Technology

I'm going to proide an opposing viewpoint: apps will always have a more native feel, have better performance, have more capabilities, and have entirely different goals compared to web apps.

• You don't need an app to do data harvesting.

• Users have very different expectations for websites and mobile apps. They look different, they feel different, they function different, and the UX is very different.

• Performance performance performance. Html/css/JavaScript/browsers/whatever are incapable of competing against 60-120fps natively written apps. That sidebar drawer navigation can NEVER feel native in a browser because swiping from the left to open it either works, but takes a second to open, or forced you to go back to the last page.

• The additional vertical real-estate cannot be understated.

• It is a lot more effort to deal with differing browser behavior on the web. Adding mobile experience into that is even more annoying. Developers work on a desktop and will forget about mobile devices at literally every possible moment.

• You have zero control and a user can leave at a moment's notice even in the middle of critical flows. In an app, you can quick store this information away or continue it in the background. On desktop, you have zero chance to react to it since the browser will destroy-the-world the moment the user wants to go away, which leads to a ton of defensive programming, more chances for errors, and lower performance overall. Death by a thousand cuts.

I'm a developer, if you hadn't been able to tell. I am responsible for mobile responsivity on the website and it's a massive goddamn pain in my ass every waking hour of the day, and fixing it definitively is impossible with the actively hostile browser landscape leading to whack-a-mole bugfixing that needs to be done. I also point to my previous point of "devs forget about mobile constantly." I'm tired. Don't even get me started on the fixes for one browser breaking literally every other browser, leading to complete refactors of layout being necessary. This has happened more than a few times in the last year alone.

I'm actively pushing for a mobile app because we have complete end-to-end control of the experience. If something works, it just works, and it won't be broken on a random Friday or Sunday when google or apple decides to push an update to their shitty fucking browser that breaks half of the site with less than zero notice. iOS is especially fucking terrible in this regard. Every single update to safari brings horrendously breaking changes that fuck my life up.

Playing to the higher-ups by enticing them with top-of-mind awareness and having a place on their homepage is a means to an end. I want my life to not be shitty fucking web dev. When something works, I just want it to work and not require checking against every single browser in existence dated back seven years because people don't update.