Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
danq.me878 points by MrVandemar 6 days ago
878 points by MrVandemar 6 days ago
Nobody here is talking about the fact that a significant number of users want apps, too.
I'm responsible for an internal tool at the company I work for, hosted as a website, that handles a bunch of miscellaneous tasks that other employees need. Think reimbursements, documentation and reporting, gathering and presenting business data. That sort of thing.
When I took it over, it was desktop only ( a lot of <table> formatted pages with fixed px sizes). I spruced it up, modernized it to work on screens of any size, and created a mobile version of any pages that just didn't translate well to small screens (think "large tables of information").
When I announced the update, the number of people who asked me variations of "how to get website on phone if website on computer" or requested I make the damn thing an app was outrageous.
We take tech literacy for granted, because it's like a dozen levels down fundamental to our entire field. But the tech illiterati exist, and they love apps.
> We take tech literacy for granted, because it's like a dozen levels down fundamental to our entire field. But the tech illiterati exist, and they love apps.
They "love apps" because apple and android have spent billions to break their mental models and convince them that "you use apps to do things on your phone". Literally. That's the extent of most people's understanding.
So, sure, they "want" apps in the same sense that early internet users "wanted" AOL because in their minds AOL and the internet were indistinguishable. But actual free choice requires an understanding of the choices.
This doesn’t really make sense. Apps were pretty popular immediately after decades of web usage. There are many reasons to prefer an app. Even on desktop; if I’m using a service enough throughout the day, I want a native app, not a website.
There are many reasons to prefer an app, most of which are ways OS makers have crippled web apps for reasons that TOTALLY HAVE NOTHING TO DO with the fact that they get a 30% cut if the user chooses the native app.
One important which is not included: web apps are resource hogs
Electron and React apps, perhaps.
It's completely feasible to build a webapp that is lightweight. I have done it several times.
This is wrong. The most important reasons why I prefer mobile apps are the same as why I prefer desktop programs.
- I can download it once and then use it.
- I can see when it gets updated (versus a website that gets updated every time I load it). For security reasons it's better, I can even verify my app with other people online and make sure we run the same thing.
- End-to-end encryption doesn't make much sense in a webpage, because I fundamentally have to trust the server (which serves me the whole app I run every time). If you care about end-to-end encryption, you want an app.
- For open source apps, I can audit the code, possibly edit it, and use it. I cannot do that with a webpage.
- I exclusively use free apps, so 30% of zero is... zero.
1. You can download & install PWAs for offline use too.
2. This isn't true for apps anymore. Server driven ui is a thing.
3. JS runs locally. You can inspect the network traffic more easily than you can with an app.
4. You can audit OSS websites too.
5. Your personal preferences have nothing to do with the fact that Apple makes tons of money from apps but not websites.
1. If you do it like this, then I count it as a mobile app, not a webapp. A webapp loads in the browser. We're not debating programming language here, if you run Rust in your browser via WASM it's still loading in the browser.
2. Wut?
3. The network traffic of an end-to-end encrypted app is... encrypted traffic to the server you don't trust.
4. Not sure if it's bad faith or not, you conveniently drop the other ideas: can you fork a website and use it against the original service? And again, if you audit the sources and then load the website, you have no idea if you are running those sources or not. Or if you will next time you hit "refresh".
5. Granted, they make a ton of money for apps. My solution to that is to force them to allow third-party stores.
> - I can see when it gets updated (versus a website that gets updated every time I load it). For security reasons it's better, I can even verify my app with other people online and make sure we run the same thing.
in many cases this is no longer the case. Discord, for example, has introduced capabilities to update parts of the app without goung through the play store on android, same with youtube. Which they obviously use to enshittify things against your will.
I understand your point, but I am not sure how relevant it is to use bad practice as a criticism of the technology itself.
Like I can write a modern C++ program that will be orders of magnitudes slower than an interpreted Java program from the 90s. But that does not mean that C++ is slower than interpreted Java: just that I can't write software, right?
If I care about security, then I choose apps that I believe are built correctly. I do happen to believe that ProtonMail is built correctly, and Signal as well. But it remains that because of how the technology works, the end-to-end encryption happening in ProtonMail requires me to trust the server, which defeats the point of end-to-end encryption in the first place [1].
[1]: to be fair, it does not defeat the purpose of ProtonMail entirely. It helps me trust that ProtonMail doesn't massively store data of all the users. But it is weaker because Proton can easily target me personally, and Signal cannot.
At this point, most of those "native" apps are actually just web apps packaged in Electron. The fact that you generally can't tell the difference is proof that there aren't any real reasons to prefer a native app. All the reasons have to do with either OS vendors trying to hobble PWAs, or web developers creating React monsters for no good reason. Web apps can actually be very performant.
The real reason is really simple tho, and we could identify it ahead of time even before apps existed:
The average users sucks at managing bookmarks.
Telling a user that a feature is a webpage instead of an app means that they, in their glorious tech illiterate brain, think they have to memorize the url. They don't want to do that. They want to "have it" so they don't forget it. And having it is easier in the app mental model to them than in the bookmark one.
I know sufficient 40+ year olds who have the most absolute disgraceful phone desktops, filled with garbage. And yet, this is what they want. They want their bookmarkrs in the one place they'll check. And they want no folders.
This is trivially solvable with a good mobile OS level feature to create phone desktop icons from websites.
Of course, Apple and Google will never do such a thing when their cut of app sales is ~$100bn globally.
I just tried and it looks like I can do this in Chrome on Android relatively easily. The UI could be a lot nicer for it though.
And I did run into an issue where if the site allows me to install it as a PWA, Chrome will want to do that and won't want to bookmark a specific page on that site instead.
Also, maybe your point was that this could be done at the OS level rather than the browser, which is fair.
Not sure what you are talking about (is this sarcasm?), but on iOS, Safari allows you to add any website as an item to your home screen. I am pretty sure Android has a similar feature.
Is that front and center in the UI? How many users know about this feature? Do they promote it as much as they promote other features they want to promote?
Location and marketing matter. Otherwise we're in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the aliens put Earth's demolition notice on the bottom of a cupboard in a cellar on a planet light years away from Earth.
In what UI? I've definitely done it by accident as well as on purpose before.
Most people like apps because they're often better to use, unless you have accessibility requirements (and even then an app that makes sure accessibility is good might still be better than a website that makes sure accessibility is good).
Agreed, except that on Android, you can easily bookmark any site as icon, when using Android Chrome.
Don't forget that Google also has ChromeOS, it is Apple that isn't that keen on the Web.
On the other hand, thanks to devs and Electron garbage, the Web is actually ChromeOS nowadays.
You could tell the average user that installing a native app would require memorizing a URL too. You would be lying, but you would be lying just as much as if you told them that they'd have to memorize a URL to use a PWA.
Everyone can tell the difference immediately due to the lack of performance
You'd be surprised. Obsidian, slack, Spotify, figma etc don't usually get panned for lack of performance, and those aren't even very light weight. As wasm apps mature, it will only get harder to justify maintaining 5 different native apps instead of a single cross platform one
Slack and Spotify really suck. I can't judge Obsidian and Figma, I don't use them.
The one example I know where they seem to have done a good job (at least in the beginning) is VScode, and even there it's not great. It's just not terrible. Put the same effort into a native app and it will be great.
Not being unusably horrible in terms of performance and being required to do something I need to do doesn't mean I enjoy or even tolerate your JavaScript app, bro.
I'd switch over to the 16-bit VB4 form version as soon as available.
