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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

I'm excited for what this means for categories of apps that many users currently consider to be "junk" – restaurant ordering apps, parking apps, venue apps.

There are many of these, and we often don't want download these, or when we finally cave in and do download them the friction of notifications and eventual deletion is a pain.

With App Clips, and some of the features like "no install", 8 hours of push notifications and the ability to confirm a fixed location without location permissions, I think the UX is going to be significantly improved.

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I agree, though I think there's also a more cynical side to it. I see it as a land-grab by Apple to bring use-cases that currently belong to the web, under the umbrella of their app ecosystem. I'm still excited because I think the user experience will be legitimately much better. But I am a bit concerned about the implications.

Any time I try to order food on the web I feel like I have to make an account for some service I've never heard of and manually enter in credit card info. I fully welcome just being able to choose my order and pay with Apple Pay, nothing else needed.

That's an option on the web too though? Through both Apple's proprietary implementation and the standardized Payment Request API: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_pay_on_the_w...

...of course this requires developers to use it, but then so does App Clips.

Apple has a policy that any app developer who offers "Sign in with ___" for any company, has to also include "Sign in with Apple". That's not something they could do on the web.

They could revoke your keys (in theory). I don't think they would though

You misunderstood; I'm saying Apple couldn't coerce a website into offering Sign in with Apple as an option, like they can with an app on the App Store.

To me, this is a feature: I don’t want to have a million passwords because some random developer doesn’t like my preferred authentication method. As a user, I prefer to pick a trusted authentication provider and use it everywhere because, in the end, it’s a lot simpler for me: I don’t need to remember half a million username/email/password combinations, I just need to be able to authenticate myself to Apple.

Developers, web developers especially, often seem to forget that the browser is a _user_ agent. Instead, they force their aesthetic and functional preferences on me, when I have chosen fonts, colors, interactions and systems that I prefer to be able to use wherever possible.

And they are saying that apple can do that. By threatening to revoke payment keys.

What kind of payment keys would they revoke for a website that does not offer ‘Pay with Apple Pay’?

Sign in with Apple and Apple Pay already exist on the web. Though I guess, Apple can't force companies to offer it on the web.

What incentive do parking and venue apps have to implement this? The audience is captive. They push the app because either they do not want to spend the engineering effort to make a usable website or they want to siphon data from their clients. In either case, they will not have an incentive to spend more engineering time to get less data from customers.

> What incentive do parking and venue apps have to implement this?

As a good example, a parking meter app is simply there to collect money at the meter. An App Clip is small, which will be way faster to download than the full app, and enable a user to pay much faster than before. In a situation where you want people to get an app but know that they're time constrained and that app is how you get paid, you'll implement it because it'll make sense to implement.

I've personally given up on bike and scooter rental apps because the time to download and setup was frustrating. For those cases, this would be awesome.

They also, cleverly, give you an easy way to convert the Clip into the full App right from your home screen. I think certain segments of dev companies will love this as an avenue for onboarding.

But as mentioned, the audience is captive. If there was another parking option around the corner they would have used that. I don't think parking lots care how long it takes you to download their app and pay.

Not really, there are often other options. Different lots nearby using different systems, for instance. Or the option of simply not paying and risking getting towed / a ticket.

A parking lot clip could use the time-based notification to warn you that your meter is almost up and give you the option to re-up. Without having to walk back to the lot to do it. I imagine this would be especially useful in a tourist-heavy area since somebody who isn't sticking around won't want to download a whole app for the purpose.

I kinda doubt that parking lot management companies would be willing to pay Apple's 30% transaction fee though.

Apple's fees are on digital goods, not physical ones. Amazon doesn't pay a fee for me to place a physical order in the Amazon app, nor does the laundry app in my old apartment building.

I thought parking counts as a service, not physical goods, but then again I think I paid parking via app in the past, with external payment gateway, so you're probably right.

The in-app purchase system is the one which takes a fee, and is only sometimes required (and only _usable_) for services or digital goods consumed in the app itself.

