This is the entire philosophy behind all of the apps run by DHH/Basecamp. The web should be the default and native apps should only be used for software that just isn’t possible through the web (yet).
The problem is that users much prefer native apps. The idiomatic UI, the use of OS specific capabilities (even if the same result could be done without), the appearance of better performance because the app launches before a network connection is made.
We can opine all we want about how things should work, but the ground truth is a good native app has higher user satisfaction, more engagement, whatever metric you want other than development cost/non-customer concerns.
It’s very hard to tell users they should feel differently than they do, no matter the technical or philosophical high ground.
> We can opine all we want about how things should work, but the ground truth is a good native app has higher user satisfaction, more engagement, whatever metric you want other than development cost/non-customer concerns.
No way / at most, HIGHLY context dependant. Facebook/Insta/social media slug of the year? Yes, probably app is desired.
My bank? Maybe, at a strech, if it's good.
My local doctor? The real estate agent im trying to rent a house from? Amazon/AliExpress/Shopee? A movie theatre? My council street parking system? My university? Fuck no i dont want your shitty apps on my device.
My bank has been fine as an app. My main nitpick is that it makes it very hard to fully detach from the app store since none of the banks publish elsewhere (I can easily ditch social media on the go or use a website, in comparison).
I went to college early enough in the smartphone era that they didn't have an app as a freshman but did by senior year... I don't miss it.
Yeah banks want the closed ecosystem. Last thing they want is a plethora of app stores where fraudster clones of their apps appear, or jailbroken phones where grandma does everything right but a bootkit steals her money.
> The problem is that users much prefer native apps.
I imagine there is some data on this, but it goes against my observations of me and my circle.
I have maybe 4 apps that I use heavily and another 10 that I use when I have to. I actively avoid installing another app when the web version is sufficient. I don't need the weekly updates to clog up my storage. I don't need notifications going off at all hours. And I don't need creepy unfathomable permissions requests.
Is there some 500ms delay if I click a button on the web version? Maybe. Honestly, I'm not so busy to have noticed.
I’ve worked on a few native apps for large companies where there was already a decent web app but we were losing to competitors’ native apps.
User feedback was loud and clear: many users see web apps as cost savings efforts that are inferior products and only exist so a lazy / cheap company doesn’t have to invest in native.
Remember that permissions and notifications can also be a problem in web apps; that’s one thing the “make web apps as good as native” crowd has gotten us.
> it goes against my observations of me and my circle
Your friends are probably tech savvy. That means your browser is well configured (or configured at all), running an ad blocker and on a modern machine. You probably value the privacy attributes of using a browser, versus most of the population than will trade privacy for convenience.
Speaking as a user, I do prefer native apps that actually do the things that you have mentioned (i.e. use idiomatic UI for the platform, integrate with its features etc).
The problem is that the vast majority of the apps that we're talking about here - the ones that replace websites - are little more than a web app repackaged in the app store. So it still has all the downsides of a web app UX-wise, while also working around any privacy settings that would have applied in the browser.
For a GP booking app that most people only use once in a blue moon it really doesn't matter much. And most users will absolutely prefer a well-designed webapp vs. a crummy semi-working native app, as the previous person described. In short, this is just boring thoughtless repetition of a cliché with no consideration for context.
part of that is old perceptions that have long went away. And the other part is the huge push against PWAs, especially from Apple. Web-based app development has come so far but Apple is showing off its control freak tendencies as usual to make it not seem so.
Hearing the story above about infinite loading to hide crashes really boils my blood and shows that it's simply a matter of care these days (and not hardware/bad middleware) that determines how smooth something feels.
I’m not sure what Apple’s huge push “against” PWAs is, other than just declining to support them. Are they doing anything active to lobby against PWAs?
people here is web biased, people forgot that mobile world exist and I can tell you navigating web in mobile vs native mobile app is like heavenly different
if people commenting from web dekstop perspective I can see that point, but from mobile?? where hardware processing power and network is sometimes unreliable???
Ideally, Web is either for thin clients or text/visual focused content with minimal interaction (i.e. anything more than basic forms). Apps are for when a user needs more control (i.e. important or sensitive data that persists on their hard drive or account) or access to your hardware for proper function (aka, games or other resource-specific/intensive tasks).
In reality, you want to push everything to an app that you can or one day want to monetize. Web is to be avoided except to advertise the app. I hate it with a passion. Easily my least favorite shift over the 2010's. We advanced past flash to make proper use of HTML5, and can now start blur the lines with aspects like Webassembly and PWAs, but corporate is angry that the WWW never properly optimized itself to monetize easily.
