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The reason this is done is because you can see everything your browser is doing, but you can’t see everything an application is doing without disassembling it.
I want very much to go back to websites. Apps are stupid.
the reason is children. for some reason the most recent generation of kids requires apps instead of sites. god forbid they have to remember an address.
just look at the fuckload of people who cant use lemmy without an ‘app’
this is one of my peeeves
My high school computer teacher once ranted about this to us. He said the younger students are lacking the basic concepts of computer stuff. They are spoiled too much to not even know what a file browser is.
That’s the parents fault too for not teaching the kids.
Eeh, I see it as a gray area. Majority of millenials, myself included, grew up learning about novel technologies as they developed. We learned how to use desktop computers and browse the internet during a ‘golden age’ of innovation. They became part of our everyday lives and are second nature to us. The next generations don’t fully have that experience but are expected to natively know their way around a computer since they’re so ubiquitous in our lives. In reality, they know how to use smart phones and chromebooks but aren’t getting the experience of working on a real desktop computer.
Regarding teaching kids the basics, I’d put it on the schools, not the parents. Do schools still have computer labs? That’d be where proper computer skills should be taught. If parents can help at home that’s great, but I don’t think it should be expected that every kid is going to have a real computer at home to learn on (versus phones, tablets, chromebooks, etc).
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He’s the computer teacher. Maybe he should teach them about computers
He did teach them. He was just comparing different generations of students.
One of the reasons I like apps for Lemmy is for notifications.
Coincidentally, one of the reasons companies like apps is for notifications.
Your mobile browser supports notifications per site like an app. It even supports custom icons per site when the notification pops up.
You don’t even know if the telemetry leaving your phone to the app server is using TLS encryption, you just let them hail-mary football-throw send it.
I don’t understand why we insist on bending over and freely giving away our data to fucking apps.
I don’t understand why we insist on bending over and freely giving away our data to fucking apps.
Some people are extremely averse to the discomfort of the slightest speedbump in their computer/phone usage and are more than willing to give their “worthless” data in return.
One benefit an app for something like Lemmy offers is significantly better customization.
thats a copout for the site sucking. lemmy looks like someone forgot the css. one of the reasons i chose mbin, its not fugly and very user-configurable.
no app required
one of the reasons i picked dbzer0 is that the layout just looks Better (ie doesnt look like someone forgot the css) :]
I mean, I think part of it is because they grew up interacting with apps because parents were, mostly rightly, restricting their children from use of the greater unrestricted web. Every modern parent I know had children who knew which apps on mommy or daddy’s phone they were allowed to touch - their games or youtube kids or whatever. These apps provided easy safeguards for parents to rein in their child’s internet experience. Even if these methods weren’t perfect in their attempt (Elsagate and all that), this was still good practice for allowing your child access to modernity in the times you couldn’t fully devote your time to overseeing their activity with relative confidence they were probably not watching wildly inappropriate content.
In a perfect world parents and educators would also be devoting time to teaching their child to navigate the internet and allowing them monitored (with physical eyeballs, not tracking) online browsing time, but I don’t think we can rightly fault the kids for not having received that. Rather than grumbling about the situation, I think we’d be better served accepting it for what it is and instead approaching the topic from a stance of: how do we teach them better behavior and help them unlearn these bad habits?
edit: typo
You don;t need to put “edit: typo” in your comment. /lh
I’m aware, but I do it to ensure readers that the content of my message hasn’t changed in the time since the edit, I’m just cleaning up the syntax. It’s a matter of attempting to provide a consistent face.
If it’s a service I use regularly on my phone like Lemmy then an app usually does provide a better experience. The UI is usually better optimised and they tend to load faster. However if I’m only using it once, or if I’ve just visited your site then stop trying to get me to use the fucking app! That goes for Reddit as well, I have the app installed but if I’m just trying to view a post because I googled something I don’t want to be forced into the app
I’m not a child. But I already have an entire OS running on my phone. Why would I run a browser on top (with all of its UI clutter) so I can use an app.
If I’m going to use an app often, for more than a couple minutes each time, I’m gonna use an app. If I’m just visiting a site for the first time, or I’m just going to stay there a couple seconds (search engines), I’m using the web browser.
Browsers are for browsing the web. Apps (run by the OS, not by a web browser) are for doing things.
Browsers are for browsing the web. Apps (run by the OS, not by a web browser) are for doing things.
hahahahhahhaahahha
im deep in the corporate, non-app web-based environment. this comment is so out of touch. i get that its your POV, but its not even close to the broader reality that most apps are just packaged websites and that browsers are nearly fully virtual machines and incredibly capable.
again, the apps exist generally because they want to capture more data than the browser allows (they are exploiting you). theres very little functionality that cant be run in the browser directly.
