[mmcclure]

I switched to using PWAs for social media apps for similar reasons the author outlines. A pleasant, but somewhat unintended consequence is that I just use them a lot less because the experience is pretty bad. It makes me a little sad because I’ve always believed in the PWA dream, but the reality is that they’re bad because companies certainly don’t want to make an experience that rivals the app they really want you to download.

Expected, but just leads to reinforcing the idea that PWAs won’t ever be as good when every one people try from someone with a popular app is so awful.

[qWoodpecker]

What's funny is that desktop versions of websites in a lot of cases are responsive, and work fine on small screen. BUT at the same time the mobile version is crappy and lacks some features (or just shows "download our app").

Recently I've set up Firefox on Android so that it always run in desktop mode. I needed to also change screen width in about:config, because otherwise everything is too small. But after this websites seem to work better.

[chii]

> But after this websites seem to work better.

quite likely that the site has a mobile "mode" and a small-screen mode (for desktop), each made by different teams. some mobile mode website is fine, but others suck. Where as the small-screen mode for desktop tend to be made by the same team/person as the main site (it's a css media query after all) - so it's likely to be more coherent.

[cubefox]

What is the relevant setting in about:config?

[aembleton]

To avoid the download our app nonsense, you can add this filter to uBO: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/ref...

[henriquemaia]

What a great suggestion. I've followed your advice and it works. What a treat!

Thanks for sharing.

[raw_anon_1111]

And you don’t realize that social media apps put cookies on other websites so they know you have been to another website and then start showing you ads based on your interests?

Apps can’t tell what you do in other unaffiliated apps nearly as easily at least now on iOS that there is no globally unique identifier that apps can use to track you.

[socalgal2]

Apps require you to sign in so they've got you immediately. They can share all your activity with whoever they want. Websites (many) do not require you to login (youtube, reddit, hacker news, etc....)

Apps also try to open all links into their own webview, a webview in which they can track all activity.

[robhlt]

All privacy-respecting browsers block 3rd party cookies by default now, which prevents that kind of tracking. There's still other forms of fingerprinting they can use, but those can be used in apps as well.

[jeroenhd]

PWAs can be good, but for a lot of social media, they're only as good as their website experience. Many (most) companies seem to make their website intentionally slow and buggy, probably with the idea that users only need to use their web UI for a short while because they lost access to their apps or something.

For instance, I've installed Mastodon as a PWA and it performs great. Photoprism also works so well I haven't even bothered to look for an app.

[array_key_first]

The absolutely batshit insane part is that the 'native apps' are almost certainly created using web technologies which call the exact same APIs as the web app.

There's zero reason the web apps should be so slow.

[severine]

Try Phanpy for the fediverse: https://phanpy.social/

Maybe the best web app I've used.

[georgefrowny]

I'm convinced many companies purposely gimp their web sites to drive people to apps.

Uber for example doesn't seem to work from my phone browser.

What surprises me is how many engineers must be involved in this kind of scummy shit and keep it tightly under wraps.

[pavel_lishin]

You can't use Facebook Messenger on the web at all, unless you go to Facebook and switch to the desktop version. Then it's a simple matter of zooming in without accidentally clicking anything, using their fiddly interface to load up the conversation you're interested in, and get bounced around the screen as the input focus changes around.

[jsheard]

> I'm convinced many companies purposely gimp their web sites to drive people to apps.

And then their app is just a webview wrapper. But that still gives them more access to your device.

[grvdrm]

Instagram - major offender.

[m463]

> Uber for example doesn't seem to work from my phone browser.

Remember when uber wouldn't work for regulators either?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Uber...

[hdjrudni]

I don't know if big companies even know how to make web apps. Honestly. Which is extra insane to me because there's so much investment in web technologies. On my team at $BigTech there's like 1 or 2 people out of 30 people on our team that knows web, the rest are mobile. I'm a web guy but I refuse to touch our web-app because they butchered the tech stack and I don't have the energy to deal with that BS. We still have an mobile-web version distinct from the 'desktop' version because.... I don't know why, whoever wrote it never learned about responsive web design and we never bothered to move out of the stone ages because if people want to use the app on their phone, they should download the native app of course! And by "native" I mean we built our own half-baked framework so that we could cross-compile for Android and iOS.

Also I don't think these people know how capable PWAs are. There's very little you can't do in a web-app that you can do with a native app.

[DANmode]

Normies just see everything as “apps”,

and don’t mentally differentiate how they’ve put it on their homescreen once it’s there.

Plenty of great crossplatform webapps, if you’re not exclusively using social media or spyware. Often even if you are!

[ruralfam]

I have had a FOSS web app for learning arithmetic for quite a few years. I occasionally review it, and make changes. Each year Chrome and Safari both nip at the edges of what allows a PWA to be OK. No one really cares until one has to write documentation helping folks install the PWA and avoid issues that did not affect the PWA a few years ago. I mean really, are Tim and Sundar really that afraid ?? I guess so. They have dozens of millions on the line. Capitalism... gotta luv it.

[boppo1]

Hmm, I'm making a site and I planned on using a PWA for the app experience instead of a native app. Am I setting up for a bad time? I'm not too worried about the installation hurdle, my potential early adopters are motivated and smart.

[boppo1]

I'm making an app and I plan to go the PWA route to save myself on managing native apps. Any tips on making my experience first-class?

[bstasse]

If you're using React, I'd recommend using Silk (silkhq.com) to create native-like bottom sheets, pages, sidebar, etc.

Most animations, including the swipe, are hardware-accelerated, and it deals with a lot of common issues you encounter on the mobile web (body scrolling, on-screen keyboard, etc).

Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Silk.

[lanfeust6]

Personally my experience with PWAs has been solid, on Firefox w control over JS. I still use them a lot less because I don't stay signed in.