Please Don't Make Me Download Another App

Well, the elephant in the room is that an app these days is a packaged version of a website with one twist: notifications. Unless you explicitly disable it via settings, it will try to get a small chunk of your attention every now and then.

- Would you like to enable notifications to see when your EV finishes charging?

- Yes.

(in a couple of days when you're thinking about a completely different topic)

- SPECIAL OFFER! 20% OFF THE FATTY FRIES IF YOU GET A CAR WASH FROM US!!!

And that's everywhere. It pays off due to the scale, just like spam. It costs nothing to send an annoying notification to a horde of users, and even if 1% of the users go for it, it is still 5+ figures of revenue out of a handful of characters pushed to users' devices, and hours of human time wasted dealing with useless annoying distractions.

Don’t forget, you can read this article in the Atlantic’s official iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-atlantic-magazine/id397599...

Too true, I was looking at solar charge controllers and after rejecting yet another otherwise nice looking one boldly advertising it's bluetooth communications my thoughts were viscerally negative.

"I don't want bluetooth and an app, I want rs485 and a specification"

All of this is… whatever. I think we make compromises.

What kills me is I cannot… CANNOT view Instagram content on my phone without the app. I tried to actually send a link to my Instagram page to someone today and I literally could not obtain a link to my page anywhere in the web app. It simply would not allow me to do that. I could be missing something but every time I was in a logged in state on the web it was railroading me into the app. I almost deleted my account for that. I might still.

There are a couple benign exceptions, but I've generally accepted the policy of only having first-party apps on my phone and using the browser to access anything else (even triggering desktop mode if I have to).

Is this possibly the first pushback against "app culture" ever?? Then it's a long time coming. "App" has been my most hated word in the English language for at least 5 or 6 years.

Myself, I never fell into the trap of using them, living in a rural enough area that the lifestyle doesn't require it. And if a company or service does require it, i.e. doesn't offer a web-based equivalent, I move on.

Would love to see some deep dive reporting on what happens to the data after it's collected and how much money I'm actually worth to companies if I succumbed.

So don’t. I can’t fathom what you’d need an IKEA app for. If you need an app for something brief but specific, delete it after you’re done.

On the other hand, apps frequently work better with less clutter than the mobile website. It’s wild how many websites clearly aren’t tested on real mobile devices — usually just by shrinking a browser window and saying “looks good on mobile” then moving on.

Recently had to download an app to pay for parking at a public transit center. It made me really grumpy—fortunately I arrived early enough that I could figure that all out, but if the app download rigamarole caused me to miss my train.

Not an app, but I also had to use my phone to check my luggage curbside at the airport. This was frustrating because I had to use a small screen to enter the details that were on my phone.

I’m more concerned about needing apps to configure appliances. Or your Wi-Fi router. Or even a KVM (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2024/09/29/1900). How many of those apps are going to be maintained for, say, five years?

I "love" that almost everything I want to see in a browser (content, shops) wants me to install an app, and almost everything I want to have as an app (tools, editors, email... MS Office is the biggest offender here in my books) wants me to be in a browser or is just a bloated packaged website with subpar UX.

The apps also don’t let you turn stuff off like the web does. I can disable shorts in most apps that have them. The app is a massive downgrade in functionality for me.

All the llm providers are rushing to create desktop apps while File > Add to Dock is superior - you can change font size, pinch to zoom, cmd+f to search, your extensions work, you can open multiple windows...

Both implementations somehow manage to suck up 100% of cpu when rendering fucking text tho.

The nadir for me was a barbershop that required me to download an app to get a haircut. I told them they lost me as a customer and left.

I wish I could use internet banking to replace bank apps. The banks are slowly shutting down their internet banking or requiring their app to perform face recognition. This is probably because online gambling and scammers were running automation on the website to move money quickly. The scammers moved on to cracking the mobile apps and instead of adding verifications the banks just start cracking down on debugging techniques like blocking VPN and debugging (or sometimes having Developer Option is enough to trip the block).

Most of this is the fault of apple and google. We could have native style apps that load in and out like webpages, and have them load in as parts that come in and out too! If we were using objective C, they might even be smaller to load than an equivalent web page.

But we don't due to the app model being profitable as a choke point for the os makers. Web GUIs are worse on mobile than the equivalent app, and there are many things that just gated off that you don't get in the web guis, and thus everything stays as an app, while many apps would work fine as this kind of dynamically loaded native app without any 'store' you would need to go to, just a url you load. The android activity model especially lends itself to acting this way too.

But app clips and google play features you may say. They are too restrictive and clunky, and google play features still need a base app to work.

Loyalty cards and apps are awful. They're just a way for companies collect our data and 'segment' pricing aka discrimination which muddies those 'pricing signal' things hardcore capitalists like to mention when they talk about free market efficiency.

To get the normal price now you have no choice but to hand over your data and dignity. These mechanisms should be banned.

My rule is never to download apps to my iPhone.

Wasn’t this supposed to be solve by App Clips? [0] I used this only once or twice, and the idea kinda seems abandoned.

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/app-clips/

If Apple would play nice with PWAs we could effectively use that for 90% of apps.

…But then that would mean they can’t take a chunk of companies’ profits so not likely to happen anytime soon

Dear Mr President, there are too many apps nowadays. Please eliminate three. I am not a crackpot.

It's so boring to read comments on here about how everything could be a text displaying webpage. Internet everywhere in your pocket is a waste for toilet reading.

But it's also frustrating how the ecosystem of Google and Apple, has stifled creativity in the space. We went to the moon with less computing power than a crappy PC in the 90s. People copying Google's model of basic functionally but with ads and Apple's overly protective but nearly useless permission model has ruined a technology that should be more revolutionary than it is.

Some of it needs to be solved legislatively. I absolutely should be able to have my entire contacts list read by a random game app, and the only consequence be that I found all my friends who also play the game, with steep penalties for collecting and selling that data. But I should also be able to vet and use my mobile computer to put anything on it I want.

Cut the App Crap! If it can't be done on the web it's probably not worth doing.

Yet again we see that Steve Jobs’ user interface instincts were right: he hated the idea of apps and fought putting them on the iPhone.

Stand down everyone. Stand down. There's no gun to the authors head. Nobody "makes" them do anything. They install apps out of their own volition. As you were.