In most cases, a great mobile website does the trick. You don’t need an app, or the app store. We already have a pretty great app store and you’re browsing it right now.
SPAs were a clever solution to a temporary limitation. But that limitation no longer exists.
Use modern server rendering. Use actual pages. Animate with CSS. Preload with intent. Ship less JavaScript.
Rich suggests another reason why the UX of websites on mobile is so shit these days:
The path to installing a native app is well trodden. We search the App Store (or ironically follow a link from a website), hit ‘Get’ and the app is downloaded to our phone’s home screen, ready to use any time with a simple tap.
A PWA can also live on your home screen, nicely indistinguishable from a native app. But the journey to getting a PWA – or indeed any web app – onto your home screen remains convoluted to say the least. This is the lack of equivalence I’m driving at. I wonder if the mobile web experience would suck as badly if web apps could be installed just as easily as native apps?
I have to agree with John here:
There’s absolutely no reason the mobile web experience shouldn’t be fast, reliable, well-designed, and keep you logged in. If one of the two should suck, it should be the app that sucks and the website that works well. You shouldn’t be expected to carry around a bundle of software from your utility company in your pocket. But it’s the other way around.
There’s absolutely no technical reason why it should be this way around. This is a cultural problem with “modern front-end web development”.
Remember when every company rushed to make an app? Airlines, restaurants, even your local coffee shop. Back then, it made some sense. Browsers weren’t as powerful, and apps had unique features like notifications and offline access. But fast-forward to today, and browsers can do all that. Yet businesses still push native apps as if it’s 2010, and we’re left downloading apps for things that should just work on the web.
This is all factually correct, but alas as Cory Doctorow points out, you can’t install an ad-blocker in a native app. To you and me, that’s a bug. To short-sighted businesses, it’s a feature.
(When I say “ad-blocker”, I mean “tracking-blocker”.)
It’s a shame that the newest Safari release is overshadowed by Apple’s shenanigans and subsequent U-turn because there’s some great stuff in there.
I really like what they’re doing with web apps added to the dock:
Safari adds support for the
shortcutsmanifest member on macOS Sonoma. This gives you a mechanism in the manifest file for defining custom menu commands that will appear in the File menu and the Dock context menu.
If you’re thinking of making a native app, think again.
Technically, websites can do just about anything that native apps can do. And yet the actual experience of using the web on mobile is worse than ever.
It’s kind of ridiculous that this functionality doesn’t exist yet.
Apple are planning to kill mobile web apps. This is not an exaggeration. We must stop them.
Mobile Safari finally ships the feature we’ve all been waiting for …but hardly anyone is going to get to use it.
# Liked by Aaron Parecki on Sunday, January 9th, 2022 at 3:32pm