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Comment by chr15m

14 hours ago

Here's what I would do.

1. Make it QR code scanning instead of tapping so it can be a PWA.

2. Make it a PWA. This will make it accessible to many more people. Nobody wants to install an app. Nobody wants to install a PWA either but they will at least use a "web site" (a surprising number will install it if it's good).

3. Save yourself a lot of money by building it on top of the Nostr protocol. Run a relay yourself if you want guaranteed reliability. Run a Blossom server for media. Use email for auth and store people's keys for them if you want a traditional UX. Don't worry about what's on Nostr already, just build your own thing on the protocol.

Let people come and go as they please and don't lock them in. They will love you for it later.

Cool project. Have fun!

27 comments

chr15m

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JimDabell  5 hours ago

> Make it a PWA. This will make it accessible to many more people. Nobody wants to install an app. Nobody wants to install a PWA either but they will at least use a "web site" (a surprising number will install it if it's good).

I’ve worked on a platform for social media apps. When the social network had a native iOS app, a native Android app, and a PWA, users chose iOS about two thirds of the time, Android about a quarter of the time, and PWA about 10% of the time. That’s across all users, including desktop, so the PWA actually had an unfair advantage.

People strongly prefer native apps to PWAs, especially for social media.

  • pbasista  2 hours ago

    > People strongly prefer native apps to PWAs

    Such a conclusion cannot reasonably be made from the data you have presented. It merely means that your web app was not preferred over your native app.

weird-eye-issue  12 hours ago

If somebody wouldn't even bother to download an app for a social network they probably wouldn't stick around for very long either

  • probably_wrong  4 hours ago

    What about the opposite situation? I'm not installing an app without first having taken a look at what the network has to offer.

    • weird-eye-issue  3 hours ago

      Yes, of course some people will feel that way, but also having less friction is not always necessarily a good thing because it requires less of a time investment for the user to get started, so therefore they are actually more likely to just churn. It is a balance

derwiki  13 hours ago

Nobody wants to install an app?

  • danilocesar  12 hours ago

    I always avoid apps if I can.

    But yeah, that comment is a bit disconnected to majority of the population.

  • threecheese  12 hours ago

    We’re not normies, so take that with a grain of salt. Here’s mine: apps have access to significantly expanded capabilities which has privacy implications. If I can use the browser for a given app, I do it. Amazon for example.

    • ChrisMarshallNY  11 hours ago

      As a native app writer, this has been my experience.

      Mentioning it here, though, tends to get pushback from folks that write Web apps. They don’t want to admit that native apps have more capabilities than Web apps; even if that’s a bad thing, because of security risks.

  • numpad0  5 hours ago

    People say PWAs are good as apps now and feels like an app now, personally as ab armchair nobody I doubt the retention rate actually compare, even if the app was literally just a plain WebView.

  • fc417fc802  9 hours ago

    Personally I'll only install FOSS apps on my phone and I go out of my way to actively discourage (to varying degrees of success) my relatives from installing arbitrary junk that they surely don't need on their phones.

    • opan  5 hours ago

      Same here, if it's on F-Droid I'll install it, otherwise I'm using the mobile site on my browser.

  • retired  12 hours ago

    I have a handful of 3rd party apps on my phone and none on my computer. Prefer to just use browser.

dgellow  4 hours ago

That’s empirically wrong. All statistics say that people do install apps way more than PWA