Any real world good or service would fall onto Apple Pay, which makes its money through a micro fee on the card issuer, basically to use the phone as a convenient, highly fraud-resistant card.

You're also looking at this the wrong way. Parking apps make the overhead of managing parking lots less expensive. IF you have higher adoption of the app you have less problems with your onsite machines/attendants/cash. Those cost way more money than adopting this across your fleet of lots. Also a lot of lot owners, have a mangement company or work with an app vendor who will add this as a simple way to improve their cash flow.

App vendors are only paid by the people who use the app, so they have every incentive to make it that much easier for some one to use the app than the ticketing machine.

The parking lots may be competing with other lots, but really they are most likely getting money either way, they want to decrease their overhead, hence apps.

But the parking lot can just require the app. That’s the point. They do not need to worry about adoption of the app because you need the app to use the parking lot.

They can up until someone says they don't have a smartphone or their battery is dead.

The reality is that most parking lots do need to have fallbacks for these cases rather than telling people to drive off, and those fallbacks are often more expensive in terms of staffing/maintenance (which is why they added the app in the first place). Something where I point at a code on a sign, it pops up a payment button without me knowingly downloading anything will increase the cost savings beyond an app.

There's usually a non-app payment alternative.

Go visit mainland China and see how QR code’s exist everywhere that lead to mini-apps inside of WeChat. There’s plenty of precedent.

I actually LOVE this idea. And we develop an app for people to get personalized information from their local government (https://polkadotskysoftware.com).

What I love is that we actually get access to a whole swath of people that want quick information but don't want to install a whole app for it. In fact, we want to make our stuff available on any platform, because our goal is to get as many people to use our system as possible.

When it comes to parking vendors, they get their money no matter what (either from a government contract or as a slice of parking fees, not from number of app installs), so it's in their best interest to INCREASE engagement.

Our main problem is that our mobile app is written in React Native, so I'm not sure how this would fit in near-term. We are loathe to add too many native features because the whole workflow in React Native is already a bit brittle.

OT, but your company looks really interesting. It's similar to a project idea I had recently but hadn't explored yet.

A few questions: are you a nonprofit? And if not, who do you sell to? Do you sell to local governments to help them quickly bootstrap citizen involvement services? Do you develop solutions on an area-by-area basis or do you have a single product that tries to cover all of them?

We're a for-profit that sells a SaaS product to (so far) state and local governments. Our stack is Elixir and Ember JS, running on AWS.

We're currently involved in a lot of COVID related efforts in the eastern US (SMS delivery of test results, etc – we haven't had a chance to update our page, been too busy). Still a product but each customer has custom needs to integrate with their systems, which we do via APIs and custom data ingestion code.

We do guide local governments in bootstrapping all the data on our platform but it's a multi-tenant system and everyone's on the same platform.

Yeah, good luck making it under the 10mb limit with React Native.

Why is this downvoted? This comment is spot on. The junk apps are junk because the businesses make them like that on purpose.

You can also turn this around: what stops businesses right now from making extremely lightweight apps that don’t bother the user? The same forces that make companies slap tons of trackers and JS on their websites.

> The junk apps are junk because the businesses make them like that on purpose.

While this is sometimes true, I think it's more often the case the businesses make junk apps because they pay the lowest bidder to make them a bare minimum app.

And the lowest bidder is often an app factory.

See real estate apps or corporate travel apps for instance. A majority seem to be the same few practically unusable apps re-skinned.

I believe as part of the App Clip announcement they were showing Yelp creating/managing apps for restaurants. So they're specifically trying to improve this type of app.

I wouldn’t assume that’s the only reason for how these apps exist. Most businesses pay considerably more for an app than it would cost to have a website. In some cases that’s due to something like robust offline support or tracking not allowed by the web security model but there are plenty of more common reasons: the owner wanted to be able to tell their friends that they’re in the App Store, they perceived it as more modern/cooler, they got a sales pitch about how this would boost revenue or customer loyalty, etc.

