The reason this is done is because you can see everything your browser is doing, but you can't see everything an application is doing without disassembling it.
I want very much to go back to websites. Apps are stupid.
the reason is children. for some reason the most recent generation of kids requires apps instead of sites. god forbid they have to remember an address.
just look at the fuckload of people who cant use lemmy without an 'app'
this is one of my peeeves
I mean, I think part of it is because they grew up interacting with apps because parents were, mostly rightly, restricting their children from use of the greater unrestricted web. Every modern parent I know had children who knew which apps on mommy or daddy's phone they were allowed to touch - their games or youtube kids or whatever. These apps provided easy safeguards for parents to rein in their child's internet experience. Even if these methods weren't perfect in their attempt (Elsagate and all that), this was still good practice for allowing your child access to modernity in the times you couldn't fully devote your time to overseeing their activity with relative confidence they were probably not watching wildly inappropriate content.
In a perfect world parents and educators would also be devoting time to teaching their child to navigate the internet and allowing them monitored (with physical eyeballs, not tracking) online browsing time, but I don't think we can rightly fault the kids for not having received that. Rather than grumbling about the situation, I think we'd be better served accepting it for what it is and instead approaching the topic from a stance of: how do we teach them better behavior and help them unlearn these bad habits?
edit: typo
If it’s a service I use regularly on my phone like Lemmy then an app usually does provide a better experience. The UI is usually better optimised and they tend to load faster. However if I’m only using it once, or if I’ve just visited your site then stop trying to get me to use the fucking app! That goes for Reddit as well, I have the app installed but if I’m just trying to view a post because I googled something I don’t want to be forced into the app
Yeah, but there are companies like McDonald's who killed online ordering on the website to force you to their app. I will not reward that behavior. I don't want any company's app on my phone that does nothing a website couldn't. I just went to a show with some shitty Ticketmaster competitor that required you to have their app to access your tickets (AXS I believe ) Great, you made a competitor to Ticketmaster that's even worse than Ticketmaster. Shit's ridiculous.
I'm not a child. But I already have an entire OS running on my phone. Why would I run a browser on top (with all of its UI clutter) so I can use an app.
If I'm going to use an app often, for more than a couple minutes each time, I'm gonna use an app. If I'm just visiting a site for the first time, or I'm just going to stay there a couple seconds (search engines), I'm using the web browser.
Browsers are for browsing the web. Apps (run by the OS, not by a web browser) are for doing things.
no they're brilliant, for exactly the reason you said.
I would also like to go back to websites, which are much less evil.
I hate that websites will purposely block a perfectly working website feature if it sees you're on a mobile just to refer you to their mobile app.
FUCK websites that require a login, i'm looking at you twitter, you need to be sued over this shit.
i wanted to download a singular PDF file yesterday, and apparently i needed to be logged in to do that? I'm not making a fucking account on whatever scribble.com is for a singular PDF that will help me find my Kojima-name wtf
and that is when I just drop that company forever.
Go to browser settings on mobile and switch on desktop mode. Fuck them sites.
Oh sowwy, this splitwise feature is only available in the app. There's just no way to make it work in a browser that isn't the one our app wraps around, you gotta understand.
imgur is evil
this unironically
An app for a fucking cemetary!? Nuh-uh
My most boomer opinion
Most of these memes are ironic, but this one is actually true. These apps could just be websites, but instead they're bloated spyware
Voyager app users
Unironically this. There's nothing these stupid apps do that they couldn't do on a fucking browser from 2018. If you want people to use the stupid app over the site, then please have only the stupid app and ditch the "just pretending it works" site and for fuck's sake, don't make the stupid app a javascript mess, because THAT could've been a fucking site instead.
Buddy, these apps could have been done in php and ajax 15 years ago
I know. It grinds my gears how sites of 15+ years ago worked better and loaded faster than the shit we have today.
And the web versions have and constant lightbox that asks you to download the app every fuckin breath you take. Instagram and Twitter being the worst of them all. For the second I don't even touch it. For.instagram I got barnista. And that's cause my wife uses Instagram sometimes .
The secret is that tons of apps are just web browsers in a costume.
There’s nothing these stupid apps do that they couldn’t do on a fucking browser from
20181998Reminder that the original Space Jam site is still intact
Dunkin Donut's website just doesn't work. The app is mandatory. Noped out of there real quick lol
Dunkin: “fahk yah! Just wahlk in and Ahsk for yah damn cafee and egg bahgle.”
