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That sounds less like wanting apps, than simply having no idea what's going on.

I really wish PWAs were more well-known among average users. If people knew and expected they could install certain websites as apps, that would simplify things so much and really balance the power of the app stores.

When I announced the update, the number of people who asked me variations of "how to get website on phone if website on computer" or requested I make the damn thing an app was outrageous.

I had a similar experience. It was mostly lower- and middle-managers who needed to put their mark on something visible.

I responded with, "Tell me what features you want the app to have that the web site doesn't; or is this a vanity project?" The "vanity project" line is what made people re-think what they were asking.

When that didn't work, I pointed out that they'd have to hire an entire new team to do the app, and gave them a high six-figure number to accomplish what they wanted.† That always worked.

† For a number of regulatory and political reasons, we cannot offshore for cheap.

And in fact, a significant subset of users will pester you to make an app, even if your website can and does do everything an app could do.

Apps bypass ad and tracking blockers too. They do have OS permissions as a potential roadblock, but most users just click "OK" on those prompts the first time when they install or open the app.

I mean, I don't know if that's a generation thing or what but as much as I'm comfortable using my phone, and ordering things in my phone's apps, when it's a website and I'm on mobile I always feel an urge to go to my desktop or laptop to check and do it there, I don't "trust" mobile websites as they always seem to give a limited set of information. Or at least that's the vibe I'm getting.

I like making maps, and I wanted to do a certain bend on a very specific kind of online map, filling a gap I noticed in existing maps.

The idea of an app really appealed to me (at first), but the more I thought about it the more I didn't want to deal with iOS and then Android and then maintaining parallel functionality on the web and all that mess just for a fairly-local hobby project that I make no money off of.

So, I just kept it as a website (which is also a PWA) with extensive testing on every platform I can think of. It's just worked out so well and is so, so, so much less complicated. And if I abandon it, should just keep working for years so long as the website stays up (or until browsers start doing something very different JS-wise.)

(You can see it at https://trailmaps.app if you're interested.)

I periodically try to put something together. I don’t even care about publishing to the app store really, I mostly want to make stuff for myself for macOS.

My last attempt, it felt like Apple was no longer interested in the idea of hobbyist developers. The setup just to get the Xcode project setup felt like I needed to have a company and a website. When I selected something about iCloud, because I thought it would be nice if what I made synced to iCloud, I couldn’t even get started without paying $99, so I had to start again and choose a different option without it. And here I thought the $99 was just to publish to the store.

Considering how Apple started, this trend feels wrong. When I wanted to make a simple little app a few weeks ago, I ended up using python with webview. It seemed to be one of the few ways to make a little GUI app without boiling the ocean.

As someone who uses apps, the hoops you have to jump through are one of the reasons I prefer apps. I'm glad Apple knows who you are and have scrutinized (to some degree) your app.

I have no interest in installing a web app that could look innocuous today and be entirely different every time I hit F5.

> I might be misremembering or misinterpreting, but it seems like you really need an LLC with a mail forwarding service and a cheap second phone line just to avoid the App Store sending the whole internet to your personal phone and address.

For something free I can get why this would seem unreasonable (modulo scams, for which this is a hoop I would rather have than not), but if money's involved, a consumer should be able to contact a human and be made whole, and having the money be handled by a company (even if that company is just a one-man-show) honestly does not seem unreasonable.

If you want to bypass that, you just shouldn't publish to the App Store, which does (or at least is supposed to) have protections suitable for most people. You should still be able to make apps and use them without the App Store involved, then the individual human who wants that app can make decisions based in the specific app in question and the people behind it, but that's a separate conversation.

Yeah it’s all a pain. One thing that helped was using hotwire native. It is basically a web view but it bridges the mobile app with your website and wraps it into a mobile app. This is the only way I can make apps now. Flutter never worked well for me.

I did something similar, for similar reasons. In the end I just did whatever to get it published. If you show up at my door, I'll pour you your choice of beer/coffee. But I agree, it feels very invasive!

On the web side of things DNS only recently started being more private - 10+ years ago it was common to have your phone + postal address on whois.

Two take aways from my experience 1. I'm happy that I invested more in the web 2. The app store gives you distribution - I have a few websites with almost 0 traffic, but the app I wrote gets a handful of downloads a week almost 2 years later?

I did something similar. I wanted to tell myself I had done it, but also it was an inexpensive learning experience and I got an app that I wanted out of it.