That sounds like a shit app. I just don’t use those. And if I have to use them, it’s rarely enough that they fall into browser’s scope.
A large quantity of apps are thinly disguised browsers “stuck” on a specific web page and with extra tracking and data collecting capability. I’d wager all shopping apps are this.
They just haven’t seen the light yet - I feel like most people from every generation are app’d up.
I prefer using Lemmy with an app because apps are better designed for my screen than an website. It’s kind of rare finding an website that looks good on portrait.
right, the lemmy website is garbage. many others are not. i have zero issue using mbin, accessing lemmy content without an app on my mobile device in portrait.
no app needed, but its because mbin is designed as modern sites should be. dynamically scaled to the requested interface.
again, if your website isnt absolute garbage no app is required.
Apple brainwashed us with iPod 3Gs and apps
Also people can use Lemmy without apps, it just doesn’t have all the same features in the UI which is why people use wrappers
no they’re brilliant, for exactly the reason you said.
I would also like to go back to websites, which are much less evil.
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I hate that websites will purposely block a perfectly working website feature if it sees you’re on a mobile just to refer you to their mobile app.
FUCK websites that require a login, i’m looking at you twitter, you need to be sued over this shit.
Insta. Facebook. In fact all social media that only lets me see 3-4 messages before demanding I log in. Fuck. You.
it’s actually so bad, i genuinely have started to not use the internet outside of like, youtube, npr sometimes, and wikipedia. And archive.org because it’s actually fucking useful.
i wanted to download a singular PDF file yesterday, and apparently i needed to be logged in to do that? I’m not making a fucking account on whatever scribble.com is for a singular PDF that will help me find my Kojima-name wtf
it’s even worse in the field of science, honestly fuck journal publishers, you can all eat dicks. None of you do anything important for humanity.
Well Twitter is awful anyway, so no big deal…
i would be inclined to agree with you, but don trump jr posted an image about tim walz drinking horse cum, and i just had to see if it was real. Because well uh. Obviously. (yes it was real)
and that is when I just drop that company forever.
Go to browser settings on mobile and switch on desktop mode. Fuck them sites.
imgur is evil
Oh sowwy, this splitwise feature is only available in the app. There’s just no way to make it work in a browser that isn’t the one our app wraps around, you gotta understand.
this unironically
An app for a fucking cemetary!? Nuh-uh
I hear it’s dead now anyway.
Laurel Hill is a historical cemetery with a few historical figures buried there. Actually, I think Adrian Balboa’s fictional grave is there, too. The app has audio tours and information about the architecture and stuff.
could still be a website.
Probably, but making it an app allows users to pre-download the whole thing beforehand so they don’t need to depend on cell data when they’re out in a field.
You can just download the HTML files
Hahaha
but I… it… it’s a PDF, its stored on my phone. I downloaded it. I actually still have it, if I need to prove I was on the train. its not in the app anymore, but I still have it here.
you know you can’t make a PURCHASE on an app without network access, right? like, it has to interact with your bank and generate the code (and that’s done on their server, so you can’t make yourself free tickets) and update “this ticket is valid” in the system. the app is literally just a web site with fewer features. all the important math happens on the server. usually, not even a timetable is stored locally, and it still has to be retrieved from the network, it doesn’t even cache, I bet. I could check, but I would have to find my phone.
Ew, reading?
(Joking btw)
I think you replied to the wrong person?
download the whole thing
all the functional parts are server calls, app or website. all of them. buying a ticket involves authenticating with both the owner’s server and my bank. that’s a network thing. can’t download my ticket til I do that, site or app. even looking at a timetable (i dont see where in the app I can do that? but point to point trips) on the app doesn’t work when im in airplane mode, but I know for a fact my browser caches, and if I’ve looked recently or left the page open, it will still be there when I come back.
there’s no advantage of an app, unless you’re doing fancy graphics shit, which eats battery like a mother fucker and makes low end devices much more unhappy.
But I don’t want a app to get audio tours.
I want a app to make their body spin 360 degrees. 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
How about an app where you can take a picture of a tombstone and it’ll show you a live webcam of the inside of the coffin?
That’s how you get a haunted phone
My most boomer opinion
Most of these memes are ironic, but this one is actually true. These apps could just be websites, but instead they’re bloated spyware
Many of these apps could just be menus.
Even menu websites are chock full of Javascript for no reason. It could be a JPEG!
Menus should be PDFs so they are searchable.
Don’t get rid of ordering online, I have bad vision and like sitting for 30 minutes deciding what to buy and how much is way too much to spend on the food I’m getting
As a programmer who used to fix accessibility problems with iOS apps, I’d like to say that one good thing about apps vs. websites is that apps are generally much better than websites for people with vision problems. But they aren’t! At least the ones I was fixing sure weren’t.
