Comment by denysvitali
8 hours ago
I understand the user point of view, but some web UIs nowadays are so bad and the app so good that I'm not sure this always holds true.
I do agree that this seems to be exception rather than the rule - so having both is actually nice IMHO.
> some web UIs nowadays are so bad and the app so good that I'm not sure this always holds true.
This is by design to force you install the app. Most of these days, I just treat it as a signal to neither use the app nor the website.
Reddit comes to mind. I have so many issues with their mobile website. The back button has been broken for years, comments will frequently just hang as loading indefinitely (only fixable with a hard refresh), videos will sometimes not be replayable, sometimes if you change the zoom on the page it will just hard refresh, etc.
I'm not sure if it is intentional to push you to the mobile app, but I have to imagine the mobile app doesn't have all these issues.
Thankfully, old.reddit.com as a default option still works.
The kicker is that the text is so small and to make the site usable (and readable) you need to rotate your phone to landscape mode.
This works well enough that I haven't downloaded the reddit mobile app or used their mobile site ever since they killed Apollo.
I'm especially angry that if you go to reddit.com in a mobile browser, it will sometimes fully block you from certain subreddits (not just NSFW ones) and tell you that you can only access it from the app. Meanwhile, you can easily visit the exact same subreddit by typing old.reddit.com/r/whatever. The outright lying bothers me so much. I refuse to be desensitized to lying just because everyone is lying all the time; it's still really wrong, and they really should be ashamed of themselves.
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Their mobile app sucks too. They just killed /r/all recently.
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you mean like in a way of "defending" the user from using the website and just go right away to the app?:)
Not really, more like "just pick whatever works, both usually suck"
If it's really "by design" then you are saying they have a staff of web developers who are told, "No, no, no... all that quality work you're capable of--don't do it. Here are some JIRA tickets to make the web site shitty and slow and eat the user's battery. Go implement them and make everything worse!"
What kind of sad, self-loathing software developer sits down and says "OK boss, whatever you say, boss, gonna go make it bad now..." I mean, I know to a lot of people, it's just a 9-5 and you do what your boss says, and "pride in your work" is not really a thing anymore, but come on. Who gets even a shred of satisfaction doing this?
I think a better explanation is just incompetence.
It's usually done in such small portions the developers don't know exactly what they're doing. That, or they've become so numb to it to not really care
Alternatively, they could just make the web UI good.
This isn't an alternative for the user (the person you're replying to).
I can't think of a web app that really feels like a (good) native one. For example, I would never use Google Calendar as a web app / Google Maps as a web app as they're far inferior IMHO
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TurboTax, for all its faults is one of those where the desktop app is better than the webapp they keep pushing.
Unless it’s required (Starlink) or something I check often (not much this day), I don’t use the app version. I prefer grabbing my laptop and use the web version. But best is when there’s an API available so I can write my own tools.