And I think I got that. I like how mine does what it does (maps breaker panels and records home maintenance and stuff) without someone trying to sell me something.

But once I realized what advertising costs everywhere, I pretty quickly realized that app exists essentially just for me.

And that’s ok, but it’s a stark contrast from the goldrush years of (even garbage) apps making money.

Back when I used to freelance, somebody once paid me a scant fee to build a pretty cool online tool for music teachers, basically an interactive piano. I checked in on the website a few years afterwards and found that they had wrapped it into an app and been selling it for $5/install ever since I made it for them. Probably my fault for not licensing the software I wrote for them (I was basically a kid at the time) but it still bothers me.

> it seems like you really need an LLC with a mail forwarding service and a cheap second phone line just to avoid the App Store sending the whole internet to your personal phone and address

That's an EU thing. If you don't publish in the EU you don't need to dox yourself.

It's about tracking. Most of the money in the industry comes from knowing precisely when you were on the toilet every day and they can't get that from a web app.

Couldn't agree more. I've only published on Google Play, but the number of hoops Google makes you jump through (and keeps making you jump through if you want to keep your app in the store) is a full-time job in itself. New permission requirements, needing to self-decalre that your app does/doesn't do this or that, forcing you to reveal your personal details. The list goes on.

It's like a lot of tech trajectories. At first it was fairly easy and people did it, and then both the producer, consumer, and platform evolved off in some direction in an endless feedback cycle, and now a newcomer sees the whole ecosystem is all the way over there in some weird place and doesn't join it because why would you want to be over there, but the existing actors don't see it as strange because they acclimatized to each step along the way.

Recently I tried out tiktok for a day and couldn't fathom why I would possibly want to ever use this app. Same with Instagram. But people who followed their trajectory since their earlier days find them normal.

Same with Facebook, actually. And Google.

On the other side of that equation, my very old YouTube account (which still has a subscription to "YouTube Red" that costs half of what a new subscription to YouTube Premium costs) has been trained to show me certain content, and if I joined with a new account or told someone else to join, I know the homepage would be filled with dumb slop.

> I’ll be the first to admit that my actual app is pretty much garbage

It’s working. Your low quality project you weren’t really committed to got filtered.

> it seems like you really need an LLC with a mail forwarding service and a cheap second phone line just to avoid the App Store sending the whole internet to your personal phone and address.

This is an EU requirement, and Apple didn't do this before EU required it. All app marketplaces have the same requirement for EU

> On a website you can just not deal with any of that

This may violate other EU compliance requirements but sure there's obviously no authority determining your compliance before allowing you to publish on web

The android store is the same. Jump through loads of hoops, fill in tax information for a bunch of countries, dox yourself, etc etc.

I'm finding it hard to reconcile a) how difficult the process and b) the load of absolute garbage apps that are out there.

> my actual app is pretty much garbage

The app review process is explicitly meant to keep out garbage apps.

Sounds like it worked as designed?

I have been publishing apps as a solo developer for a long time and every app I've published has been something I wanted for myself. For example, I spent so much time here on hacker news. So I wanted an app for a better experience. So I built my app almost a decade ago. Then people requested me build one for Android, so I built that too. I've similarly built various macOS apps which I use daily for myself.

If anyone is interested, it's called HACK and I am writing this comment from it. Link is in my bio.

It’s a pro for you (the user), but I’m sure Disney (or whoever made this app) cares very very little about this, or treats it as a negative.

Are these Chrome extensions? How did you learn to write them?

> I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture"

Thie assertion is extremely funny to me. Historically we come from an "app culture". Back in the day, around 2000 or so, if you wanted some functionality, you ran an application. You ran software in your computer.

Then on the early 2000s people started migrating their software web" , inventing "SaaS" (software as a service" .

I remember my young self being strongly opposed to that, because I saw little sense in constraining what you could do with a scripting language, when you could easily get the "networking" capabilities adding tcp/ip to your software .

But the web and Javascript won, mostly due to control (there was advertising in software since the 90s, for example Opera or GetRight had ad banners) .

The feature and mobile phones came and people started to migrate to "apps" again. So we came full circle.

I don't think that's it. Apps took off because people felt comfortable yoloing stuff from the Apple app store, and for a short while before saturation, the app store reach was making small developers rich.

Nah. When the App Store started getting truly popular you couldn't even run an ad blocker on mobile Safari. That came many years later.

