Feels like this field has become a lot about doing the easy, visible parts, getting a month of attention, maybe a promotion, then moving on to the next "new project".

Meanwhile, the people who stay behind and actually make these half-finished apps work properly, maintain them and deal with all the boring problems rarely get the same credit or benefits.

This isn't about the app being unfinished, it's about Google deliberately half-assing support for open standards. They want you to be stuck in their calendar ecosystem so they make sure there's more friction adding a calendar from outside than adding someone else's Google calendar.

And this is why I usually say, I will look at it when I am in front of my computer again for most things, side from a free does where I mainly am reading.

It's almost impossible to use social networks on mobile without installing their apps

Most companies mostly want app access because you get a bunch of APIs with which to annoy users with marketing notifications, tracking, and url handling.

At this point the barrier for me to install an app is pretty high. If you're going to needlessly gate certain functions behind an app that work on a desktop browser (or could work in-browser), then I just won't use those functions. If by extension that degrades the value I get from your site, then I just won't use the site, and I won't be contributing to ADU stats you promote to advertisers.

Every single company has turned this into a situation where I cannot trust your apps with privacy or security, and the risk and hassle isn't worth the install.

Then you have other sites/companies that go the opposite way: having functionality that is App-only. As an extreme example: my health insurance provider in Spain (Alan) is app-only. They don’t even have a website one can use. It is maddening for those of us who always prefer desktop over mobile.

If only Google had a UI framework that would let them build apps and target all platforms.

Definitely annoying to have random features not work in app. This "subscribe to event" feature for example.

More implicit in this post seems to be an argument against apps entirely, which I cannot agree with. He doesn't exactly say this but it points there.

  - never establishes a need or true advantage to an app. does briefly acknowledge apps can do something unique things but then immediately undercuts it. positions Google etc. motivation as wanting to occupy your home screen, dont trust you to use bookmarks, etc.

  - says he has experience building phone apps and knows the pain of updating across so many devices and says solutions converge on basically re-implementing web browsers (which I think is a large leap)

So when he says

  >If you want an app, fine. Do it. Just finish the job please!

I dont really believe him. From his perspective, why is an app ever necessary? To me it's obvious because I absolutely do not want to use Google Calendar in a phone browser. Primarily because the UI on an app is optimized for the phone. And at that point it feels like imperfect feature parity is just the normal problem of releasing the "same" thing many times.

The title also seems to be pointing to a sort of equivocation where you say a group of People say X, and then blame a Person 1for contradicting X by saying Y. Except We've never established that Person 1 was in the group of People saying X. You see this a lot on reddit, hackernews as well. "Oh, many people in the comment section said said Y before now user123 is saying X thats a contradiction."

Having said all that, the blog is labeled "rant" and I can respect that a lot of the purpose is to blow off steam.

I recently decided to use my google calendar to track my mood, as part of my CBT therapy.

What baffles me is that, there's no way in the web app to assign a default calendar for new events. When I create a new event on the web, I have to scroll through all the calendars that I have and choose the one that I want every time. Meanwhile, in the mobile app, I can simply tap on a new block, the event window appears, and the selected calendar defaults to what I used for my last added event.

It made even sadder by the fact that often the "app" is more or less just webview.

More and more I'm giving up on apps, and online self-servicing as the structures and scope of what either one can do is increasing narrowing. It's much much easier to just call these days (fortunately AI answering the phone is still not prevalent). Customer service will obviously inform you that "You can just our self-service solutions in the future", even if you literately just called in because you can't due to inflexibility and options you don't understand.

Also "you can manage it from your phone" is not the sales pitch it once was, because it's no longer the entire truth. You can in fact ONLY manage it from your phone. If whatever you're selling requires an app, chances are that I'm not buying and if it's a service, I will seek out your store or staff and make them do it for me.

It’s a shame the web was so slow to adapt to this new mobile world. When it all started things like offline capabilities were very difficult to do on the web and native development felt necessary. These days the web can actually do a lot… but it’s too late. People expect to find something in the App Store, pinning a web site to their Home Screen is just not something they know they can do. So a lot of people waste an enormous amount of money on three different implementations for, often, simple CRUD operations.

Hah. I was trying to buy something on the BestBuy website. I’m not sure what kinda of bitcoin miner they’re running on that site, but it repeatedly manages to crash the tab as I was trying to browse. I had to eventually just download the app.

So what's the solution again? Everything as a web app?

I've had an issue where, when clicking a "locations" link on a web site, Google Maps "permanently" added a bunch of locations to my map. This was quite unexpected on my part.

