I've got an old-ish phone, so in most cases, I can't download your app even if I wanted to. You deliberately set your minimum iOS deployment version to be higher than what my phone can even install. So I have to go to your web site or just stop doing business with your ass. Just because your developers decided that developing for older phones is too hard to figure out, or it takes too much effort, and they'd rather just cut us off.

Nah u right, it is possible to do BLE debug stuff from browser, but my tool is so fire and china keeps downloading it 200x per day i had to add that $4.99 monthly subscription wall.

It’s a little tough these days. With AI and scraping, running an open webapp/website is now more expensive than ever before. My friends and I have launched a product in the last few months and decided to focus on mobile first and wait to develop a webapp simply because we couldn’t feel we could optimize the costs of open webapp while we have so few resources.

I agree...except, I would've appreciated some self-awareness from the author. They represent a minority of the users, yet they fail to comprehend this simple fact.

For the large majority of users, phones are THE primary (if not only) device for their interaction with the internet. You can complain "them-lazy-brainrotting-GenZs" but some people don't have a choice. There are plenty of countries where a smartphone is the cheapest internet enabled device that a person can afford.

Secondly, the UX for "web browsing" on the phone is strictly worse compared to (well-made) apps. In fact, apps are the reason for the explosion in popularity of smartphones. And also the reason only android and iphone have survived the OS race (see windows phone and linux phones). So — much to my own disappointment — it does make sense for companies to treat mobile (app) users as first class citizens. You need to understand that you are not the target user anymore. And, yes it sucks.

That said, it does not justify the gradual enshittification, dark patterns and dopamine hacking that have been normalized in modern apps.

I wish there was a version of this website that was simpler, more educated and that I could show to the "normies" who own business and insist on asking me to download their app (I'm looking at you, TKD school!). This one is too aimed at the cooks.

My gripe is how iOS allows these companies to constantly bug us to use their stupid apps. I ended up installing the NYTimes app, not because I use it, but just to shut it up. I switched to duck duck go because I was sick of being bugged to install chrome. How many times do I need to say no?

Yes, the TC is right and I completely agree, but we all know the reason for forcing users to install an app: retention, ARPU and other metrics grow for this audience, and push notifications also help with that.

This is especially true for dev tools. Engineers already have 20 browser tabs open with dashboards, CI/CD, docs, and logs. The last thing anyone wants is another Electron app eating RAM in the background. The best tools meet you where you already are.

I have it the other way around. I want local first app. Don’t want everything in the cloud apps.

Luckily there is choice :)

I wish PWAs were more of a thing. That is actually what I'd use instead of installing a company app.