IMO the reason we got to this place is twofold:

- apps give companies a spot on your Home Screen and allow you to develop a habit of opening it. I suspect Apple are very aware of this, which is why they continue to make it very difficult to install a web app to your home screen.

- notifications. Which, again, draw a returning audience

Two more things:

- well-designed apps retain enough state to be useful offline or in places with spotty coverage; PWAs can kinda be made to work like this but IIRC iOS will happily evict them under disk pressure;

- notifications. I've read that Apple have implemented them for home screen installed web apps but for reasons unknown I have not seen this in action even once.

I think it’s that your install base represents real customers who could actually buy things.

Web traffic is so diluted and low signal.

Apple has actually started allowing this. You can find the functionality in an adblocker called Wipr now and it works really well.

That and having an app gives you a ton of options for data collection

For most app ads it's enough to set a DoT or DoH in the system that blocks ad domains. Android supports this with a settings menu entry, on Apple one needs a more "technical" solution I think (loading some XML?). Most VPN apps also support DNS enforcement.

Apps like YouTube are an exception, but there are other ways around that on Android.

It's too bad not enough people know about using adguard dns on their phones. Dunno about iPhones but it works wonders on Android. Only downside is it sometimes interferes with signing into public wifi networks.

There are surprising portion of population expect a dedicated app to perform a particular function

There's also more data you can access from an app than from a browser. E.g. surrounding WiFi networks, battery level, persistent device identifier.

They now make 30% of those, no matter the amount of effort, and that part of their business is growing fast in terms of revenues, so no I think even Steve Jobs wouldn't be reverting to html. He was not annoyed about the closed garden, he was annoyed that it wasn't his.

Another lesson here is about how Adobe screwed that up when they had control, but then again they never wanted Flash they just wanted to kill Macromedia, by the time someone woke up over there it was way too late and even Air was too little too late.

I want my lickable pixels back.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581424

Yes, this is the answer. It’s easy to forget if you live in a tech bubble, but there are probably billions of smartphone users who don’t even know how to type a url into a browser and navigate to it.

I’ve worked on projects where we ran this experiment, and the success rate of “install this app and click on it” is several times higher than “navigate to this webpage every time you want to use our tool”.

One small correction though, android has made it easier to add a “progressive web app” to the home screen now. You can prompt the user with a dialog asking if they want to install it. I think there was at least some period where Google was really encouraging PWAs. iOS still sucks. I’ve had very poor success rates in getting users to install our PWA using the iOS workflow (and our tool is something they need for their jobs, so they are highly motivated to install it).

> My strong belief is they want apps because they can spam you with notifications to get your attention.

That's it, an app installed on a mobile device is a much more effective attentional hook than a website that must be either bookmarked or remembered. It is like inviting a door-to-door salesman to your house, of course they will take the invitation.

> My strong belief is they want apps because they can spam you with notifications to get your attention.

I believe the same about the Youtube App, I just can't see why else it exists and I hate the video links try to open in the app if you're not careful!

They want apps so they could fingerprint your device, spy on you and get a lot more information than a web app.

We are in the age of PWAs. I've created a few where I just host them on Github pages (no backend needed, no hosting costs).

And the P in PWA has become "Personal" ... vibe coding apps with no backend for non-developers for their _personal_ needs e.g. a create a job hunting app for my son specific to the types of jobs he's looking for. If I update it, it updates on his phone plus he can sync to his laptop via WebRTC.

I'm currently attempting to write a calendar app for personal use, and I wanted to go the route of a self-host PWA. Notifications are a good point. How can I create notifications as a reminder before an event? Alerts are part of the icalendar standard ("VALARM"), so these are clearly notifications that are wanted by the user. Is that even possible for a PWA?

> My strong belief is they want apps because they can spam you with notifications to get your attention.

My strong belief is they realized people were prone to spending absurd amounts of money in Facebook games, so they hijacked "social gaming" and spent 20 years deteriorating in defense of it.

Consider this timeline:

- Apple launches iPhone in 2007 with web apps central

- Zynga launches "Zynga Poker" on FB in 2007

- Apple launches App Store in 2008 with single-purchase apps

- Zynga hits 40 million monthly users in 2009

- Apple implements IAP and defensive policies in 2009

- Hundreds of millions of people playing Facebook games in 2010

... Apple goes to war with, bans and eventually kills Flash, the core technology to these games, and all of it moves to mobile and IAP

... web apps deprioritized, arms race with other browsers prevented

sure, but that original idea was 20 years ago.