Is here a joke here? All I see is truth.
Yeah someone called it out in the comments.
This template is for over the top exaggerations.
there is an alternate universe out there where every shitty social media website has good rss services and doesn't degrade you for not using the app
TFW someone makes a desktop app but it’s literally just a bundled chrome browser page
Lychee, a slicer software for 3D printing, immediately comes to mind. It's a fucking electron app. It also only works if you login to a fucking account, even the free version, because fuck you. Oh, and free users have to sit through 30 seconds of advertising whenever they click "Slice", because fuck you again
I am really confused about this meme template, didn't its usage used to be satirical (not sure if that's the right word)? I remember seeing ones like "Nobody ever needed maths", but recently I am seeing them inverted where the subject matter is actually criticised for being useless. Instead of claiming something useful to be useless. Can someone explain? when did the usage shift?
it's pseudo post-satire is how i like to think about it. It's satirical by nature, but it's gone so far, that it's not quite straight satire, some of the points made are genuinely accurate.
it's a meme just don't think too much
Please pair this with: Stop forcing me to make an account for your useless fucking service. It's a pain in the ass and only serves your corpo tracking while I get nothing in return
I agree it's annoying, but I've been using temp-mail for accounts I'll only ever use once and mysudo for accounts I'll need longer and it's been working well. Except ticketmaster doesn't accept voip numbers for your phone.
One of the most ironic things is if you willingly download the app version of a website, hoping it would speed things up and reduce internet data usage, just for the app to be using WebView or some other micro-browser engine which will essentially be the same as if you were visiting the website using your browser as before.
Thanks for nothing.
The few times I visit Facebook I just do it from a web browser on my phone, I'm not letting them spy on me 24/7 just so I can check on a couple groups
So I bought a new mouse, of course it came with RGB nonsense. Before purchasing I checked it could be disabled.
Software to control RGB? 300MB. Who knows what the hell else that'll be doing.
Plugged it into my Linux laptop, download OpenRGB, 1.7MB application that supports more than just this brand. Turn off the rgb, click save to device.
Same energy - whole different thing. I remember in 2005 having to install a special printer software. You can install the drivers, but to understand error messages, you needed "the suite".
So furious at the ordeal, I hoped that the future, we don't have to deal with this.
Apparently the future hates us and we are STILL dealing with this
Bro, my city just made an app it has a news button, a quick link to city code compliance and a quick form for reporting illegal fireworks. City is depreciating email newsletter and website for app and facebook. and I hate so many places advertising decent deals behind apps. I am not downloading an app for every fastfood chain and grocery store. Stopped going to del taco, mcd and Wendy's over shitty apps.
Controversial opinion. I love apps.
(Only because in my company, we created a app team to hire more developers and while our website absolutely doubles as a really fucking good web app, we hinder it in order to keep our app developer homies employed.)
im convinced 99% of app development is just for enhanced tracking and telemetry. Most are a browser in app anyway
I used to work for a very large cable company. All of our apps were championed by VPs who had strong personal connections to InfoSys, who got most of the contract work to create and maintain them. Almost nobody actually used the apps - the developers used various tricks to enormously inflate the apparent numbers of users. So essentially they were a mechanism for one large corporation to siphon millions of dollars from another large corporation. My life became a lot happier when I finally realized this and stopped giving a shit about anything.
As a side point, what the hell is wrong with Snapchat's UI? It's a mess of buttons arranged by a monkey on cocaine. How is this shit popular?
I spent most of my programming career working for small companies and doing almost everything myself (including collecting requirements, design etc.) but the last few years I spent with an enormous tech company working on apps with teams of professional designers and UI/UX experts (I've avoided the scare quotes around these terms, with difficulty). The designers always designed on paper, and violently rejected any suggestion that their designs be put in front of focus groups of actual users and modified according to feedback. "Users have no idea what they want" was an actual, frequent quote from them. As a user who does know what he wants and rarely gets it from modern mobile apps, I found this attitude a bit surprising. Not surprisingly, our apps usually averaged barely above one star (thanks to corporate instructions to employees to vote our apps up), with many comments along the lines of "only voted one star because you can't vote zero stars".
"Users have no idea what they want" was an actual, frequent quote from them.
It's because they're not designing for the users' wants, they're designing for the users' engagement (or whatever flawed metric they use to determine that). The designers mindlessly equate what keeps the user engaged with what the user wants.
