Comment by xxprogamerxy
2 months ago
Simple, UX.
The reality is, most webapps for mobile just suck. The UX is nowhere near that of a native application. I don't want any text to be selectable. I don't want pull to refresh on every page. I don't want the left-swipe to take me to the previous page.
You can probably find workarounds for all these issues. The new Silk library (https://silkhq.co/) is the first case I've seen that get's very close to a native experience. But even the fact that this is a paid library comes to show how non-trivial this is.
>I don't want any text to be selectable. I don't want pull to refresh on every page. I don't want the left-swipe to take me to the previous page.
Strange. This inability to select any text has always felt like one of the most hostile things developers could ever do. It feels like pure vandalism.
Another thing that causes massive productivity degradation is not being able to keep multiple pages open so you can come back to some state. I cannot imagine how anyone could possibly use these apps for any serious work.
The UX of almost all native mobile apps is absolute crap. But it's not their nativeness that makes them crap. I'm not complaining about the idea of operating systems offering non-portable but high performance UI primitives that make use of OS facilities.
Many native desktop apps don't have these UX issues (at least not all of them at the same time). It's the mobile UX patterns, conventions and native UI frameworks that are causing this catastrophic state of affairs.
Inability to select text is a pain in the ass when you're midway through learning the language and only wants to translate certain parts. In native apps it's understood (app makers don't really give a shit about me), but when it's in websites it's like a slap in the face :)
Yeah, the app model of one page open at a time ever is such bad UX. Huge regression from the web. Funnily enough you get around it on an app like Reddit by opening pages in the web browser.
Every time I try to select a single word in a WhatsApp message I surprised for a second. It’s so strange that most apps that have text as their fundamental content don’t allow you to do this.
> Strange. This inability to select any text has always felt like one of the most hostile things developers could ever do. It feels like pure vandalism.
Use Circle to Search? Native capability that works on every single app, and is close to perfect (with the exception of handling text at the very bottom/top of your screen that's covered by your navbar/Google logo).
On modern mobile and desktop operating systems, you can always copy that portion of the screen to the clipboard and it will recognize the text so you can paste it anywhere.
No you can't.
Even if you could (which you can't, at least on my, modern, phone), it would be a workaround, not a solution.
A solution would be allowing free selection like in the browser or, better yet, ditching "native" apps for web apps, as the person above suggested. As a bonus, this "exodus" will force browser makers to iron out any UX issues very quickly.
I’ve noticed that apps can tell when you’re taking a screenshot and often will pop up a little message first which appears in the screenshot.
Reddit on iOS was one that did it.
Also, if my memory serves, native MacOS apps by default support selecting most text that isn’t part of a clickable element like a button.
No, that's absolutely not the case, and it would be very odd and disturbing.
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To be fair, browser apps do have their advantages:
- text is selectable
- content is zoomable
- you can have an ad/nuisance blocker
- page source is open
While native apps have their own advantages:
- much smoother experience esp. navigation, scrolling, animations, etc.
- better overall performance (JavaScript will always lose to the native binary)
- access to hardware opens new possibilities; audio, video accelerators etc.; there's a ton of things you can't do in the browser with audio for example
- widgets, some of them are nice and useful too
- for publishers: an app icon on the home screen is a reminder, a "hook" of sorts; this is the main reason they push apps over web versions
All the features you mentioned can also be achieved by a well developed PWA. Of course, minus the widgets or some deeper system integration (like controlling phone calls etc.)
Try to build a more or less serious music synth in the browser that won’t kill your battery.
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> browser apps do have their advantages:
These are more like byproduct of the fact that web apps are built on the stack not suited for modern UI apps. It's literally a text typesetting engine pretending to be a rendering engine for high-performance UI.
So, it can also be framed as:
- everything is selectable, even what shouldn't be - buttons, drawers, video players, etc - content is zoomable, which most of the time just breaks UX in hilariuous ways. Developers have to do extra-work to either disable zoom or make hacks/workarounds.
"Everything is selectable" and "everything is zoomable" makes total sense if it's a blog post. If it's a UI for the modern app, it does not.
