It's been 13 years of "no, you can't do in the phone's webbrowser the thing you can do in a PC's webbrowser, you need to install a fucking app". People just accepted it. The fuckers accepted it.
This was actually Steve Jobs original idea for the iPhone. Instead of native apps everything would be a web app.
I’m torn because I do hate responsive design to the max. But I also hate how the web has evolved into a pseudo os with everything in JavaScript. Don’t get me started on electron.
I like the native app approach so I can actually use the is as intended it many apps these days are just a wrapper for the webapp anyway
these days are just a wrapper for the webapp anyway
The Bank of America app on my iPhone is a 400MB behemoth designed just to slowly load a bunch of webviews. Also, at one point not long ago the Square/Block Cash App was around 700MB for some reason, but they have managed to bring it down to a trim 318MB.
the web has evolved into a pseudo os with everything in JavaScript
I'm not an expert on these matters, so probably have this all wrong, but I saw someone on Mastodon yesterday lamenting that he has to bump the RAM on older computers purely because the web has got so bloated with java everywhere, and that made me angry, because my old, perfectly good Mac mini has 8gb of soldered RAM and work I need to do in Google Docs frequently takes up a huge chunk of that.
I had the first iPhone pre-app store and lemme tell you, those web apps sucked.
Even if you wanted to play a simple game like darts, you better hope your Edge connection was up to the task. There was zero offline utility to be had with the webapps, and back then reception just sucked everywhere, even metropolitan areas.
Some apps are genuinely useful to have offline. Some apps can go to hell and be a web page.