First, there was web browsers which you could use to access most everything on the net. Then came apps. Then people started getting sick of having too many apps and started wanting all-in-one apps
on the other hand, stop putting apps in webpages
- Apps were not supposed to be given a constrained execution environment that is years behind what the hardware can do
- Years of internet and no real world use-case for using anything other than Lotus 123
- Wanted to do something else for a laugh? We had a tool for that: It was called "Games"
- "Yes please let my hardware be useless without internet access" - Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged
Bold of you to assume that the websites wrapped up as apps are in any way useful if you lose internet access.
Service workers are supported by every web browser and enable websites to work offline. They can even do periodic background pushes/refreshes.
My dream is that one day PWAs replace 90% of apps in existence today.
Love running apps in a worse operating system running on top of my operating system
depends what the app is. If its proprietary trash I'm forced to interact with because capitalism, you know I want it in firefox with ublock and as locked down as possible.
If it's something relatively trivial I use once or twice and never think about it again? Better to not have that lingering around on my device.
A good web app is leagues better than several bad native apps, but good, standards-based native apps are almost always better. I'm taking libreoffice over google docs any day, but for more obscure stuff a web-app means I can run it on any device with a browser, not just whatever single OS it was developed and maintained for.
The browser is a tool designed to give the user control over how pages are rendered. Capitalists hate that.
Apps" are bazinga shit and any economic or social pressure pushed on me to use them pisses me off.
This makes me sad because phone apps should just be touch-friendly programs that you use on your phone, which should be as useful as any program you install on a PC.
Right? A computer is a computer. I can theoretically run any arbitrary program on this thing. So why is every phone app so objectively shitass?
There's momentum on phones to make programs that aren't for the existing user, they're for the new user, the potential next user. They go so far as to define first time users' experience as "user friendly". Well I'm a user too and it certainly isn't very friendly to me when I have to go hunting for a feature you took away last week and hid somewhere.
Also, any time a UX designer says the word " cluttered" they should be immediately shot because that word means "this app is too useful and it might scare grandma if she sees three too many buttons"
I think with the cluttered thing, it really depends on what the app is trying to do. Sometimes it works sometimes it just results in too many taps to get where you want.
But you're right, there's this tendency to do minimalist design for minimalism's sake. I think it's mainly to do with the corpo influence on tech, especially with mobile apps.
A lot of these "apps" would have been tray programs or terminal one liners as well. Making that into a whole app is a form of clutter.
Well I'm a user too and it certainly isn't very friendly to me when I have to go hunting for a feature you took away last week and hid somewhere.
At some point it should be punishable by law to change shit.
Like imo someone should hang for the slow steps Reddit is taking to kill old.reddit.com when people CLEARLY FUCKING LIKE IT AND PREFER IT TO THEIR FUCKING APP.
I've used old.reddit.com for years because the mobile site is just fucking garbage. And it just works, so much better. It's infinitely faster. The app is even worse than the mobile site.
Like all this fucking time and energy wasted on work making shit nobody wants
We need to create a new cool af retro sci fi guillotine for the tech companies' CEOs because they ruined computers and the internet. I'm thinking either laser guillotine or like a gigantic Jacob's ladder in reverse. I'm open to suggestions.
I learned laser bongs are a thing, maybe we can start the design there
Damn we gonna smoke the rich? Do you get a high from that or is it just for flavor?
I think it just uses lasers to heat up the weed but idk I've never used one. But like, what if we make one, but bigger? you've heard of the gas chamber, the bourgeoisie will fear the laser chamber
Hmm is it like a disco rave inside and they have to jump over the lasers for hours until they can't anymore? Can we televise this?
Clutter is a real thing, but it's something that's present all the time when it really should not be and is so in an obstructive way, such as ads, locked out premium features, reminders of premium features they want you to buy, wasted empty space, etc. In contrast something like a settings menu definitionally cannot be cluttered (at worst it can be disorganized or poorly labeled) because it's something that's rarely touched and which needs to be exhaustive in its contents.
So apps tend to be actually extremely cluttered in bad ways (because monetization is real clutter), while also being infuriatingly barebones. They're the actual worst thing and should simply stop being a thing.
Mfw when when app maker makes app but app is website in a browser window and somehow worse
Using the cemetery app to find haunted headstones sounds like something out of a game.
Those Trump staffers weren't taking pictures, they were trying to find the right gravesite using the MyArlington app.
I used to work on the notification system of a big crypto exchange before I got fired for being a shit employee lmao
Other that a few intensive purposes like Uber, TikTok, Google Maps type apps, companies only create apps and heavily push you to download them so they can shove push notifications to your phone. It's basically impossible to do 99% of that using a website (fine grained controls of what notifications, collecting analytics, delivery speed, proper scheduling, etc.) cause then you'd have to go through the browser's notification system
Yeah. I bought a TV a few months back using a store’s credit card. 12 months interest free. Sweet.
Every month I visit the site and pay that month’s amount. Few weeks back I get an email to say that I can only pay the bill via their fucking app from now on. They literally do not offer a way to pay off their card that doesn’t involve installing their app.
It’s fucking mad. I genuinely can’t work it out. The app doesn’t have ads, I don’t let it push notifications, nothing like that. It’s on iOS, so fuck knows what it can see of my shit.
I'm not installng shit. App only features means I'm never supporting your company.
In the same vein, video ads on a gas pump puts a store on my blacklist
In the same vein, video ads on a gas pump puts a store on my blacklist
I mash buttons until it mutes and then write in "MUTE THIS SHIT" next to it
they disabled the ability to mute at a major chain near me. I stopped driving (that wasn't the only reason but it was driving me insane)
These kind of campaigns/posts whatever are cute and admirable like "buy physical media" or wanting buttons in your car. But they show a fundamental lack of understanding how weighted everything is towards data now.
Nothing can be permitted to stop the surveillience and dark patterns as we go deeper into monopoly capitialism. It's the last frontier.
I used to make a living making apps and while there are legitimate use cases for running software applications on handheld computers there are a hundred times more apps than there are good use cases.
I have 2 apps on the Play Store. One is something I actually mostly just made for my wife that helps her figure out how well balanced her DnD dice are. It's just called Dice Weight Calculator. But when you search for it, a ton of virtual dice roll apps come up. There are dozens, if not hundreds of them.
The worst are when someone takes something that already exists and slaps ads on it. It's as difficult to find a good sudoku app on the play/app store that isn't riddled with ads or wants you to make an account as it is to find a bad one in my Linux package manager. What value did you provide making yet another shitty sudoku app? None, yet you serve me ads? The gall!
My old internet provider had a function on their website that would do something to fix your Internet connection from their end. I lost internet one day and went to use it, but they replaced the mobile version of their website with a page telling me to download the app. Fine, I'll download the app, which is clearly just a wrapper for the website. But for some reason you can't access that function through the app.
One of the best days of the last two years was when att fiber rolled into my neighborhood and I got to cancel Xfinity. All telecoms are evil but there's a special place in hell for Comcast.
its truly horrible.
You need their app to do port forwarding now, and instead of not paying modem rental fees, there's actually a fee for bringing your own modem now.
I agree so fucking much jesus christ. I would ban all apps as dictator
