Comment by sgerenser
5 hours ago
They don’t need to specifically support “niche platforms,” which will never happen anyway. They just need to support the one, universal platform every device (be it phone, laptop or desktop) can always access, the web.
And they don't want to, because that experiment ran for around 20 years and resoundingly failed. Turns out it's really hard to stop the bottom quintile of users from entering all their credentials into just about any website that looks similar to what they are used to - and then their identity/money is just gone.
Stopping those users without a trusted authority deciding which electron-wrapped websites are genuine is an unsolved problem, I think.
If the app truly just plumbed a webview and cert verification - which has been doable for over a decade - it would be very portable and this wouldn't be a problem.
The apps don't just do that though; they call into and use an awful lot of the system APIs for user tracking / semi-native experience / biometrics and probably a whole host of other things. Its the incompatibility in these that drags compatibility.
> The apps don't just do that though; they call into and use an awful lot of the system APIs for user tracking / semi-native experience / biometrics and probably a whole host of other things. Its the incompatibility in these that drags compatibility.
Both can be true. Many (most?) online banking apps are just shitty wrapped javascript, that also uses an awful lot of system APIs.
I'm using a couple of different banks, and not a single one has anything close to a native app. Because how nice would that be? Responsive interface (since it doesn't need to load every single view from the server), instant search over your transactions (since the DB can be cached locally), instant access to all the PDFs in your inbox... but no.