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Comment by _boffin_ | Hacker News Reader

Why do you not allow for functionality on your website, but force users to use an app?

They actually tease you by pretending to show results on their website [0] but when you click on any of the flights it just takes you to their homepage.

[0] https://www.hopper.com/deals/best/from/city-toronto-YTO/to/c...

I'm impressed you even found that. AFAIK there's no link to it anywhere from hopper.com. It was a little SEO project that one of the engineers that's been here a while worked on using our internal prediction APIs. Something like it existed in the app at one point, but the engagement we saw with it was pretty miniscule.

Appreciate the kind response. Those pages are linked right on the homepage, I clicked on the Paris[0] one.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/7ey6spH.png

Oh wow, goes to show you what I know... I assume when we were working with the company we contracted out to build that fancy website they asked if we had anything to link to for flight deals that we were just like "this engineer had a little pet project you could link to". The funny thing is a new hire just asked why we didn't have anything in the app for "best deals in general from my city" and I responded by linking to that project.

It used to exist as its own separate app called "Get The Flight Out" but for some reason we removed it from the app store. We also had a feature devoted to something similar for "flexible watching" but it never got much engagement and it didn't warrant the infrastructure cost it required to keep up.

yeah... i find that a bit disgusting.

Assuming good faith, the business decided that mobile apps were more valuable to their customers so they've spent their (inherently limited) resources improving the mobile apps. Assuming bad faith it's because they want to get whatever data they can off of you while using the mobile app. But due to Apple more clearly exposing what permissions an app uses, that is not quite the concern it used to be.

I'd bet anything that the business didn't decide that a mobile app was more valuable to their _customers_. Maybe more valuable to them, but not to their customers.

It is very rare that an app will provide more value than a website. And most of the time when it does, it's just because the website is shit, and they spent more time on the app. But if they focused on the website, it would be way better than whatever experience the app is giving you.

Here's something to think about: would you download and install a desktop application for every random website you come across? No? Then why do it on your phone? People must just make better websites.

I'm assuming good faith here, and you should too until you find out otherwise. It's fine to be skeptical, but it's rarely helpful to be cynical.

Yea it's not like you would ever use your phone for anything that you couldn't just use a website for. Before the pandemic when I was at a bar and needed to get a ride home I would just take out my laptop and find the number for a taxi company to call to pick me up. This is the perfect solution to the problem and a mobile app could never be more useful.

Yeah, the parent comment is unnecessarily cynical. I've worked at multiple travel companies that have independently either built an app or considered it based on user feedback. I'm not the biggest fan of the idea but I've come to peace with the idea that other people interact with their devices differently than I do.

I wasn't saying never use a phone when you can use a website. I was saying why have a dedicated phone app when you can just use the browser app on your phone. Or are you saying you downloaded an app on your phone just to lookup taxi numbers?

I'm saying there are 2 multi-billion dollar companies that only had mobile apps for a long time that the vast majority of people use to book rides to places.

Because there was a vacuum in the mobile travel space when Hopper was trying to find its main value proposition and we tried to fill that vacuum. Millennials (and now Gen Z) tend to be pretty price sensitive and they also tend to be a higher share of the mobile user space so it made sense to apply our "you can watch for flights and get notified when the cheapest flight hits what we think is the lowest price" feature on a platform where sending notifications that users actual on is actually feasible. On web, the options are email or web notifications and neither of those are very actionable in a timely manner.

They did preface the post by saying they’re an engineer. Most likely that wasn’t their decision.

I fully expect that it wasn't their decision, but also presume that they'd have insight into why a decision like that would be made.

Also, it allows me to express my disdain at such a decision and if enough other people did too, said engineer has the ability to go up the flagpole and inform the decision makers that there are many people who are displeased at their decision.

I do have that ability, but I also have the sense to know that HN readers is not who we're building the product for and when you look at the travel industry as a whole the SEO/web advertising game is not one you really want to play. Two of the biggest spenders on Google AdWords are Expedia and Booking.com. They spend our annual marketing budget in every like 10 minutes or something like that. We literally can't compete, especially when you consider that Google is doing their own with Google flights and hotel search which favors themselves.

So the smart thing to do (at least in our opinion) was to not even play the search engine advertising game and focus on building mobile apps that users will come back to after using. We tend to see really high retention rates with users because they like the experience and we don't have to pay for the ad impression every time they feel like searching for travel destinations.

To make more money. Like most "dark" patterns.

Just a thought, perhaps it's something to prevent scraping.

This actually is one of the benefits of being a mobile only product! It makes it a lot harder to scrape the data that we produce (prediction and such). I don't think that's ever been the main reason though, just a side benefit.

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