Voyager app users
Anybody who wants to offer me an open source app that doesn’t spy on me is totally fine, especially when the app kicks ass.
- sent from Voyager
Can you explain this? I’m a very stupid person.
Voyager started off as a website(wefwef.app) but is now also an app
website
.app
🤔
They have played us for absolute fools!
Voyager’s app is still the website though
Voyager is a Lemmy client.
Unironically this. There’s nothing these stupid apps do that they couldn’t do on a fucking browser from 2018. If you want people to use the stupid app over the site, then please have only the stupid app and ditch the “just pretending it works” site and for fuck’s sake, don’t make the stupid app a javascript mess, because THAT could’ve been a fucking site instead.
Buddy, these apps could have been done in php and ajax 15 years ago
I know. It grinds my gears how sites of 15+ years ago worked better and loaded faster than the shit we have today.
And the web versions have and constant lightbox that asks you to download the app every fuckin breath you take. Instagram and Twitter being the worst of them all. For the second I don’t even touch it. For.instagram I got barnista. And that’s cause my wife uses Instagram sometimes .
The secret is that tons of apps are just web browsers in a costume.
There’s nothing these stupid apps do that they couldn’t do on a fucking browser from
20181998Reminder that the original Space Jam site is still intact
Nice, talk about nostalgia
I love how the Concentration game has a (144k download) warning. At average 32k dial up speeds, you’d have to wait roughly 2 minutes for it to fully download.
It has moved URLs, the site is still there but they just moved the files to a new URLs.
Dunkin Donut’s website just doesn’t work. The app is mandatory. Noped out of there real quick lol
Dunkin: “fahk yah! Just wahlk in and Ahsk for yah damn cafee and egg bahgle.”
Is here a joke here? All I see is truth.
Yeah someone called it out in the comments.
This template is for over the top exaggerations.
there is an alternate universe out there where every shitty social media website has good rss services and doesn’t degrade you for not using the app
I am really confused about this meme template, didn’t its usage used to be satirical (not sure if that’s the right word)? I remember seeing ones like “Nobody ever needed maths”, but recently I am seeing them inverted where the subject matter is actually criticised for being useless. Instead of claiming something useful to be useless. Can someone explain? when did the usage shift?
it’s pseudo post-satire is how i like to think about it. It’s satirical by nature, but it’s gone so far, that it’s not quite straight satire, some of the points made are genuinely accurate.
it’s a meme just don’t think too much
TFW someone makes a desktop app but it’s literally just a bundled chrome browser page
Lychee, a slicer software for 3D printing, immediately comes to mind. It’s a fucking electron app. It also only works if you login to a fucking account, even the free version, because fuck you. Oh, and free users have to sit through 30 seconds of advertising whenever they click “Slice”, because fuck you again
But also, MFW somebody turns a perfectly usable desktop application into an internal website that ends up only working on one browser…
So I bought a new mouse, of course it came with RGB nonsense. Before purchasing I checked it could be disabled.
Software to control RGB? 300MB. Who knows what the hell else that’ll be doing.
Plugged it into my Linux laptop, download OpenRGB, 1.7MB application that supports more than just this brand. Turn off the rgb, click save to device.
Same energy - whole different thing. I remember in 2005 having to install a special printer software. You can install the drivers, but to understand error messages, you needed “the suite”.
So furious at the ordeal, I hoped that the future, we don’t have to deal with this.
Apparently the future hates us and we are STILL dealing with this
Controversial opinion. I love apps.
(Only because in my company, we created a app team to hire more developers and while our website absolutely doubles as a really fucking good web app, we hinder it in order to keep our app developer homies employed.)
im convinced 99% of app development is just for enhanced tracking and telemetry. Most are a browser in app anyway
I used to work for a very large cable company. All of our apps were championed by VPs who had strong personal connections to InfoSys, who got most of the contract work to create and maintain them. Almost nobody actually used the apps - the developers used various tricks to enormously inflate the apparent numbers of users. So essentially they were a mechanism for one large corporation to siphon millions of dollars from another large corporation. My life became a lot happier when I finally realized this and stopped giving a shit about anything.
As a side point, what the hell is wrong with Snapchat’s UI? It’s a mess of buttons arranged by a monkey on cocaine. How is this shit popular?
I spent most of my programming career working for small companies and doing almost everything myself (including collecting requirements, design etc.) but the last few years I spent with an enormous tech company working on apps with teams of professional designers and UI/UX experts (I’ve avoided the scare quotes around these terms, with difficulty). The designers always designed on paper, and violently rejected any suggestion that their designs be put in front of focus groups of actual users and modified according to feedback. “Users have no idea what they want” was an actual, frequent quote from them. As a user who does know what he wants and rarely gets it from modern mobile apps, I found this attitude a bit surprising. Not surprisingly, our apps usually averaged barely above one star (thanks to corporate instructions to employees to vote our apps up), with many comments along the lines of “only voted one star because you can’t vote zero stars”.