Web sites optimized for mobile weren't really a thing when the iPhone launched. That's why apps shined on smart phones. Web designers did eventually catch up with the <meta-viewport> hack but the trend towards apps was already too established at that point and people thought that you need an app to use a service.
Funnily enough, when the iPhone launched, it didn't have a native SDK. With iPhone OS 1, developers were supposed to create web apps. That only got changed with iPhone OS 2.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070722172208/http://developer....
You are right. Steve Jobs also used the opportunity to destroy Flash. But my point still stands: Most web sites weren't developed with the mobile form-factor in mind until a while later.
HTML 5 canvas exists because of the iPhone, originally it was going to use Web apps.
Apple created <canvas>, but it wasn’t for the iPhone, it was for Mac OS X dashboard widgets. This was a few years before the iPhone existed.
Eh it's partially true - the browsers on phones needed to get better as well.
Zuckerberg famously made the Facebook apps basically just a responsive webpage under the belief that maintaining one codebase for all platforms would be best.
The performance on mobile was so terrible that Instagram started eating his lunch simply by maintaining native mobile apps that are actually performant, and Zuckerberg was forced to panic purchase Instagram (made by a team of 13 people) for a billion dollars.
Eventually phones got more powerful and mobile web browsers got good enough that PWAs could perform comparably to native apps, but it was too late, and Apple and Google had absolutely zero interest in promoting something that would damage their app store / play store revenue.
It has now been longer since apps on smartphones were introduced than it was between the web’s birth and smartphones (to say nothing of popular uptake, it’d be generous to give the web a full decade there before the rise of the smartphone). Combine that with recency bias and the marketing serving incentives of platforms and vendors to push towards “native” and the point seems pretty strong.
There’s some minority of apps where work is offline resource bound or mostly offline regardless, those certainly have always made sense on device, other than that habit and mindset probably is the main driver of preference.
The original reason apps were popular was because they provided access to device apis such as accelerometer and gps which websites didnt. Think the beer drinking app etc.
Since web apis have caught up and allowed the same functionality, the common perception hasnt shifted back as App Stores have perpetually tried to keep attention so that they keep getting their cut of sales. If everyone knew you could do everything in a wepb page that you can in an app, sales would stop flowing and that is a bad thing for Apple/Google.
Most 'native' apps are just electron wrappers around a webpage these days, so how do you know you 'want a native app', just because it has the convenience of being managed through the app store?
> Most 'native' apps are just electron wrappers
Desktop apps tend to be ElectronJS, because somehow Desktop failed. But because ElectronJS sucks doesn't mean that it's impossible to have good desktop apps. I have high hopes that Kotlin multiplatform and Compose multiplatform will make desktop apps cool again.
Then mobile apps are a completely different story: a good mobile app is a lot better than a webapp. At one end of the spectrum, I don't need an app to show a website (this should be visited from the browser). At the other end, I don't want a complicated webapp in my mobile browser, I want a mobile app.
Another thing that web people tend to completely forget is that a webapp is re-loaded every single time. A mobile app is downloaded once and fetches the data, and can sometimes mostly work offline.
I am very, very happy that CoMaps is a mobile app and not a webpage.
Everything you have said here is pretty much incorrect. Are you a coder and do you know how native and webapps work? If not I would do some research rather than assuming, because things you are saying about how webapps work are just not true.
You may start by elaborating on why everything I said is incorrect. I can't really engage on "it's wrong, trust me bro".
> Are you a coder and do you know how native and webapps work?
I am, and I do. I am thinking that we may disagree on what a "webapp" is. I meant webapp as "a dynamic webpage that behaves like an app, but in the browser". Not "web tech used to write a desktop app" like ElectronJS. With ElectronJS you ship a desktop app built with web tech. You may also ship a mobile app built with web tech. But that's orthogonal to my point.
My point is that what you load in your browser is not installed. It's fetched at runtime.
I kind of get this, but quite a lot of the websites/webapps I use are better off on the web.
Imagine that from tomorrow, hackernews is an app. You can't do stuff like open 10 different tabs of it, put it in a tab group, expect it to restore where you left off after shutting down your device. It's interaction with other pages is also wrong. It would have to either open a webview or a separate browser app, both of which make navigations more complex. Extensions no longer work, you can't change stylesheets or use user scripts and so on.
This is why I don't like Reddit pushing an app and breaking/limiting the mobile website. It's just not how I want to use it at all.
> This is why I don't like Reddit pushing an app and breaking/limiting the mobile website. It's just not how I want to use it at all.
As with many reddit problems, old.reddit.com is a pretty universal fix.
I do use old reddit on my PC, but unless I'm programming or gaming, most of my browsing is done on mobile.
There are extensions to make old reddit mobile friendly, but by default it is a terrible experience. Another example for "you can't use extensions on apps".
I personally find old reddit on mobile more usable than both new and the app version.
I want native apps because I don't want to rely on the internet existing and I don't think hosting an offline web page in a captured browser is "good enough"
A lot of "native" apps rely on the Internet for essential functionality. Your Starbucks app would be deadweight if it couldn't pull your account info and store catalogs from starbucks.com.
Back then developers didn't have tools to create websites that look good on both desktop and mobile devices. So websites back then were hardly usable. Apps solved this issue.
To most modern users, web browsers kinda suck if they don't know URLs. For example, if they want to find an item they saw on Amazon, searching it in browser history just sucks compared to the in-service search.
A lot of users also use browsers like they use their Desktop folder, which is to say they have 100s of tabs open. The fact that apps enforce quitting and limited state is a plus to them, hence mobile Chrome adding an automatic inactive tabs cleanup feature (which mobile FF removed for some reason?).
Browsers really should've adapted to this reality with some UI/UX changes, like showing relevant site history. But none of them are actually interested in improving UI/UX, and the few changes that do get through just piss off long-term users.
> To most modern users, web browsers kinda suck if they don't know URLs. For example, if they want to find an item they saw on Amazon, searching it in browser history just sucks compared to the in-service search.
And, more and more, browsers are trying to hide the URL as much as possible. Which is REAPLY annoying.
That is a great analogy! I still remember the day my cousin explained that there was a whole internet outside of AOL…
No, because I used a computer before web apps took over and native software is a better experience.
webapps are inefficient, clunky, slow substitutes to actual native apps. I think decades of marketing and billions spent by Google trying to convince people that webapps are better is what makes many tech people think they are. Literally.
People "want" webapps to be what users "wanted" bc it pays their salary...
That's clever rhetoric, but for most use cases it's just not true, and that's the point of the original article. There are legitimate use cases for native apps, but many of them could be converted to an instantly loading, 50-100KB web page without losing any functionality. As opposed to a 50-300MB native app, which you need a fast connection to install, and starts up more slowly than the web page every time you use it.
They both have their uses. At the extreme, try to imagine Pubg as a web app. There are good modern games that work purely in a browser. But still, there are "applications" that function better as full fledge clients seeping small amounts of data and there are "applications" that function just aswell as dynamically loaded full server-side solutions.
I know, I agree both have their uses :-) I was just jesting about the kind of extreme OP went for.
My take is that they love apps for the simple reason they show as easily clickable buttons to enter. Most dread having to type a Web address for something they regularly do. Few know that they can create an "app-icon" from any Web page. Should be advertised more.
> Few know that they can create an "app-icon" from any Web page
Let's say from most web pages. Some sites will hijack your browser and install their PWA instead of the page you requested.
When I say I want an app that implies a few things:
- this isn't a one-off use, I don't want an app to pay parking meter once and never use it again.
