Comment by IanCal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IanCal | Hacker News Reader

>For instance, you receive a link on food recipe from Buzzfeed video app on your whatsapp and you want to view it. You just need to click on the link, instead of asking you to install the app, it will open the link itself like a website and video starts playing and you need not require to download an app.

I'm confused as to why this isn't just a link to a normal website. A cross platform, open standard that works perfectly well for playing video. I don't really want a big split into some simple websites and some bulky app partial downloads to do something as simple as play a video.

> Suppose you are searching for a particular camera you want to buy in Google search engine, you type the model in search engine and you see an offer from B&H Photo, with one tap the B&H app opens up deep link right to the camera you want to buy.

Again, websites work perfectly well for this.

How much of the use of this will be cases like these?

Edit I should really add some more to this. I'm frequently having to switch to desktop version of a website as it is, and that's really frustrating, am I going to have to find a way of opening links in a third way dependent on who they're pointing to?

> Again, websites work perfectly well for this.

Not always. The idea here is that an app would be able to use some of the phone's native features, making the user experience more straightforward.

Think about the camera purchase concept. If you open a website, once the user has selected a product, they have to either login or enter payment information (like a new credit card). But with a native micro-app, it can just start a payment intent that accepts whatever the user has already saved to their OS (through Google Pay). Basically two taps and you're done, as opposed to a bunch of taps and filling some forms.

Much less friction, if done right. And that's just one example. I'm sure people will come up with others.

I'm sure some publishers will want to abuse the system to force people to run apps that have no benefit over a simple web page. Same problem contrived "mobile" websites have. But at the same time there's a lot of micro-situations where mini-apps serve the user in a much better fashion.

At least until HTML5+ has proper APIs for the features they need.

It's funny your example is covered by a new web api called PaymentRequest which Google showed off at the very same conference where they announced this.

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2016/05/enhancing-and...

>But with a native micro-app, it can just start a payment intent that accepts whatever the user has already saved to their OS (through Google Pay). Basically two taps and you're done, as opposed to a bunch of taps and filling some forms.

That sounds like it could become a new vector for fraud if not implemented correctly.

I'm not sure that is less friction. Chrome already can and does store my contact and payment details, and the alternative is downloading and running some part of a custom app that integrates with Google pay?

Somewhere I have to choose what card I want and what address to send the item to, both of those are already handled pretty well in chrome. The problems come with poorly made forms on sites, but I dont think comparing bad sites to good apps is fair.

I'm not trying to be contrary here, I've just not seen a decent reason for these yet. Really they're like websites but with a different API that's not cross platform. I guess a good integration has to be one that can't be done with a website, a user also doesn't need regularly and requires no special permissions.

You can't run an ad blocker in a native app.

Normally your cynicism would lead me to downvote you, but in this case i can't do anything but agree. I see this as the main reason.

But can you pay on a website using Android Pay like you do with the B&H app?

Soon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yelPlCVZLEE

The animated gifs located here (http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2016/05/android-insta...) make it look as if you can cancel out of it.

They introduced an instant app like experience prior to this but only through the Google App and they called it streaming. I tried to get hotel tonight to load in this manner right now but could not get it working unfortunately.

edit: got it working. The link was specifically marked as an app link above the regular webpage link.

Personally I could see this being handy for things like games and other times when you might need to install an app to complete a specific task but I don't see it replacing the mobile web.

This may be very interesting for the webmaster if the content of its website est copied by other sites. If they do not have the app, they can not copy the content. For the user, it may be less useful unless the app is customized for he/her.

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