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Comment by denysvitali | Hacker News Reader

I understand the user point of view, but some web UIs nowadays are so bad and the app so good that I'm not sure this always holds true.

I do agree that this seems to be exception rather than the rule - so having both is actually nice IMHO.

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> some web UIs nowadays are so bad and the app so good that I'm not sure this always holds true.

This is by design to force you install the app. Most of these days, I just treat it as a signal to neither use the app nor the website.

Reddit comes to mind. I have so many issues with their mobile website. The back button has been broken for years, comments will frequently just hang as loading indefinitely (only fixable with a hard refresh), videos will sometimes not be replayable, sometimes if you change the zoom on the page it will just hard refresh, etc.

I'm not sure if it is intentional to push you to the mobile app, but I have to imagine the mobile app doesn't have all these issues.

Thankfully, old.reddit.com as a default option still works.

The kicker is that the text is so small and to make the site usable (and readable) you need to rotate your phone to landscape mode.

This works well enough that I haven't downloaded the reddit mobile app or used their mobile site ever since they killed Apollo.

But i.reddit.com does not. That was the original mobile experience.

And worse: neither would propagate to on-site links. That is, if someone had explicitly linked "www" rather than "old" or "i" at reddit, then regardless of which interface you'd arrived at it from, requiring you to constantly re-specify the actual interface you want. Particularly when not logged in to the site.

I'd begun using Reddit nearly 15 years ago, my last comment is now two years old, and my subs private (and inactive). Site's dead to me.

It used to be that you could set old.reddit.com as the default interface for www.reddit.com URLs, with the new interface still being available at new.reddit.com - is that no longer the case?

You can specify the interface as preferred, if you are logged in to your Reddit account.

However *if you're visiting the site via a specified hostname ("www" or "old", previously "i"), following any arbitrary link from a post, comment, or Wiki page to Reddit will not respect the hostname you'd arrived at that link from.

This to me is absolutely maddening behaviour, as it's now necessary to edit the URL within the browser nav bar. Tedious on desktop, painful on a touchscreen device.

I no longer read Reddit.

Their mobile app sucks too. They just killed /r/all recently.

you can launch it from a comment linking to r/All (with a as upper case) iirc. How long that'll still be available, I have no clue, but I like to imagine the devs who work on reddit realise how braindead of a decision removing it is but have to please the shareholders by removing any obvious access of it

I think they took the wrong signal from the people avoiding the default feed since it's filled with days-old posts you've already seen from subs you haven't joined.

I'm especially angry that if you go to reddit.com in a mobile browser, it will sometimes fully block you from certain subreddits (not just NSFW ones) and tell you that you can only access it from the app. Meanwhile, you can easily visit the exact same subreddit by typing old.reddit.com/r/whatever. The outright lying bothers me so much. I refuse to be desensitized to lying just because everyone is lying all the time; it's still really wrong, and they really should be ashamed of themselves.

reddit browser behavior got me into using frontends for various sites, such as redlib dot privacyredirect dot com

there are surprisingly many of them for pretty much every social media website.

If it's really "by design" then you are saying they have a staff of web developers who are told, "No, no, no... all that quality work you're capable of--don't do it. Here are some JIRA tickets to make the web site shitty and slow and eat the user's battery. Go implement them and make everything worse!"

What kind of sad, self-loathing software developer sits down and says "OK boss, whatever you say, boss, gonna go make it bad now..." I mean, I know to a lot of people, it's just a 9-5 and you do what your boss says, and "pride in your work" is not really a thing anymore, but come on. Who gets even a shred of satisfaction doing this?

I think a better explanation is just incompetence.

It's usually done in such small portions the developers don't know exactly what they're doing. That, or they've become so numb to it to not really care

you mean like in a way of "defending" the user from using the website and just go right away to the app?:)

Not really, more like "just pick whatever works, both usually suck"

Better can be relative, too. If your app is native (desktop or not) and now efficient with ram than your website is, I'll download it and use that instead. My mother's computer has 16gb RAM and was ooming due to outlook and Google workspace alone using up 8gb of RAM in 7 tabs. I added an increased swap file and it started thrashing instead of just killing the browser. It's so bad Quicken 200X doesn't work properly (according to task manager, Quicken uses some 30mb RAM)

For local apps, I'll firewall it: on mobile I use rethinkdns and trackercontrol to block unnecessary network calls; on desktop I'll mostly just deal with it (I have an extensive hosts file), but that doesn't mean everything).

Alternatively, they could just make the web UI good.

This isn't an alternative for the user (the person you're replying to).

I can't think of a web app that really feels like a (good) native one. For example, I would never use Google Calendar as a web app / Google Maps as a web app as they're far inferior IMHO

I used Home Assistant as a web app for years before deciding to download the companion app instead to give it access to my phone's sensors.

I used to care a lot about app designs feeling "native" but when I actually took inventory of the apps I use, I came to the conclusion that all app developers (including Apple and Google themselves) will force their own designs and theming into every app. The only exception seems to be coming from a bunch of open-source apps that don't have branding concerns to worry about.

With the realisation that most apps look and navigate must as bad as their website equivalent, I found it much easier to use web apps.

TurboTax, for all its faults is one of those where the desktop app is better than the webapp they keep pushing.

Unless it’s required (Starlink) or something I check often (not much this day), I don’t use the app version. I prefer grabbing my laptop and use the web version. But best is when there’s an API available so I can write my own tools.

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