- it's an app and not a WebView pretending to be native
- it's native and not react-wanna-be-native
- you know how to make an app
I have to use this app to open a parcel locker and every time I launch it I have to wait for "downloading bundle". It's probably the easiest kind of app to make and yet somehow they made it worse then a website.
> this isn't a one-off use, I don't want an app to pay parking meter once and never use it again
Just today I ran into a parkingmeter that was covered up in favor of ONLY allowing to pay via app. Which I find horrendous. (austria, for context)
But take parents example. What is it you want the app version to do that a decent website can’t do?
Well, for starters, UIKit apps are faster and better on battery than web apps. Then we add a bunch of APIs that are just not available to a web app:
- Core Bluetooth
- Core NFC
- Periodic synchronization
- Background upload/download
- Background location tracking (in some cases, it's a plus, though)
- Nearby Interaction
- Anything USB
- No widgets
- No HomeKit integration
- No share extension
- No Live Activities or Dynamic Island content
The list is honestly too long.
To be clear, I do wish that Apple was less hostile towards PWAs and developers were better at making PWAs. Until recently, you couldn't even send a push notification from PWA.
To me the major distinctions are near full functionality even if I'm offline and the app hasn't been used in a long time and offline-first design with all major assets being available for download ahead of time and/or transferable between devices without re-downloading
Sure, but when it is for things like "reimbursements, documentation and reporting, gathering and presenting business data. That sort of thing.", I'm not really sure offline is that big a requirement, or that there are that many major assets. Even so, your mobile browser should be able to cache CSS and hero images.
Not the op, proper graphics.
Web 3D will never compete with native APIs in developer tooling, and hardware capabilities.
Now outside gaming, all CRUD apps could easily be mobile Web.
End users don't care about if it's an app or not.
What they care about:
- Does it do what I need it to
- Can I access it easily
- Is it easy to navigate
- Does it work or is it buggy
- Is it slow
- Does it abuse notifications
- Is it prompting me to log in all the time
- Are there too many ads
- Can I use it on any device I have
- Does it complain about updating constantly
I don't think any of those actually has to do with being a website. The problem is that web browsers and websites didn't get a not-stupid UI for phones faster than the phone vendors could funnel everyone into their walled garden. Remember "click here for mobile" and having to develop two web interfaces? And half the time functions would be missing on one side?
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading these comments. Apps are clearly better for end users.
HTML and css is SUPER slow. It doesn't feel native, it doesn't feel good to use.
You also get so many weird glitches with state refreshing, sessions being cleared, log in not persisting.
Has anyone here actually used a PWA? You can feel that it's slow and clunky. Apps feel SO much better with the native UI, pre-downloaded, much faster etc.
I've found the most consistent indicator of overall app quality to be whether it is extremely small in size. An Android app under a megabyte in size is going to use the familiar, high-performance platform-native UI because it doesn't have room to do anything else. It is gonna do what it says on the tin and nothing else. It won't have ads. It won't phone home. Since it doesn't show ads and doesn't phone home, it's quite likely open source, meaning it quite likely has a GitHub project that I can look into if something goes wrong -- and because it's so tiny, I won't need to spend days trying to figure out how it works.
You might be taking crazy pills or you've yet to come across an app that's just a webpage inside a web view (a lot of apps these days unfortunately)
For sure, and these apps feel bad. I notice instantly. But they manage local storage, caching, and sessions much better than a PWA anyway
> You also get so many weird glitches with state refreshing, sessions being cleared, log in not persisting.
And these don't happen in native apps? Because they somehow have less bugs?
> Apps feel SO much better with the native UI, pre-downloaded
React Native apps are pre-downloaded and have a native UI. Lots of them feel really bad. Not all, though.
You can make fast websites/PWAs just like you can make slow apps.
A web app is limited. Even if it loads fast, it feels clunky. Apps using native components have a much higher ceiling. Users don't care what tech is underneath
> A web app is limited. Even if it loads fast, it feels clunky.
But what about it feels clunky?
HTML and CSS are a lot faster than you want to believe. You can't tell me you've never used a website that isn't slow. Problem is the people making most websites don't care to optimize or profile anything.
Except most "native apps" shipped by most companies are Webviews, React Native, Cordova, Flutter, MAUI, and very seldom written with the native SDKs.
That sounds less like wanting apps, than simply having no idea what's going on.
Most of the users of phones seem to operate on the no idea what's going on model. It's on developers to meet them where they are at, and if that's the app store you better be there for them.
Agreed, you never insult or complain about the customer you only address their issues
Honestly, they probably would have been perfectly happy with a bookmark on their home screen, but have you ever tried walking someone who doesn't know how to enter a url into their browser through the process of making a home page bookmark on their phone?
Ultimately I ended up making a PWA that does nothing except act as a bookmark. Which was way more of a PITA than it should have been.
>Ultimately I ended up making a PWA that does nothing except act as a bookmark.
Which is exactly what I was going to reply to your original post.
I am willing to bet 80-90% of user don't want / need / care if it is an Native app. They simply want the website / PWA bookmark icon on their App Screen selection.
The problem right now is the experienced of getting a PWA on to an App screen is not user friendly or in someway user hostile because it goes against the fundamental service revenue of their App Store model.
That and Apple ACTIVELY does not want PWA to catch on and be user friendly.
If a stupid website is turned into an App, then any purchases made through it instantly get slapped with a transaction fee straight to Tim Apple's pockets. There was a whole court case with John Epic about this and everything.
A PWA would bypass that. They really, really, really, really, really dont want that.
Sounds like what could be a useful built-in OS feature. Along the lines of:
"Aim camera at QR code to put "open-link" icon on your home screen"
Does something like that not exist?
Devs can pretty easily implement this on their site using the BeforeInstallPromptEvent.prompt method.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
Though of course...
> This is not supported on iOS.
It could, right? But let me tell you a secret: Apple doesn't want PWAs/web apps and actively limits Safari to force developers to build apps.
If pinning website bookmarks was more prominently advertised in the UI, they would be fine with it I guess. Though it would need some more changes.
Why do people like apps? Because they can put it on their home screen, they can open the app list and pick from there, they are searchable in a canonical repository, which is kind of like googling for the website but still.
Login flows are simpler and persist better, with local storage etc.
Multiple apps can be switched between by just moving between the currently opened apps, while website tabs appear inside the browser only and are mixed with many other unrelated browsing tabs, making it harder to find.
I guess fundamentally all of these could be supported with browsers. But in the end, Google and Apple don't want to make bookmarks and independent persistent "browser windows" easier.
I really wish PWAs were more well-known among average users. If people knew and expected they could install certain websites as apps, that would simplify things so much and really balance the power of the app stores.
It's not well known because it's annoying to install ... and it's annoying to install because the stores are huge cash printing machines so that's not going to change.
It's not that hard to install. The website can just have a button you click to trigger an install prompt: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
But of course...
> This is not supported on iOS.
But on the same page
> On iOS 16.4 and later, PWAs can be installed from the Share menu in Safari, Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Orion.
So you can't have an install prompt, but it's still pretty easy. If people can learn hamburger menus they can learn this.
My problem with PWA, is that it usually completely ruins the multiple tabs/windows of the same app/data
On desktop or on mobile?
On mobile it's rare for apps other than web browsers to allow multiple tabs/windows and the ones that do (Ex: Gmail allows a draft to be a second window) have many multi window related bugs.
