Comment by const_cast
7 days ago
Web apps have been sabotaged so severely for years now, and it really peeves me. Half the time they bombard the UI with "use the app!!1" popups and the other half of the time they just don't work.
The worst part is that a lot of native apps these days are just web views. You can't even be bother to use the native UI toolkit and you expect me to download your app? If this is just safari with extra steps then let me use safari!
It stuns me that eBay is so determined to get you to use the app that they will divert someone who has landed on the site and started typing a search term presumably with the explicit intention of buying something in order to sell them on the idea of installing an app instead!
Just ... let me give you money without interrupting me ... please?
Yes, it's the same thing I see with logins. How many more sales could we be making if we didn't require a user account? A lot, I would imagine. Most people are going to be seeing your site for 5 minutes, buy what they need, and then get a confirmation email. That process should be something you're optimizing for - but evidently, the promise of juicy data is more important than actual sales. Hopefully that user account is worth more than a few cents!
Exhibit A: parking apps. Why do I need an app? And why do I need an account? What if I just... don't pay? How many people are doing that? Probably a lot.
So let's spin up a contract with a local towing company and burn all this money for non-compliant customers instead of just getting our heads out of our asses and streamlining the process. I bet you if you just put a tap-to-pay meter then 99% of the non-compliance will just - poof - disappear.
I like using ublock origin since I can create filters for those popups.