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Ugh even my weed dealer wants me to install their app. When will it end?
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.
no they’re brilliant, for exactly the reason you said.
I would also like to go back to websites, which are much less evil.
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
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.
One benefit an app for something like Lemmy offers 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) :]
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).
My university was still teaching windows 8 for their computer science classes as of last summer. I was working at Microsoft when that was released, so you can imagine how angry I was that I had to take that class lol
He’s the computer teacher. Maybe he should teach them about computers
He did teach them. He was just comparing different generations of students.
They just haven’t seen the light yet - I feel like most people from every generation are app’d up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That, but also about marketing and having your personal data. A few years ago, I used to work for a large company that rhymes with Schmipotle. They wanted to know more about their customers so they could target them with advertisements. The problem is, their customers don’t say “hi I’m jballs and would like a burrito.”
So they created their app so they could target people with advertising and push notifications to drive business.
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.
TFW someone makes a desktop app but it’s literally just a bundled chrome browser page
But also, MFW somebody turns a perfectly usable desktop application into an internal website that ends up only working on one browser…
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
(honestly i think tim cook wrecked the company, he’s a pure bloodless businessman, thinking only about numbers and value extraction versus innovation and changing the world, which jobs, for all his faults, objectively did)
Both capitalist pigs
I miss the old days where a macbook came with a bunch of creative apps that kids in the 60s-90s dreamed of.
That innovative creative freedom train is long gone from that company
Care to name some of those apps? Genuinely curious, mac computers were (still are) prohibitively expensive and I never knew anyone who had one before the iPhone launched
This was a choice by Steve Jobs for how it is now. This was also the time they were trying to push HTML5 as the future as removing dependency on specialty software. If mostly everything was only needing a website, then it didn’t matter what OS you were using. This would help allow iOS and OSX (at the time) be fully compatible against Blackberry and Windows Vista. But then Android got popular and Windows 7 was a major improvement, Linux was growing as well (netbooks, before MS tried to push into that market). Suddenly their push of any device would be on equal footing was not in their favor, so Apple pushed HARD on “There’s an app for that” to start the hard lock in of iOS leading to where things are today.
I’m so done with all these apps, I’m ready for the mains
Then we’re getting some 'zerts!
Haverford intensifies
This is why I only use Instagram through Firefox on my phone. A) Meta software ain’t getting installed on my device. 2) The Instagram app fucking melts iPhones.
I’ve learned the Facebook app actually causes a lot of battery drain. And those who uninstalled it suddenly found their phones lasting twice as long.
I wouldnt know as a non FB user.
Oh it melts Androids as well. It’s just full of tacked on garbage that wasn’t in the original.
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.
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 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.
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.
imgur is evil
Go to browser settings on mobile and switch on desktop mode. Fuck them sites.
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.
You can actually use Facebook in a somewhat acceptable way without an account.
Really? It seems like it’s 50/50 if I can even open a link I’ve searched up without it immediately demanding that I log in.
What how?
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)
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.
and that is when I just drop that company forever.
If it ain’t on F-Droid, chances are I ain’t usin’ it.
I think there are a grand total of 4 non-free apps installed on my phone right now. 2 are for smart home crap I don’t want to live without right now, and 2 are Google services I haven’t pried myself away from yet.
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
Voyager app users
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 is a Lemmy client.
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
One of the most ironic things is if you willingly download the app version of a website, hoping it would speed things up and reduce internet data usage, just for the app to be using WebView or some other micro-browser engine which will essentially be the same as if you were visiting the website using your browser as before.
Thanks for nothing.
The few times I visit Facebook I just do it from a web browser on my phone, I’m not letting them spy on me 24/7 just so I can check on a couple groups
This but unironically
This post was ironic?
There was a website for a while that could emulate PS1 games in a browser on your phone.
That told me that there is absolutely no reason to have everything be an app. Even games