> On mobile it's rare for apps other than web browsers
One more reason I'd rather have a site than an app: because I can open multiple copies, open a link in a new tab, open different installations of the same site, and all the other things that browsers automatically support.
Unfortunately apple accomplished their goal of killing that entire idea. The time for it to take off was 10 years ago. They begrudgingly support it now but it's too late. gg
When I announced the update, the number of people who asked me variations of "how to get website on phone if website on computer" or requested I make the damn thing an app was outrageous.
I had a similar experience. It was mostly lower- and middle-managers who needed to put their mark on something visible.
I responded with, "Tell me what features you want the app to have that the web site doesn't; or is this a vanity project?" The "vanity project" line is what made people re-think what they were asking.
When that didn't work, I pointed out that they'd have to hire an entire new team to do the app, and gave them a high six-figure number to accomplish what they wanted.† That always worked.
† For a number of regulatory and political reasons, we cannot offshore for cheap.
My PWA skills are rusty, but IIRC it's one click on Android to install web page as an "app" (ie it appears on the home screen like anything else), and it was about 3 in Safari - perhaps a onerous for B2C, but surely not for internal users.
So you can easily make an "App" for normies, from a web page.
I think you're right, but I think it's also because the industry trained everyone on this model. I remember ~ 2010-2012 there was a big push to make everything an app. As far as I can tell the only benefit to users is a nice icon on the home page, and the benefit for the company is.. exfiltrating data from the users phone?
I encountered something similar recently. I put a lot of effort into making a PWA mobile-optimized version of my product which is effective an app in a browser. And I was flooded by user feedback saying they simply would not use the product until there was an app available. There is little option but to create an app in this environment, or face disinterest from potential customers. And the internet is shockingly mobile-focused nowadays, 80-90% of traffic is coming from mobile devices. So not having an app is death for your business.
Apple will also not approve a straight web browser in an app wrapper, there's a specific rule that disallows this, so you have to make some good faith effort to implement it natively or not be allowed on the App Store.
> When I announced the update, the number of people who asked me variations of "how to get website on phone if website on computer" or requested I make the damn thing an app was outrageous.
This level of technical illiteracy shouldn't be tolerated in the workplace in 2026. We all work on computers all day, there's simply no excuse for being incapable of basic computer operations. Upskill or get out.
As not a web dev, out of curiosity: What would be the drawback or problem with showing a header or pop-up on mobile browsers, offering to install them as (web)app? Then using the PWA functionality of the browser to do it.
I'm not a heavy user of those but the result of PWAs has always been an icon that's handled by the OS like if it was any other native app, and when opened it just behaves like the web browser in kiosk mode just for that website.
Would be great, but at least on iOS the only way to add a PWA to your home screen is via the share menu. Apple would need to support that header pop-up to install the PWA and they won’t unless someone makes them.
> What would be the drawback or problem with showing a header or pop-up on mobile browsers, offering to install them as (web)app?
In this world, every single site now pops up asking to be installed. No thanks.
I came here to say that a significant number of developers want apps, too. Including me. For many reasons including performance. But the one I want to mention here is security, because it systematically gets missed by web people:
End-to-end encryption fundamentally doesn't work in webpages. Because when you load a webpage, you have a 1:1 connection to the server which sends you the code you need to run. You have to trust that the server sends you the right code, every single time, and there is no practical way to verify it. The whole point of E2EE is that you don't trust the server, and with a webpage you fundamentally trust the server. That's completely incompatible.
Let's compare the Signal mobile app and the ProtonMail website:
- With Signal, you can audit the sources, compile them and run that. You know you are running the code you audited. You can trust someone else to audit the code, compile it and run it. Or you can just download it through the Play Store and know that tens (hundreds?) of millions of people did that too. If you download it through the Play Store, you can "verify" your app with someone else, making sure that Google didn't send you a modified version (which would have required Signal and Google to collude in the first place). You know when the app is updated. If it matters for your life, you can make sure you benefit from end-to-end encryption.
- With ProtonMail, you load a website. Everytime you load it, the sources could change. When you enter your password, you enter it in that very code that the server just sent you. So the server could identify you, and just this one time, send you a different version of the code, just for you, that would leak your password to them. You don't have any way to pin a version of the website and compare it with others, and there is no need for Proton to collude with anyone else to do that (it's a lot easier when no collusion is needed).
Again: end-to-end encryption fundamentally does not work with webpages.
If the app store allowed you to install bookmarks, I doubt most people would notice.
The Google Play store did (maybe still does?) allow installing some PWAs advertised as light versions of the apps.
> Nobody here is talking about the fact that a significant number of users want apps, too.
This is true, as it depends on the nature of what is being presented and if offline usability is preferred or doable.
Everything as a website, can arguably be an equally bad fit for situations, as everything as an app. Flexibility and careful study is required.
FTA
> I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture”
> Nobody here is talking about the fact that a significant number of users want apps, too.
End users, for the most part don't know what they want. They take when makes sense to them. To end users apps are easy. To us, a URL is easy.
> But the tech illiterati exist, and they love apps.
Yup!! And we get sucked into this vortex at times. Good post btw.
On iOS, I think the only two reasons to have an app are: notifications and access to contacts.
Rich widgets on the Home Screen are valuable too. As a web developer, I wish I were able to make widgets for people to put on their Home Screen to perform certain actions in less clicks, or have information from my (web) apps easily viewable at a glance. Which I know they would want. Right now, as far as I’m aware, for me to do that in iOS (and possibly Android) is to build those in native land.
Use this to test it out, https://whatpwacando.today/
Wait wait. How does PWA when I click "install to home screen" actually show me that rich preview screen, with instructions? That's crazy!
Edit: I have been truly wowed today https://web.dev/learn/pwa/installation-prompt
the benefit of apps is they don't break. websites update out from under you and the web expects browsers to always be evergreen
> the benefit of apps is they don't break
What world do you live in? Apps are either enshittified with updates, or the content source the app was using is broken in similar ways to a normal website.
The only way you avoid this are sideloaded non-networked apps - which are not the usual.
updating apps is optional is my point
I agree with that point.
The useful executable code is contained on your device rather than fetched from a website. No update means you can run that useful code forever.
Not many apps are useful in that form though.
Wrap the page in an app and publish to app store.
Can someone explain why this isn’t obvious?
> We take tech literacy for granted, because it's like a dozen levels down fundamental to our entire field. But the tech illiterati exist, and they love apps.
LOL. Kindly do this prompt to any LLM : "critize this statement, or any logical fallacy inside"
Try applying the same level of skepticism to your own statements before posting them on HN.
Okay I guess? So then you politely answer to them the “app” is their web browser of choice! Problem solved
I recently decided to publish an app on the App Store just so I could say I accomplished that, and maybe even make a little bit of beer money on the side.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that my actual app is pretty much garbage. I don’t expect it to be popular. It’s basically a worse version of stuff that is already available.
I expected this to be a learning exercise about the process of getting stuff published.
Long story short, by the end of the ordeal I was somewhat surprised that anyone independent bothers to publish apps at all. The amount of red tape and nitpicking by the initial app review process is astounding. The business/legal side is also annoying. I might be misremembering or misinterpreting, but it seems like you really need an LLC with a mail forwarding service and a cheap second phone line just to avoid the App Store sending the whole internet to your personal phone and address.
On a website you can just not deal with any of that, and not give Apple $99/year just to keep your app on the store.
And we haven’t even gotten into the big royalties you’re paying for App Store purchases.
Still, I understand the appeal at some point, just not for an app like OP was forced to use. I certainly wouldn’t want to use something like Immich or Opencloud without an app: these apps need to deeply integrate with my phone to be truly useful.