(I think it was for a chain or churches or a similar civic organization)

IE, I think someone made a group of locations in Google Maps, and then for the "Locations" link on their website, just linked to the group of locations in Google Maps. In the browser, this works fine, but on mobile, Google Maps just imports the link to my account without asking.

The author said it perself, "the greatest minds of our generation" working at Google, so those jagged edges are surely by design, and it's the rational most efficient solution in a economy of attention where the line between the product and the user is blurred.

I don't want yet another app on my phone.

My rule for apps these days is that if it is not available through F-Droid, I won't be using it.

I use LineageOS with MicroG and decided probably 5 years ago to just use PWAs instead of apps for any online service and grab whatever other utilities I might need from Obtanium or F-Droid. Also the experience on my Thinkphone is the exact same as it was on my Pixel XL 2.

I know not everyone can do this, and some PWAs are downright terrible if they work at all, but for my usecase it has been great.

Google has a lot of these inconveniences, super easy to fix but for some reason the don't.

I sell stuff ocassionaly on a "local" platform called MercadoLibre (like, I could afford a new handlebar for my bicycle so I could sell there the old one). Mercadolibre kind of wants to be the argentinian Amazon, even lobbying in the argentinian government so they will ban similar platforms from other countries. With time, MercadoLibre has become incredibly hostile and greedy for us small sellers, while favoring corpos.

They charge you 25% for each sale you do via their platform, but the latest thing they did was to force you to "identify" you are you via a website where they track your face features and scan your ID "because of security". Yeah, that sounds good, so I did that in 2021.

They asked this again last year because of reasons. But this time they won't let you use a regular web browser: they forced you to do this via their app. No matter how much you try, it will always fail citing "compatibility issues" or "errors". I tried to complain but their customer support is incredibly shitty, if you even manage how to find to contact them.

But oh surprise, their "app" is just a web wrapper.

If your app can be implemented in React Native with no developer pain, it should just be a website.

Native is a much better experience than mobile websites when you actually use the features and power of these fairly advanced computers we carry around in our pockets.

In Google's defense, they weren't the ones that championed the "everything must be an app" movement. My memory of the 2010s is that Google (and while they were relevant, Palm) pushed cross-platform web apps, but Apple ran a successful marketing campaign to convince everyone that everything on mobile must be a native app for reasons. So we end up with a walled garden of native apps that must be approved by and pay a tax too the company that makes the OS.

The result is that instead of building one app that works on all platforms, software companies need to build three apps: Web, iOS, and Android. I'm sympathetic to why most software companies (including my own) choose to just build a web app wrapped in a native wrapper. If a company does decide to build a totally separate iOS app, I dunno, it seems reasonable not to build support for every single niche feature that the web app can has. I'm not sure I get the outrage here, especially since Google has a long track record of preferring web apps to native.

The "reasons" primarily are that Apple refused to support PWAs, hamstrung mobile Safari, and refused to allow third-party browsers. So while it's true that native apps can offer a better experience than mobile web apps, that's mostly just because Apple artificially restricts web apps.

There's another class of problem, websites that pretend to work in the browser but refuse to support any reasonable type of login session.

Like, sure, there are login sessions that expire after five seconds of inactivity. Sometimes it even turns out that they don't support passkeys or TOTP, and you have to add a phone number for SMS authentication, which reduces account security by letting attackers prove your identity.

I want a browser extension that automatically clicks those "I'm still here" pop-ups on scummy websites like this...

But they have an app. And they don't even shove it in your face that the experience is better with the app or whatever. But it is for one and literally only ever one singular reason: it doesn't log you out every five seconds

When I was job hunting earlier this year, LinkedIn on my phone told me to install the app. Sure, why not? So I did. It refused to authenticate and never worked. One good point is that at least the mobile web version didn't lock me out with an impassable overlay like some websites are starting to do.

This past weekend I was flying on Delta and my first flight was delayed such that I was going to miss my connecting flight, so I rebooked onto a later one. During my layover I visited the gate agent to get a boarding pass with a seat assignment.

"Do you have the Delta app?"

"Nope."

Then he pressed a few keys on his keyboard and printed out a new boarding pass for me within five seconds.

What’s even worse is intentionally degrading performance for sign-in’s. This is still circumstantial but I’ve been looking into that over the past few weeks.

When switching between google accounts on a random app or game, no issue. Quick code, you’re in. When I switch between accounts on Claude on mobile, I have to sign in, enter the code, screen freezes, I sign in again, can’t verify it’s me, I sign again, wait 30 seconds, I’m in.

I have to sign in three separate times when signing into a single google account in Claude. For every single other app it’s very quick.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Anthropic and google are working together to degrade sign-in performance for multi-account users. I can’t fully prove it yet but I plan to be able to in the week or two.