> they want

Who are 'they' and how do you know what they want

Luckily tools such as uBlock Origin let you block all those nasty scripts, _including_ the cookie banner themselves.

More like "We can track you better in the app"

You can already do this, browser allow you to add a website as an icon and it acts completely like an app. Even iOS allows this, try adding HN to your home screen.

> The fundamental problem with the internet is that hosting sucks and no one wants to do it. It's thankless and it's expensive to maintain, both time and money. Apps are a way to not worry about that.

No it's not. Hosting a web app is one of the most trivial things you can do these days, far more trivial than attempting to get an app into the app store. Hosting API's and Databases is a little more difficult but you still need those things if you're building an app.

There is no world in which getting your app signed, getting it approved, getting every update approved and paying $X/year to Apple or Google is easier than hosting a webapp, even if you host it in the most difficult way possible (on say AWS + Cloudfront). And even that method isn't that difficult, just moreso relative to other ways of hosting a webapp.

No, the fundamental problem is ios. There are a bunch of features that ios locks down so that you are essentially forced to use apps. Want to send push notifications? You need an app. Want to be able to wake your app up in the background to do stuff intermittently? You need an app. Want to get your app on the home screen? Once again, you need an app. And before anyone says you can do this with PWAs, yes, that's true. But the steps required from your users in order to get a PWA running on ios are so cumbersome (by design) that nobody even bothers. And since ios has something like 60% of market share in the US, we're stuck with apps.

> The fundamental problem with the internet is that hosting sucks and no one wants to do it. It's thankless and it's expensive to maintain, both time and money. Apps are a way to not worry about that.

Except it seems like plenty of apps these days are just vehicles to give web-based services some native abilities, so they're practically useless without a data connection.

I love hosting and I will never stop doing it. I keep buying servers (second hand; almost no one actually needs the latest) and hosting 1000s of companies.

Simply hosting a front-end only app is almost free on several platforms (e.g. Cloudflare). Certainly less than the $99 Apple developer membership fee. It starts getting more expensive once you add back-end servers and databases and whatnot, but you’d be needing those with the App-approach too if your featureset requires that.

Not to mention dealing with authentication, securing user data, and opening yourself to being a target for hackers.

Shipping a local app eliminates a lot of those headaches.

Well if you're calling an API you host yourself to populate that said UI, not needing to host that UI as a webpage is not that much of an advantage.

How many free and easy options do you want me to list?

What the hell?

Make your website static and host it on a CDN. There's nothing expensive or thankless about it.

Stop over engineering.

Original author here. Upon inspection, these passwords are clearly not chosen by the user and, as far as I can tell, consist only of numbers and uppercase letters.

RFC 1738 Uniform Resource Locators (URL) December 1994 section 2.2

If it's frontier, as much as they want to make you think you need the app, if you lookup the trip manually on the site (using your confirmation code), you can download it from the web

I can sort of understand that - device attestation and all. And it's still a choice since you can go to the airline's counter at the airport to get a boarding pass.

examples?

I'm the original author (but not the poster here on HN).

Yeah, I considered that. I even wrote the code in such a way that it supports that. But I'm concerned about the legality of distributing it. Given that it hits API endpoints that were expected to be private to the developers' app, giving away a "tool" that bypasses the app (which hosts ads, albeit for their other products, and so serves as a money-maker for the app's owner) could be illegal.

At the very least, it could be a violation of the terms of service or just an annoyance to the app developer, either of which could lead them to trying to stop me from doing it, which would be an inconvenience. So maybe I'll wait until after the trip, when the page becomes useless to me, and THEN open-source it!

Maybe it should've been an app after all.

None of this is illegal.

By "marketing" do you mean "experience"? Because absolutely no one is marketing apps as being superior, but instead this is just the experience of users.

There's a weird conspiratorial thing that people do about this whole topic that is so easily debunked. For instance "Apple wanted apps more than PWAs!". Android powers about 73% of the world's smartphones, yet PWAs are irrelevant on the platform.

Web apps can be incredibly powerful, but there's just a massively lower bar in the web app domain, historically. Like people are used to the website being dogshit, a mishmash of broken functionality, terrible layout quirks, slow responsiveness, and so on. Because that is generally acceptable to the web community, where it is deadly to an app.

Like I think it's hilariously ironic that the website telling us that the app could have been a website is currently completely broken, unable to handle a relatively tiny amount of traffic.

I invite down voters to make a reply explaining why users would prefer web apps to native apps, given the choice.