I like making maps, and I wanted to do a certain bend on a very specific kind of online map, filling a gap I noticed in existing maps.
The idea of an app really appealed to me (at first), but the more I thought about it the more I didn't want to deal with iOS and then Android and then maintaining parallel functionality on the web and all that mess just for a fairly-local hobby project that I make no money off of.
So, I just kept it as a website (which is also a PWA) with extensive testing on every platform I can think of. It's just worked out so well and is so, so, so much less complicated. And if I abandon it, should just keep working for years so long as the website stays up (or until browsers start doing something very different JS-wise.)
(You can see it at https://trailmaps.app if you're interested.)
So i've done similar things in the past - and my justification for 'app' over website has been offline.
Does the PWA state of things resolve that in the modern days? If it did, yeah I'd agree, no need for an app at all. In my case the app was being used in rural Ontario. I cant even make a phone call here without wifi.
This actually handles that, at least for my use case. Specifically, on first load of the page (in a browser, or the stripped-down browser that runs the app-like PWA install) a service worker gets installed, that caches the entire site/app/map locally, and runs it from there. Then every 24 hours, or on new page load, it checks the live site for content changes and pulls down the changes if they exist. If there's no network connectivity it just silently runs the map.
Each map is 16MB - 20MB in total, so this is all nice and simple to do. Even on a slow 3G connection it's only a minute or so for a full map update to stream in.
The whole point of this system was to take a snapshot of data (mostly OSM), add on some local things that can't really be represented in OSM (like WHICH parking lots are most appropriate, stylistic overrides, system descriptions, etc) and display them. Because of issues I've had in the past with well-meaning-but-misguided OSM mappers wrongly editing trail systems I did not want anything that pulls live.
And then by having purely static content the hosting is very cheap and easy, there's no security concerns around... well... anything dynamic on the site. And each map is portable were I to want someone else to host them. And literally in a couple of years if I haven't updated the map it won't change yet still will work, and that's fine and accepted for this use. Sort-of like a mobile version of a traditional print map. Kinda like the print workflow of editing/design/etc and then rendering the PDF, but web.
This all aligned nicely for me to have a tool that works this way, with each map generated by a tool.
(Sort-of disclaimer: It was also a big personal project in learning to work with AI stuff for development. I knew and understood the inputs and outputs, was able to design the UI, handled/managed all the testing... But I didn't have to worry about the actual-code part. I was able to make pretty quick progress and iterate nicely on my ideas.)
Happy to talk, etc, more about it too. Either here, or contact info is on the site.
That was an amazing reading. I just implemented something similar a couple days ago. And now I'm building an android app based on this PWA (no tool for that, claude fable can code a good custom webview wrapper).
I got most of this done in Opus (dunno version, started in early spring) but yeah. Having something to do the heavy lifting was damned helpful.
> my justification for 'app' over website has been offline.
Gosh, I wish more apps did some kind of progressive "enhancement" and let people read already cached messages and do deferred sends like the old days, instead of being completely useless without a data connection.
I used to run a company (2010-2018) where our customers were almost always using our product inside of grocery stores, which are almost always metal sheds with some finishings on the walls. Not so great for cell service, it became essential for us to support offline mode if we wanted to keep those customers happy and engaged.
I spent many late nights trying to debug reachability bugs. It's frankly a nightmare trying to build a reliable app when the user has /some/ cell service, but not enough to operate the app reliably.
Gosh, having tried to use the Home Depot app (to find products in store) while IN their stores... It's so bad. I can't even imagine what you dealt with in trying to handle those things.
(And so, so many little bugs in my map thing from upthread were these odd timing quirks when a user didn't have good service and one check would run and leave something else hanging resulting in a blank map. <sigh>)
Yeah, home depot is a tricky case. They have a huge array of products, and in my experience when you cant find something you need to search beyond the store you're in....so the database you need access to isn't exactly small. Makes a practical offline experience tricky.
Home depots website sucks anyway, slow, clunky, terrible touch space, and the search is awful.
Aside, they should ad cell repeaters inside to fix all this.
If I have good service their mobile app is actually pretty quick, but I don't want to join their wifi so... Yeah. :\
Maybe in the US, in Canada i find their online services are pretty average. A lot of the time i search for something and i get a US link, much to my disapointment.
Hello fellow map maker! I feel like I’m in the same boat. PWAs work great, I wish Apple would treat them as first class apps. I tinkered with launching a TWA for my app on the Play Store and it works pretty well but I haven’t published it yet. Probably a harder market to monetize than iOS but it seems like good advertising just to have the listing up
Hello! And yeah... :\ The Android/Chrome/Edge support for it is great, and on iOS it's actually nice, but you have to do all the hoop-jumping of clicking Share, whatever, and getting the icon to actually appear.
Also, apparently Apple really doesn't like approving apps that are basically wrapped PWAs (Google will, I guess?) so that is yet another check against bothering with an app.
Yeah, Apple has a rule against simple wrappers. Check out bubblewrap if you haven’t already. It’s made by Google specifically for wrapping PWAs for the Play Store. There’s a tiny bit of work to make a keystore and manifest file, otherwise it just pulls from your PWA config automatically
Thanks for that pointer. I have, but I just really don't want to do it... With my current architecture -- that I like -- it'd be an app per map. Which I guess could make a little pocket money, but they are so hyper-local it wouldn't earn much. So I may as well just keep things going the way they are.
That's a cool project. Sort of a more open Trailforks alternative?
Thanks! Sorta kinda... But also different.
The main idea was to solve the gap of how many trail systems have colored loops, or signed/colored loops made up of multiple "trails", and Trailforks (et al) has no concept of that. So the situation a user finds themselves in is being at a trail, with Trailforks up, wanting to follow the "Orange" loop (for example), and Trailforks doesn't show that.
Hopefully the "Orange" loop is documented as a route, but this stuff often gets missed, and is still awkward since the image of the map still doesn't match the signs.
So my goal was to show the map close to what's physically there, use OSM data as much as possible, and filling in gaps for what OSM doesn't capture, rendering it all into a static map that also happens to work offline. For some specific examples, compare these two systems and their print, Trailforks, and trailmaps.app maps:
RAMBA: [1], [2], [3] Shelden Trails: [4], [5], [6]
There is the same kind of gap when compared to RideWithGPS, Strava, Gaia, etc.
And also, I'm a volunteer with our local trails non-profit. I want anyone and everyone to be able to find maps so they can enjoy the trails. A /lot/ of trail clubs are starting to replace maps with a link to Trailforks, which I believe does riders a disservice because it both requires an app and account and (if a user is trying to view a map out of their home area on a phone) payment. It's literally locking the basic info about a trail -- the map -- behind a semi-paywall. By making a system like this for our local trails I've helped completely avoid that mess. And so I made the map generator open as well so other techy folks can do the same or build on this.
This generated-static-map system does have the downside of being single-person-ish manually managed, and the maps do NOT update automatically. But I also see this as a feature, just like the print maps and in-person signage they are designed to complement.
I've prattled on a little more about the what-why-etc over here on my personal blog if you're interested: https://nuxx.net/blog/2026/06/25/trailmaps-app-map-generator...
--
[1]https://static.wixstatic.com/media/9d19d2_b85c5684f54a4fdc85...
[2] https://www.trailforks.com/region/ramba-trails/
[3] https://trailmaps.app/ramba/
[4] https://www.metroparks.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/2022-S...