One way to guess about what’s happening is to look at the app quality and update history: if it looks like it launched in the original App Store round or has a hideous UX which is never improved, it’s probably not actually doing enough to be worth spending more money on.

Exactly. I’m not a huge fan of Yelp but I used to use the mobile website occasionally. But they have been slowly crippling the mobile website over the years to force you to download the app instead. So now I don’t use Yelp anymore. I don’t see why a company like Yelp would embrace this, although given Apple has featured them extensively in the announcement I assume they are embracing it after all. Maybe because there’s such a simple path from app clip to installing the full app, companies might see this as a potential avenue for new installs? Also supposedly App Clips can access nearly all of the native app APIs, so even if they can’t get much location data and have limited notification access, they might be able to get some available data off the user’s device?

>companies might see this as a potential avenue for new installs

it seems like the opposite of that to me. right now, if there's some task you want to accomplish (order a meal, rent a scooter...) you have to install the app to do that. With app clips, you get the option of completing the task without installing the app. as a user i love this, but it's definitely not going to drive app installs.

I agree, I was mostly trying to play devils advocate and try and figure out any potentially positive reason. As an extreme counterexample, I refuse to install GrubHub or Uber Eats or apps like that, instead just calling the restaurants directly to order food. It’s possible I might try out an app clip, and maybe the process would be smooth enough that I’d be willing to upgrade to the full app. But I know I’m definitely outside the norm and realistically this wouldn’t move the needle in a positive direction for businesses.

I’m mostly just concerned that this will likely detract even further from web-based alternatives. GrubHub might decide that since they have App Clips, they can pull a Yelp and disable their mobile website completely.

It seems within Apple's style that they will eventually require this to be implemented for certain types of apps.

Can they, though? It seems like a lot of the use cases for App Clips depend on physical infrastructure being added in the real world, like the NFC sensors that project the existence of an App Clip. Apple likes to control, but I don't think they can really compel physical infrastructure.

You don't need any physical infrastructure for using App Clips. Ultimately they are launched via URL - that can be by physical NFC tags or QR codes, or just via Safari, a SMS/iMessage, etc.

Unless they refuse all other forms of payment, this keeps all of the many app problems from pushing into manual paths requiring human time to correct. Each stage of the process has people dropping off and calling for support or talking to an attendant.

I think maybe Apple can force them to do it somehow. And for all the other cases like ordering food, renting scooters, bikes, entering the gym for a one off session I think it’s just going to be competition. If lime has an app clip and bird doesn’t I’ll walk the extra 15 minutes. I did ask quite a few ppl since the announcement and most friends said they just dislike the new service signup soooo much they would be willing to do a physical sacrifice.

Edit: definitely not claiming this will be a mass thing but it’s my gut feeling it would be.

+ it’s a less friction conversation of very difficult segment of customers. That might count for something for some companies.

Agreed. Google did something similar with Android a few years ago and I haven't come across an app that takes advantage of it yet.

Businesses want to offer apps so that they can collect more information on their customers, not because an app is the best solution to the problem at hand.

So that I use their service instead of passing on it?

Maybe apple might stop approving junk apps that do not implement clips, like they ban apps that have "sign in with XYZ" but not "sign in with apple"

(this post represents my opinion only, and does not speak for my employer, my cat, or the flying spaghetti monster)

> What incentive do parking and venue apps have to implement this?

Because Apple is known to kick apps out if they don't like them?

I'm excited for what this means for categories of apps that many users currently consider to be "junk" – restaurant ordering apps, parking apps, venue apps

I have an old iPhone that serves a particular task in a closet and I almost never interact with it.

Earlier this year I needed to do something physically with it, and noticed it was filled with dozens of parking, ride hailing, taxi, and transit apps I'd downloaded on my main iPhone over the last few years. (For those of you not in the iOS ecosystem, if two devices are on the came iCloud ID, downloading one can download the app to all of your devices.)

With app clips, I won't have to go through and delete all these short-time-use apps on all of my devices when I get home from traveling.

