a 3rd party mobile app. The back-end was Laravel + various AWS services, with a responsive front-end made with Tailwind.
The requirements were to make it mimic most of the mobile app’s functionality. There was also location tracking via browser APIs (to track the cargo at all times) and a barcode scanner. I used a paid library for that, and it was quite expensive, but very reliable. So it can definitely be done as a web app.
https://serratus.github.io/quaggaJS/ and whatnot exist. Any reason why such an approach couldn’t be taken?
They want to wall some of their content off so it’s not easily harvestable on the web by competitors. But most of all, they want to have full control of your user “experience” so you can’t use browser extensions (like ad blockers). It’s all about money and control.
Ad revenue. It is harder to block ads on mobile than it is on desktop.
Especially in an app rather than a mobile browser.
Heck all the features of YouTube premium? Are available for free in firefox
More like gathering user data they can sell
plus all that sweet user and device tracking data.
Yeah this too. Ads and telemetry. Those make money.
This is why I love kbin. No nonsense apps just a PWA that works splendidly. Now I don’t need a mastodon or lemmy app! It’s all here!
FWIW, I’ve been using lemmy in a browser exclusively, not even a PWA and it works fine.
I’m not aware of a PWA implementation that supports multiple tabs either.
Besides the other mentioned reasons: exposure through the app store can be a motivator too.
I’m torn - apps are brutal for privacy but I really like the isolation from browser and all other sites. I typically clear browser cache on every exit so for apps that I use regularly, I am forced to sign in every time if going in through browser.
Wish browser apps had better isolation for multiple sessions.
Firefox Focus on Android sounds right up your alley.
I have it and use it. It’s great (works for most sites). My point is actually the opposite - there are certain sites/services that become very unpleasant to use if you have to log in everytime you open the browser.
The advantage of apps is that for those particular services you don’t have to reauthenticate each time you open them (the trade off being insecurity.
Using websites would be great if I could have a separate (isolated) instance per site. That way I could kill browse history for general browsing.
(The absolute worst are the apps that hop out to the browser (especially when they hard code Chrome, which I avoid where possible on Android.))
On the PC (by way of example), edge and chrome have web applications that are handy (think YouTube and YouTube music) but… they share credentials! I keep a separate login for YT vs YTM (because google completely misunderstood the reason people keep videos separate from music when they killed the excellent Google Play Music). So… When I log into one, flips the default login for the other. Now, if they were separate apps, like on Android, the sessions are separated - as they ought to be!
I will say that Duck Duck Go’s App Tracking protection is a fantastic way to tackle the way apps ‘phone home’ so much, however, since it leverages a full tunnel (yet local) VPN technique, you have to disable it if you want to connect to another VPN service.
(Bottom line - website based services are great, but, for goodness sake, I wish one had the option to persist various sites, but in isolation.)
For certain things it makes sense to have an app imo, for instance music streaming services the desktop experience just has more features, plays better with my preamp/headphones and so on.
For something like Netflix it’s extremely irritating that they either intentionally gimp the experience of using the service on many browsers (IIRC Netflix is capped at 720p in Firefox still) or try to force users into using the app (see YouTube attempting to automatically redirect you to the app anytime you try to watch a video in the browser).
I believe Spotify did this back in the day in order to hide as much of their AB testing from Apple who is essentially a competitor due to iTunes.
Having much of the UI delivered via web also makes it easier to deploy updates as no software update is necessary.
Those are actually websites, with embedded site and embedded browser, see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(software_framework)
Thats why those are slow, unstable, and huge (in occupied storage)
not on mobile, they generally use the native browser engine. at the very least it’s not electron on ios/android
Still, unless it needs some native api’s could still be a website.
I would say in some cases, people are conditioned now to expect an app, even if it’s basically a website. I think in a mobile context, most non-techy people don’t normally think to open up a browser and say, browse Amazon or something. Instead they go for the Amazon app on their phone, and browse/shop/whatever there.
I wouldn’t say this is exclusive to phones either. I once worked on a product that was essentially web-native, but they had to ship a desktop app because their market expected it, even though it was only a web-view wrapper to the website. No offline storage, no difference in behaviour, or need for some specific API; nothing. I guess you try explaining to boomers that a web-view desktop app is unnecessary.
The data vacuuming and additional marketing are just added benefits for the app developer, if they go down that path (they usually do).