[5] https://www.trailforks.com/region/stony-creek-metropark/
That’s cool.
Our local trail association did that. Well, actually we went from an old “become a member to download GPS files” to “go find the trails on Trailforks”
But that was when Trailforks was more open and less locked down.
We’ve discussed replacing Trailforks with something better/more under our control, but haven’t gotten around to it.
If you're interested, reach out. Depending on the scale of your system(s) and how much is already in OSM I might be able to spin one of these up for you without much work. (https://cramba.org is my local club, but I work with pretty much all of them in Michigan.)
I periodically try to put something together. I don’t even care about publishing to the app store really, I mostly want to make stuff for myself for macOS.
My last attempt, it felt like Apple was no longer interested in the idea of hobbyist developers. The setup just to get the Xcode project setup felt like I needed to have a company and a website. When I selected something about iCloud, because I thought it would be nice if what I made synced to iCloud, I couldn’t even get started without paying $99, so I had to start again and choose a different option without it. And here I thought the $99 was just to publish to the store.
Considering how Apple started, this trend feels wrong. When I wanted to make a simple little app a few weeks ago, I ended up using python with webview. It seemed to be one of the few ways to make a little GUI app without boiling the ocean.
This is exactly what I've been observing as well. As soon as the App Store became a cash cow, the incentive to support non-commercial development went away. It's now a place constructed by a giant company, for giant companies.
I am on a formerly fairly active game app forum elsewhere and it's been dead for years. Indie developers are still probably making some releases, but the combination of Apple being unfriendly to small developers and the economics of the whole thing means it's close to dead. There were tons of experimental little $1 or $2 games in the early days but that seems to be gone. Even worse many of the old ones aren't playable anymore because they never made the transition to 64 bits and OS support for them is gone.
As someone who uses apps, the hoops you have to jump through are one of the reasons I prefer apps. I'm glad Apple knows who you are and have scrutinized (to some degree) your app.
I have no interest in installing a web app that could look innocuous today and be entirely different every time I hit F5.
Well...
Search right now in the App Store for "Morpho" and you'll find a "Morpho: Network" app. That app says it's some sort of TODO/Note taking app. It uses very broad language in the screenshots and assets from morpho.org (a decentralized protocol).
Once you open the app, it immediately downloads another bundle using OTA updates and shows an entirely different app where you "connect your wallet". You can imagine what happens next.
> I have no interest in installing a web app that could look innocuous today and be entirely different every time I hit F5.
Or as I have encountered several times over the years, it turned out to have vanished without a trace for whatever reason (author got bored, became ill, didn’t want to pay for the domain any more, etc) when I reach for it, sending me searching for an alternative in the midst of a task.
Self-contained binaries stored on my personal devices don’t do that, and one can usually find third party copies scattered across the internet long after the author stopped publishing/maintaining them.
This highlights the differences between what developers want vs. what (some) end users want. Developers love the web because they can change things and deploy instantly, they can have a single version of their app "out there" and not have to worry about clients running old software, and they can take their software down when it becomes inconvenient to maintain. Users on the other hand, like apps: They don't want their app changing out from under them suddenly. They want to be allowed to use the old version they are comfortable with and that's not stuffed with ads. And they want the assurance that the software will actually be there the next time they want to use it.
I personally have no love for web apps either. No matter how many well-behaving developers are out there, the median web developer has ruined the web as an app platform to the point where I view web software as generally hostile, ad-filled, spyware, that's under the control of and serves the web developer's interests over the end user's interests.
In addition, it’s a lot easier to seek rent with a web app which is also likely a big factor.
I’m a dev and understand how web apps can be attractive to us, but as a user they irritate me. During my formative years, software by and large served the user over the dev, so flipping the scales entirely in my favor as a dev feels almost wrong.
Interesting. Since we're talking about PWAs, which are essentially apps running in the sandbox of a web client (i.e. browser), the issue you raise could presumably be fixed in an instant with a client-side setting: "Do not update this app".
That improves the situation a little, but the user still doesn’t have an easy way to migrate the app to other browsers on the same machine or to new machines. With a self-contained binary you just copy the executable wherever and you’re done.
The other issue is that web browsers are dynamic environments (much more so than operating systems) and sometimes break/change things. Users who’ve frozen PWA updates don’t have any access to critical fixes. A lot of devs just wouldn’t support frozen versions.
My assumption is that 99% of what is on the app store is trash. I never go surfing the app store to find "an app" because I know it will be a waste of time. I'm outright offended that they hide the search in a corner and center a bunch of ads for apps that I know I want nothing to do with. I had to subscribe to Apple Arcade and cancel right away to make the (1) badge go away on a feature that insults me as a "gamer."
All the time I hear that "PhotoSync" is good or I install an app for a business that I deal with like my bank or the local gas station.
On the other hand I feel like it is safe and usually worthwhile to browse the web -- even the sketchy parts, like the web sites that lead me into rabbit holes right out of Videodrome.
> I have no interest in installing a web app that could look innocuous today and be entirely different every time I hit F5.
That's been the case with native apps for a long time now too.
It's against the App Store rules but if you build an app with React Native/Expo you can OTA update it to do something completely different without going through another review. Enforcement is minimal, especially since you can selectively roll out updates to make it unlikely that a reviewer gets it.
It's such a weird thing to be concerned about though. Your phone automatically updates apps by default so they can suddenly look different later. And even then, so what? If the change was malicious just stop using it? Apps are sandboxed, websites are sandboxed, you'll be fine.
> Enforcement is minimal, especially since you can selectively roll out updates to make it unlikely that a reviewer gets it.
What's worse is that there's practically no process to report any sort of rulebreaking, so someone could be mining crypto or running a residential proxy [1] through the mobile game I've been playing, and I'd be none the wiser.
Not really, no.
Not that it doesn’t occasionally happen, but at that point you’re trying to dodge the police… as compared to there being no police in the first place.
In this case the police are not watching. Apple does a cursory review during the approval process but they are not proactively firing up your app to see if anything changed post-review.
I have no interest in installing a web app in almost all cases. I'm happy to visit one though, and I trust the browser sandbox to keep it from doing anything worse than making my device warm until I notice and close the tab.
Exactly. I've published apps. When GP says their actual app is "pretty much garbage" and that there was red tape and nitpicking - Apple is trying to stop garbage!
> When GP says their actual app is "pretty much garbage" and that there was red tape and nitpicking - Apple is trying to stop garbage!
and failing at it, because that garbage got published on the app store.
Yeah, that part was a bummer. I get that Apple has incentives at cross purposes there. Do they have a higher bar than Google? Can we even tell?
From experience doing mobile development at work, natively for both Android and iOS, Apple does test and run your app to make sure it works and that it does what it promises to do. I can see it because we issue both Google and Apple accounts and I can see when they get used. While Apple's app review is harsh, it did make our app higher quality and they are quick to reject when there are bugs. They run our app on every review and go through their checklist. Apple is also quick to question the permissions we ask for and make us justify them. In one instance, whoever did the app review, listened to our justification and actually recommended a better, alternative approach. Android, Google test ran our app when we put it up for the first review and havn't used their test credentials for any subsequent reviews to push app updates. We totally could just completely bust our app, push it to the store or do whatever we want and there seems like little to no oversight.
That's really interesting - thank you for sharing! I've only ever submitted to the App Store, so I didn't know!
It's hard to go look in the app store and see what a dumpster fire it actually is and then claim Apple is trying. They aren't. They're just claiming that as marketing to keep their money making machine.
