Posted by ssiddharth 6 hours ago
The crazy part is how many teams still treat the web as the demo and the app as the “real” product. For a lot of stuff it's the opposite now.
I know there are edge cases, but most of the time “download our app” just means “please care way more about our product than you currently do.”
Furthermore, to say platform owners don't care about offending such users would be an understatement: platform owners likely want to actively repel such users. Why serve someone who neither pays a fee nor agrees to be shown ads?
They didn't grow up with the world wide web. They only started using technology when Android and iPhone was popular. They only know Whatsapp, Youtube, TikTok. They're not used to using the browser.
There's a meme that "Gen Z Kids Don't Understand How File Systems Work" [0]
So, it'll depend on your target audiences.
At the end of the cycle I can barely run the base phone let alone the menagerie of apps the world would like me to run.
I have opted out of app only service such as a Loyalty programs that forced me to transfer point from a partner only if I installed an app on my phone. They have enough info on me from purchase, they don't need more. (I even offer my card to strangers in the grocery cash if they did not have the loyalty card so they would get a discount and I would get a list of products I never buy in my loyalty list. Its a small, willful act of rebellion )
Then, unfortunately, apps are a better choice for such phones (unless the app itself is just a thin webview wrapper). These days too many websites would fry a budget phone.
Obligatory: The Performance Inequality Gap https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-...
Made me realize that for a lot of people who get cheaper phones with less storage installing a new app is actually a pretty big decision.
Found a new doctor, because anyone that thinks this way I do not trust my heath to.
Absolutely no one will make me own a cell phone or install corpo spyware. It is still actually a choice.
Mapped it out here if curious - https://vectree.io/c/enshittification-how-digital-platforms-...
I too love the web, but throughout my career the idea of web-first/web-only has been DOA. There is some level of perceived prestige from having an app.
I've told this story countless times but on multiple occasions I've written cross-platform apps using web technology. Throughout the development process, I have urged or even begged the stakeholders to try out the web-based version on their phone. It's almost identical. You just see the browser chrome in the web version. And yet it's not until I provide native builds that some people will even bother to look at.
I provide web interfaces as part of the package but I could probably skip that and no one would bat an eye (I won't though, it's practically free to do that alongside the native apps and I prefer it).
There are a handful of things you can only do, or only do well, in an app so I do understand that argument. Also, I find some PWA-advocates to clearly not be living in reality: "You can do X in a PWA" - only if you hate yourself and enjoy silly limitations that clients do not and will not understand or care about ("Just make it work, an app can do this!").
I went to a gas station and they had someone offering to pay customers if they'd install their app. Discount gas for X months. No one seemed interested.
People do want apps for things they do quite often, but that's mostly social media or video games. The hassle of install and account setup simply exceeds the benefit of rarely used apps.
When I use, say, the Signal app:
- I can audit it, download it or even compile it myself from sources
- Once I have installed it, Signal doesn't get to change it "in my back"
- As a result, I don't need to trust Signal for the end-to-end encryption, which is the whole point of end-to-end encryption.
When I use a webapp, say ProtonMail:
- Every time I load the webapp, it is downloaded from the Proton servers. Even if I once stop to audit it, next time I load it, it may totally be a different codebase (that e.g. adds a backdoor, potentially just for me, and just this one time).
- I need to trust that Proton doesn't inject a backdoor to extract my key, then end-to-end encryption is useless. I could also trust Proton to not read my emails, right?
- If a webapp is served by a CDN, I have to trust that the CDN doesn't tamper with it. Actually Meta has an extension made for verifying that for WhatsApp Web. The extension is a bulky way to make sure that you loaded what Meta wanted you to load (i.e. that Cloudflare did not tamper with it), but it DOES NOT ensure that Meta did not inject a backdoor just for you, just this time.