Kids
I hate that I need an app to change the colour of my fucking lightbulb, give me a remote instead, damn.
That being said, I prefer using apps over the browser because they load way faster.
There's a lot of reasons to use a app over a browser.
Speed is not one of them.
As a web dev, we can absolutely provide you faster experience. Depending on the service and needs, we can blow any app awaym
But a app can access hardware tools that browsers cannot.
I don't know the technical reason but, on my phone, the browser takes a few seconds to load every page, while on an app it's way faster.
Of course a good website can beat a shit app. But there's no way that you can build a website that's faster than a good app.
First of all, because your website has to run on an actual app, called a web browser. Additionally, you can't magically remove the initial load time to fetch resources from the server. Those resources are already on your phone on the app so it's instantaneous.
I have Phillips wiz bulbs in my house and I can do most of the stuff in the app from Google home. The only thing I can do is set scenes but I rarely use those.
The only real downside is these use some Phillips API so of course to work they call back to their servers so that stop being smart without an Internet connection. Some day I'll move my light bulbs out of the cloud but that day is not today.
I have one from a brand called Enki and not only they made me dowload an app but I had to make an account as well. And every time I want to use that damn app it has logged me out and I need to type my credentials once again.
I didn't know about Google Home, I'll check if I can use that one instead.
(honestly i think tim cook wrecked the company, he's a pure bloodless businessman, thinking only about numbers and value extraction versus innovation and changing the world, which jobs, for all his faults, objectively did)
This was a choice by Steve Jobs for how it is now. This was also the time they were trying to push HTML5 as the future as removing dependency on specialty software. If mostly everything was only needing a website, then it didn't matter what OS you were using. This would help allow iOS and OSX (at the time) be fully compatible against Blackberry and Windows Vista. But then Android got popular and Windows 7 was a major improvement, Linux was growing as well (netbooks, before MS tried to push into that market). Suddenly their push of any device would be on equal footing was not in their favor, so Apple pushed HARD on "There's an app for that" to start the hard lock in of iOS leading to where things are today.
Both capitalist pigs
I miss the old days where a macbook came with a bunch of creative apps that kids in the 60s-90s dreamed of.
That innovative creative freedom train is long gone from that company
Care to name some of those apps? Genuinely curious, mac computers were (still are) prohibitively expensive and I never knew anyone who had one before the iPhone launched
A lot of website use so much ressources, I couldn't visit its with my 5 years old laptop or my "smart" phone. The only way to access their services is with apps. Fortunately, I could choose FOSS apps on F-Droids
However, loading textual information shall not consume all my RAM and most of my CPU. There is an issue with today web
Firefox Android has uBlock Origin.
This but unironically
This post was ironic?
Yea this pisses me off!
-Sent from Boost app
I always thought these were at least 50% ironic. Please don't tell me you don't actually want websites OP.
I unironically do. I don’t use apps for almost anything.
Bro most apps are unnecessary af!
Yeah. I refuse to use my gym app, cause unnecessary, but there's plenty of usecases where apps provide useful, specific efficiencies, not to mention the aesthetic improvements, and the ability to create and curate interaction.
Given a malware free world, apps can be cool.
they used the template wrong dw lmao
I'm so done with all these apps, I'm ready for the mains
Then we're getting some 'zerts!
Haverford intensifies
'Member when apple didn't launch the iPhone with native app support and used the argument that HTML5 could do everything you could ever want, and they were wrong, but actually right as well?
Yeah, I 'member...
Ugh even my weed dealer wants me to install their app. When will it end?
This is why I only use Instagram through Firefox on my phone. A) Meta software ain't getting installed on my device. 2) The Instagram app fucking melts iPhones.
Oh it melts Androids as well. It's just full of tacked on garbage that wasn't in the original.
I've learned the Facebook app actually causes a lot of battery drain. And those who uninstalled it suddenly found their phones lasting twice as long.
I wouldnt know as a non FB user.
Real times 10000000
There was a website for a while that could emulate PS1 games in a browser on your phone.
That told me that there is absolutely no reason to have everything be an app. Even games
If it ain't on F-Droid, chances are I ain't usin' it.
I think there are a grand total of 4 non-free apps installed on my phone right now. 2 are for smart home crap I don't want to live without right now, and 2 are Google services I haven't pried myself away from yet.