> It's hard to go look in the app store and see what a dumpster fire it actually is and then claim Apple is trying. They aren't.
You cannot make that claim unless you know how many apps Apple has rejected for being garbage. On one hand, developers complain Apple runs all kinds of checks on their apps before publishing on the App Store. On the other hand, users complain that App Store has too many low-quality apps. Both can be true at the same time if the stream of apps is high volume and low quality.
If they were actually doing a good job this would make sense.
Just weeks ago they published a sanctioned Russian bank's app masquerading as a pomedoro timer lmao.
It's not about a "good job" or a "bad job". It's a continuous game of cat and mouse. They're getting better at it just as some of the best funded bad actors are.
They only have 500 reviewers for the whole App Store, and in fact, they were chastised by the judge in the Epic case for investing very little in the review process six years ago when they also only had 500 reviewers for the whole App Store. This isn't cat and mouse it's theater while they're shielded by section 230 immunity and pocketing enormous profits.
I'm not sure why it matters that they have 500 reviewers, or had six years ago. Is this a "that number seems small" argument?
It matters in the context of trusting their review process, and certainly "seems small" considering these 500 people oversee 2 million apps while scams and fraud have been prolific for years.
I think if they didn't have immunity for all the scams and fraud - and that's being challenged by both the EU regulators and in US courts - they'd probably have a lot more than 500 people. Multiples of it.
How many exactly would they have and why?
BTW, good recent comment on the difference between Apple and Google reviews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48911599
> it seems like you really need an LLC with a mail forwarding service and a cheap second phone line just to avoid the App Store sending the whole internet to your personal phone and address
That's an EU thing. If you don't publish in the EU you don't need to dox yourself.
It's also a very general European mindset thing. They have a very different approach to privacy there - they basically expect everyone's identity to be public, and then protect those identities from abuse, rather than the more US approach of letting you hide your identity so it can't be abused. You see supermarkets with the owner's full name plastered across the storefront underneath the franchise logo. "This store is EDEKA John Smith"
There's something to this but it's still a slightly dodgy generalization.
A random counter-example from France. If you have a one-person small business (i.e. with a registered business number and the right to invoice), all personal information beyond the name is private by default, it cannot be looked up. The Nordic countries are perhaps closer to the image you're painting. Personal tax information is famously public in Sweden, for example.
But IMO differences are easy to exaggerate. Let's not forget that private phone numbers used to be published in paper directories - with home addresses! - everywhere, including America.
> The Nordic countries are perhaps closer to the image you're painting. Personal tax information is famously public in Sweden, for example.
It used to be much more open, with phonebooks and open tax records, but the last decades I think every Scandinavian country have started prioritizing especially online privacy. E. g. the Norwegian Datatilsynet used to be legendarily tough on things like public CCTV, and now they go after even random chrome extensions.
It's infamously difficult to dox someone from Scandinavia compared to e. g. the US with tons of databrokers.
A store is more reasonable to put your name on because generally if you want to meet the person running it you could just walk into it regardless of whether you know their name.
The internet has created a culture of deranged harassment that makes posting your identity online alongside anything you publish more insane than ever. And your market is more or less the entire world rather than your local community.
Europe has basically applied the same principle to websites as to stores, unlike the US where both websites and stores can be fairly anonymous.
Occasionally mobs of hateful psychos will target individuals with harassment. There is absolutely not enough protection from unwanted messages, unwanted phone calls, false reports to SWAT teams, identity theft, who knows what else.
In Europe, a lot of the protection is that they have to provide their own identity to access the system. So I can host something on my internet connection, which is tied to my ID, and people can DoS it, but those people also have to provide ID for their own internet connections and can be traced, unless they are outside Europe in which case I can solve it by blocking all other countries. If someone spam-calls me from Europe, their phone is registered to their ID and caller ID is strictly enforced, so I know who is spamming me. For this reason there are few spam calls. If someone sends me a letter - well, I don't think sender address is mandatory because it couldn't be enforced. If someone wants to look up my details on the business registry, they leave a record showing who is looking them up.
It's also in the US. A consumer protection law in California started it around a decade ago and Google applied it to everyone instead of letting us opt out of the state (it's why I let my Android app die), and since then they've also disallowed PO boxes.
The solution I figured out is to use a forwarding service (e.g., Anytime Mailbox) and then you fill out a form with USPS that basically declares that the business is the using that address as a proxy.
Technically the government knows where you are and all that, but the public doesn't easily know where I literally sleep at night.
And, really, if someone was to mail me a letter as a customer, I would get it. The forwarding service will scan mail for me or let me pick it up in person for a trivial fee
This ends up costing about $10/month depending where you live.
Just one more little way that this is a bit of a hassle to just sell a little $5 app as a side gig.
And I know this is more of a government regulation thing but I wonder if there's no other way to be compliant with regulations and also save solo/small businesses from this little extra bit of annoyance and cost.
Large companies or even relatively small businesses that exist in leased commercial space don't have this problem since their mailing address does not represent a real person's house and has no ties to an individual.
Why isn’t Apple the business with the contact info? They’re taking 15-30% cut and fully control their software APIs.
Unless I’m mistaken, Steam and GOG games aren’t listing the address of the game developers in the EU, but I admit that I might be mistaken.
Apple is just the delivery man, the app contents are solely created by the developer and are not changed by apple
Because of how the EU law was written
Nope, at least in Play Store it's because of how Google chooses to run their store. Google is the middleman between two sides of the transaction and its the developer that actually sells these apps, while Valve is one of the sides of the transaction and sells things based on the license granted by the developer. Not sure how Apple does it though.
Google publishes seller contact and Google and Apple both do so because of how EU law was written as it pertains to how they set up their stores
Back when I used to freelance, somebody once paid me a scant fee to build a pretty cool online tool for music teachers, basically an interactive piano. I checked in on the website a few years afterwards and found that they had wrapped it into an app and been selling it for $5/install ever since I made it for them. Probably my fault for not licensing the software I wrote for them (I was basically a kid at the time) but it still bothers me.
Time to make a better version for $4 install and a similar name... out of spite.
> it seems like you really need an LLC with a mail forwarding service and a cheap second phone line just to avoid the App Store sending the whole internet to your personal phone and address.
This is an EU requirement, and Apple didn't do this before EU required it. All app marketplaces have the same requirement for EU
> On a website you can just not deal with any of that
This may violate other EU compliance requirements but sure there's obviously no authority determining your compliance before allowing you to publish on web
I did something similar, for similar reasons. In the end I just did whatever to get it published. If you show up at my door, I'll pour you your choice of beer/coffee. But I agree, it feels very invasive!
On the web side of things DNS only recently started being more private - 10+ years ago it was common to have your phone + postal address on whois.
Two take aways from my experience 1. I'm happy that I invested more in the web 2. The app store gives you distribution - I have a few websites with almost 0 traffic, but the app I wrote gets a handful of downloads a week almost 2 years later?
>10+ years ago it was common to have your phone + postal address on whois
This is the .dk TLD today, and it's the reason I've never posted my website here. The .dk registry (punktum.dk) is run by absolute clowns.
On the other hand, the first thing I do before spending money on a danish website is "whois eksempel.dk", and if it doesn't return a danish address (and wasn't created recently), I'm out.
I did something similar. I wanted to tell myself I had done it, but also it was an inexpensive learning experience and I got an app that I wanted out of it.
And I think I got that. I like how mine does what it does (maps breaker panels and records home maintenance and stuff) without someone trying to sell me something.
But once I realized what advertising costs everywhere, I pretty quickly realized that app exists essentially just for me.