“Users have no idea what they want” was an actual, frequent quote from them.
It’s because they’re not designing for the users’ wants, they’re designing for the users’ engagement (or whatever flawed metric they use to determine that). The designers mindlessly equate what keeps the user engaged with what the user wants.
Kids
Bro, my city just made an app it has a news button, a quick link to city code compliance and a quick form for reporting illegal fireworks. City is depreciating email newsletter and website for app and facebook. and I hate so many places advertising decent deals behind apps. I am not downloading an app for every fastfood chain and grocery store. Stopped going to del taco, mcd and Wendy’s over shitty apps.
I hate that I need an app to change the colour of my fucking lightbulb, give me a remote instead, damn.
That being said, I prefer using apps over the browser because they load way faster.
There’s a lot of reasons to use a app over a browser.
Speed is not one of them.
As a web dev, we can absolutely provide you faster experience. Depending on the service and needs, we can blow any app awaym
But a app can access hardware tools that browsers cannot.
I don’t know the technical reason but, on my phone, the browser takes a few seconds to load every page, while on an app it’s way faster.
Of course a good website can beat a shit app. But there’s no way that you can build a website that’s faster than a good app.
First of all, because your website has to run on an actual app, called a web browser. Additionally, you can’t magically remove the initial load time to fetch resources from the server. Those resources are already on your phone on the app so it’s instantaneous.
You…realize that when you visit a website more than once the resources are also available on your phone right? Even the most bloated JS monstrosity will have most of its data cached after the first visit and the initial load time will be as good as an installed app after the first visit. You’re not fetching all 200mb of its JavaScript every time you visit the site. Of course, if the site updates its code, you’ll have to re-fetch it, but the same goes for app updates.
Obviously if your app is designed to work offline, a website probably is going to be worse. But that’s a scenario that actually does warrant a standalone app, which does not go for the majority of apps.
Most apps just do CRUD and act as a thin client to fetch data from a server (this includes pretty much all social media apps). There is not going to be a real difference in speed between loading the site in a web browser with cached resources or a fully-fledged app you install, except the app can harvest data from you in ways that can be prevented by a good browser. Actually, a site can be faster in many cases since it leverages libraries and capabilities already built into and loaded by a browser while an app might have to load its own standalone resources. And being able to access the app offline in these instances is worthless because if your connection isn’t good enough to serve the website, it’s not good enough to use the app either.
If it’s a CRUD app and slower than the network, it is a dogshit app. Both the app and the webpage should be exactly as fast, since it should be waiting for the network for most of the time.
The cache is not magic though. It doesn’t work for the first visit, and it doesn’t last forever. Some clients might not even use a cache. I don’t know if this is the case, but if the cache is validated to be recent (an HTTP HEAD request or whatever) that’s still a round trip to the server.
Well yeah. You have to download the assets on first load to cache them, just like you have to download an app first to use it. And an ideally designed app should perform as well as a website since it has access to all the low level optimization and performance an app entails. The point of the post is that most services don’t actually warrant the benefits you get with an app: namely, easy offline access, higher performance, and native feel/integration with the system. If your whole service is online anyways and every time I open the app it takes a moment to fetch data, it isn’t a considerable improvement over a web experience (with cached assets) and you still can’t use it offline. Like, why do I need an entire app to use your shitty CRUD service (sometimes it’s not even CRUD, just R). If I use it so infrequently that my cache gets invalidated, I could care less about a couple seconds initial load time.
Obviously if you use something everyday a slick app is a nicer experience than a website. There’s nothing wrong with lemmy clients, even though the web client is gonna work fine on mobile and run fairly fast. The issue is when companies release shitty apps that don’t provide any more value as an app as they would as a plain old website, purely so they can get a persistent spot on a user device and mine more data, and then push a ton of annoying banners and feature blocks to mobile web users to get them to download the app.
I have Phillips wiz bulbs in my house and I can do most of the stuff in the app from Google home. The only thing I can do is set scenes but I rarely use those.
The only real downside is these use some Phillips API so of course to work they call back to their servers so that stop being smart without an Internet connection. Some day I’ll move my light bulbs out of the cloud but that day is not today.
I have one from a brand called Enki and not only they made me dowload an app but I had to make an account as well. And every time I want to use that damn app it has logged me out and I need to type my credentials once again.
I didn’t know about Google Home, I’ll check if I can use that one instead.