Disabling zoom is so hostile, why not disable screen readers and put bollards on handicapped ramps while you are at it. It’s literally a middle finger to older people and people with vision issues. If you disable zoom I will not be using your website.
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> It's literally a text typesetting engine pretending to be a rendering engine for high-performance UI
This is an outdated view of the web. Catch up or be left behind.
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Web just have defaults that are not suitable for apps. Disable text select is one line of css, not that hard.
+ working notifications - adblocker is more of a minus for publishers though
But mainly don't expect any good web app integration on mobile, because it would hit the store 30% tax.
As a user I usually want all of those features to work. I regularly get ticked off at apps, because I cannot copy paste like in the browser or the app just closes (and loses all state) because I tried to use the back button. I also encountered apps that just reset, because I dared switch to another app for a second because I wanted to copy paste something into it...
> I don't want any text to be selectable
Disabling text selection is not just worse UX, it is actively user-hostile
In Photoshop panels, title (like "Layers") are not selectable. How is it worse UX or user-hostile?
It's worse on desktop. On mobile it just leads to accidental selection when you were trying to do something else.
I have literally never needed to select text in a UX element.
In the past, occasionally there would be an error message in a message box dialog that I wanted to copy and paste. And then I discovered that despite it not looking selectable, it actually was.
I don't want to accidentally select the text of my menu bar, or of a text box label, or a dialog tab title.
I, I, I. Empathy is a weakness.
Lots of limitations for you to not accidentally do something, maybe there is a way to not accidentally do those things and also help people that need them.
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Most apps for mobile suck too. A lot of them are worse because they are not in a web browser, eg YouTube or Reddit or similar apps that work via urls.
Browsers are some of the very few apps that work well on a phone. Most of the other ones feel like a mess (except games I guess).
Mmh, the examples you've listed are actually super easy to do if you're using a framework such as angular with it's plugins for pwa and touch controls. And prolly tailwind for css/disabling selection if you really want to, but I'd call that an anti feature in almost all cases.
In theory. In practice not so much.
I've had enough browser apps try that on my phone. Usually they start to lag out and become unbearably slow due to the framework bloat, compared to native apps that have no such issues.
You have to wonder about the motivations of the company making the browser that makes it impossible to disable some of these things, and therefore makes real apps so much superior (like swipe to go back on safari - I have never ever swiped back intentionally in over 100000 swipe backs).
“I have never wanted to type the letter ‘e’ in any of the 100,000 times I hit the ‘e’ key on the keyboard; it’s always felt suspicious to me why keyboards even have an ‘e’ key which can’t be disabled” said the perfectly normal hacker news commenter.
> I have never ever swiped back intentionally in over 100000 swipe backs
Real question here, what are you trying to do when you "swipe back"?
Touching something on the left side, like a link, and let my finger touch the glass a tiny bit too long while pulling the finger back. Unwanted swiping happens to me all the time in all directions - may the developers use a touch screen for everything forever!
This swipe thing violates one of the most basic ux principles by making a destructive action easily triggered by accident.
Dating apps.
By instinct I swipe back like I am in Safari, and that does something else in those.
Swipe UP
The "pull to refresh" is probably the most annoying one.
Other than that, I'd like text to be selectable! I don't like it when apps don't allow you to copy text.
I use Copy [1], and when that doesn't work I use the OCR text selection feature on my Pixel phone.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.weberdo.ap...
That's funny, I use Amazon on mobile web, my wife insists on the app.
Guess which one of us has way more problems, due to both functionality and a constantly changing layout?
UX is when you have less features - got it.
It doesn't sound like anything that a PWA (paired with some a sync mechanism like Websockets) can't solve. And with WebAssembly the convergence is even more compelling.
To go along with this UX argument: it’s always been my perception that native apps often lean towards a stateful design while web apps try for stateless. Maybe that’s too abstract (read - incorrect), but was always just where my intuition landed.
Nothing prevents fhe same UI being available in web though.
Iconic mirrors a lot of it, but Apple/google could have just as easily made them native components triggered in the browser
That is not an objection. Two decades of webapp progress instead of native app progress would have (and still would) addressed all of that.
webapp UIs suck because nobody cares about them. They could be a lot better.