And that’s ok, but it’s a stark contrast from the goldrush years of (even garbage) apps making money.
> I might be misremembering or misinterpreting, but it seems like you really need an LLC with a mail forwarding service and a cheap second phone line just to avoid the App Store sending the whole internet to your personal phone and address.
For something free I can get why this would seem unreasonable (modulo scams, for which this is a hoop I would rather have than not), but if money's involved, a consumer should be able to contact a human and be made whole, and having the money be handled by a company (even if that company is just a one-man-show) honestly does not seem unreasonable.
If you want to bypass that, you just shouldn't publish to the App Store, which does (or at least is supposed to) have protections suitable for most people. You should still be able to make apps and use them without the App Store involved, then the individual human who wants that app can make decisions based in the specific app in question and the people behind it, but that's a separate conversation.
Yes, you’re right that much of this only comes up when you’re trying to charge money for an app.
However, if you’re running your own website you can make those decisions on your own without being forced into most of them.
Plenty of very large “reputable” companies obfuscate their physical address and phone number, and don’t even offer an email address for contact.
I’d also say that this shouldn’t be as necessary when an app platform is involved. Apple takes 15-30% of the revenue and acts as a full retailer. Why do App Store customers have any need to contact the underlying developers in this scenario?
Walmart doesn’t make it easy/possible for me to contact the manufacturer of their t-shirts.
There are even other digital software stores like GOG or Steam that really aren’t selling you software that has a guaranteed point of contact.
Those platforms just have a half-decent to decent return policy and act as the middleman.
But when you’re on iOS you have all the burdens of a third-party supplier without all the benefits.
> Why do App Store customers have any need to contact the underlying developers in this scenario?
The EU decided so, and Apple didn't require this before EU did
I find this hard to believe, since Google Play store requires much less info, and doesn't disclose it to consumers (AFAIK).
Did the EU specifically demand this from Apple? Did they specifically require that consumers must be able to contact developers?
Or is this another "spin" by Apple to make the EU look bad when it imposes consumer protection that is bad for Apples revenue? Like they did with "chargers", "cables" and like the ad- and surveillance-industry has done quite successfully with their "spin" on the GDPR (making it seem like the EU or GDPR requires cookie banners - which it doesnt)
I'm not published in Google Play and don't have Android to check for myself, but when I look it up, I find claims that they do publish names and addresses for paid apps / apps with in-app purchases, due to the same EU law.
I'm pretty sure the Google Play Store does require this. I remember a few years ago (no longer at the company) having to verify a phone number and maybe address that is posted publicly.
> I find this hard to believe, since Google Play store requires much less info, and doesn't disclose it to consumers (AFAIK).
This changed recently.
> However, if you’re running your own website you can make those decisions on your own without being forced into most of them.
You will however pay for that privilege - a lot of people don't seem to realise their home address is in the WHOIS data, because they didn't pay the protection money to redact it
> Plenty of very large “reputable” companies obfuscate their physical address and phone number, and don’t even offer an email address for contact.
This is whataboutism. They should do that too. The fact they don't isn't an excuse for smaller devs or companies.
> I’d also say that this shouldn’t be as necessary when an app platform is involved. Apple takes 15-30% of the revenue and acts as a full retailer. Why do App Store customers have any need to contact the underlying developers in this scenario?
You should be able to contact the underlying manufacturer or whatever of any product you buy. Why should programs be different?
> Walmart doesn’t make it easy/possible for me to contact the manufacturer of their t-shirts.
They should.
> There are even other digital software stores like GOG or Steam that really aren’t selling you software that has a guaranteed point of contact.
More whataboutism. You should have a guaranteed point of contact for what you buy there too.
How far down does this go? Should I be able to contact the individual person who picked the specific strawberries in my carton of strawberries?
In the Walmart t-shirt example, should I have the contact info for not only the factory but the other suppliers who made the dyes, threads, cotton, the people who made the fuel for the harvester, the people who welded the tractor together?
Sure, maybe your idealist answer is yes, and on a conceptual level I can agree with that. But from a practical standpoint as the end consumer there is a stopping point.
My point is that Apple handles the money and the refunds, and they make all the software APIs. Completely closed platform. Why doesn’t the buck stop there? I feel like they pass along business responsibilities despite taking a large percentage of revenue.
If they’re going to pass on all those responsibilities for me then their cut should be more like ~5% to just cover transaction and platform costs.
> How far down does this go? Should I be able to contact the individual person who picked the specific strawberries in my carton of strawberries?
Down to the manufacturer of the whole product you're buying. In the case of your strawberries that would probably be the farmer.
> In the Walmart t-shirt example, should I have the contact info for not only the factory but the other suppliers who made the dyes, threads, cotton, the people who made the fuel for the harvester, the people who welded the tractor together?
No.
> Sure, maybe your idealist answer is yes, but from a practical standpoint as the end consumer there is a stopping point.
Of course there is. But you as the sole dev of an app are not at that point.
> My point is that Apple handles the money and the refunds, and they make all the software APIs. Completely closed platform. Why doesn’t the buck stop there?
My local electronics shop also handles the money and refunds when I buy a Dell. I can still get a refund directly from Dell if my machine breaks (not that I actually have a Dell). Yay reasonable laws.
The platform being closed and all the APIs being controlled by Apple are different problems that should be solved separately (which the EU is working on!).
> Down to the manufacturer of the whole product you're buying.
In case of an app, what is the "product" you are buying? Because according to Apple, they add a lot of "value" by ensuring the software is safe, performant, etc etc. Am I not buying "a safe, checked app"? Or am I buying an app and then separately pay Apple for an added service of "checking the app for safety" etc etc. I'd very much presume the first.
But if its separate, "an app" can be rather ambigous. For a one-time-purchase game, its clear. But many apps are really a service or even more that happen to have "an app" as one of the ways to interact with the service: Netflix, Uber, protonmail, Vinted (or ebay), etc etc: the app isn't the thing I buy. It's a wrapper around a service. Or even just one of the portals through which I can buy stuff. Point being: It's not simple, so your answers don't fit the analogy of "wallmart".
> In case of an app, what is the "product" you are buying?
The app.
> Because according to Apple, they add a lot of "value" by ensuring the software is safe, performant, etc etc. Am I not buying "a safe, checked app"? Or am I buying an app and then separately pay Apple for an added service of "checking the app for safety" etc etc. I'd very much presume the first.
If you want to, you can imagine the 30% cut being that separate service, but most analyses I've seen of this assume the first is the case, and I can't really see why it wouldn't be.
> But many apps are really a service or even more that happen to have "an app" as one of the ways to interact with the service: Netflix, Uber, protonmail, Vinted (or ebay), etc etc: the app isn't the thing I buy.
In those cases the app on the App Store is free, so there's nothing a consumer can really complain about, since they haven't bought anything. You can complain about the service rendered when you pay, but that purchase is handled completely separately from the app (non-)purchase.
> Point being: It's not simple, so your answers don't fit the analogy of "wallmart".
It does for apps bought as products. If you want an analogy for apps bought as services, then I'll use a different analogy, since they behave differently, and are treated differently in law.
I think a good analogy for this difference would be this:
Walmart sells both fresh/frozen/packaged food (lots of food safety regulations) and t-shirts (few regulations by comparison). They also sell things like cell phone plans and subscription services that have entirely different sets of regulations.
Exactly as you described, if I make a specific type of app, maybe the business address and responsible party should really be Apple. If I make a subscription service app, then it should be me.