Edit for all those replying without understanding my situation: I don't want to disable app syncing entirely. Some apps I want to be synced on all of my devices. It's the one-time or short-term use apps I don't want. The ones that Apple is targeting with App Clips.

This feature can be turned off. Search for “automatic downloads” in settings.

This is a very easy setting to disable in your iCloud account.

It is, but I don't want to disable it. Some apps I want to be synced on all of my devices. It's the one-time or short-term use apps I don't want. The ones that Apple is targeting with App Clips.

I see a very good business case for this for some companies. Think of uber or lime, there is very little user data can do for them, whereas instant availability has enormous potential to boost their business. Right now either a user has all the scooter/ride-hail apps or one or two. Every time a user looking for a scooter passes one they don’t have an app for, that’s lost business for them. If app clips allows users to use whichever scooter is closest to them it can drive overall usage way up.

Well maybe not Uber, but for sure for things like scooter or bike sharing. Now that I think about, do people really want to touch a bike or scooter that’s been lying around given potential exposure to Covid? Anyway I think there will be plenty of use cases for App Clips. And to add to that, I think Android/Google has had the Instant App feature for some time now, it’ll be interesting to see what sort of opportunities arise from this App clip/Instant App ecosystem.

Covid doesn't appear to transmit easily (or potentially at all) via surfaces.

When Apple announced App Clips, it sounded like something I had seen in A16Z briefings -- people scanning QR codes on super-apps in China. It seems that Wechat has the concept of Mini Apps which are similar (but less seamless than Apple's App Clips).

https://www.scmp.com/abacus/tech/article/3090269/ios-14-adds...

I'm excited for this too and I was very excited a couple of years ago when Android launched instant apps which were the exact same idea, but they never took off. Hopefully with Apples tighter control of NFC in their phones and better marketing they will become more prevalent.

Even for interacting with your robot hoover or your headphones there's plenty of opportunities to create much better user interactions than your first step of onboarding to involve going to an app store.

In my experience a lot less money comes out of Android, and feature parity is extremely important. If iOS didn’t have the equivalent feature, there was often no significant advantage to utilizing them on Android.

A while back, there was an attempt to build a web-based solution to this problem. It was a card-based browser called Wildcard (their page is dead so posting an article)

https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/13/wildcard-raises-10-million...

It seemed like a really cool idea, shame it never took off.

that looks similar to google's "physical web" project from 2016, which was apparently just as successful.

https://blog.chromium.org/2016/02/the-physical-web-expands-t...

This feature was created in the vacuum left by the slow and stale nature of web standards organisations. There should be a safe, simple way to develop a website that has all of these features. This would allow functionality like this to exist on platforms outside of Apple's control.

> slow and stale nature of web standards organisations

If there's one thing I've never heard the web platform accused of being, it's "slow and stale".

The web platform has plenty of features for doing this kind of thing. It already partly serves this use-case, in practice. There are two reasons Clips will have an advantage:

- Apple has done a lot to hamper Progressive Web Apps on its devices because they have a stake in platform lock-in.

- The web, at least on mobile, is still never quite as good an experience as a native app. There are lots of fingers that can be pointed at different parties for why this is, but speaking as a web developer, I will readily admit that it's just not quite the same on some subconscious level.

Websites support Apple Pay, sign in with apple, being loaded from a URL/NFC/QR code, location API access, etc. The main thing websites don’t support is push notifications on iOS, and it seems like that would be a lot easier for Apple to implement then an entirely new app format. I don’t think you can really blame web standards organizations, this is entirely Apple’s decision. They want their proprietary App Store front and center.

Whats the incentive for these apps to make clips available? Why wouldn't the parking app you hate just keep forcing people to install it, likely to track and report as much data as possible as an additional revenue stream.

Not every audience is captive. If Lyft offered this and Uber didn't, it might be a subtle push for me to prefer the former. Or maybe even walk/bike if neither adopts it.

Competition: if enough apps will implement it, it would become a standard user expectation.

This is really to cut down on Google searches.

In fact, if you go through many of the features in iOS 14 they are designed to let you do things without having to Google for information/links to do it.

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