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Comment by arocks | Hacker News Reader

> We always have to support HTML5 because so much of our traffic comes from email. When we were [serving] a smaller group [of users], we were hoping we could duplicate all that mobile web work to make our clients faster in terms of code deploys.

This has been my experience as well. When you click on a link in an email, the LinkedIn site would take you to the login screen. This screen is so heavy that it takes an inordinate time to even render!

Clearly, they have tried to cramp in too much into their mobile experience. They should not duplicate the entire functionality but rather simplify it considering the smaller form factor. Building a much lighter version of their site would be the right direction for them, rather than building native apps.

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This is my pet peeve lately. I get e-mails from LinkedIn about my friend's new job or an article someone posted in a discussion group that looks interesting. I click the link in my Mail app, and it switches over to my browser, which takes me to a 20-second splash page, which then prompts me to type my e-mail address and password to log in, and then I'm asked if I want to "get the app," which I already have. Since the web app is terrible, I close my browser and then go open the native app and try to find the thing I clicked on in my e-mail, if I still care enough at that point.

They need to do something to fix this experience, which is quite broken.

This approach is the key to get things right on mobile. Because of its roots, common web development focuses on desktop first and mobile second. This usually means that we do: `loadContent(); if mobile: loadMobileContent();`. Instead we should build for mobile first and load desktop content when we encounter one: `loadContent(); if desktop: loadDesktopContent();`

I think a lot of use cases would actually benefit from having a branch (desktop and mobile) instead of an add-on (mobile and then desktop or vice-versa) just because the experience is completely different. If we consider generic websites and blogs, the experience is so similar using responsive design is the best approach. But if we consider web apps, like those that can improve the experience using geo data, branching can be a better fit. Responsive doesn't seem like a silver bullet.

Honestly sometimes when I'm on my phone and I get a linked in email I won't click the link because the experience is so bad. I'm petty sure it starts with more than 2 possibly 4 redirects and then it shows you that spinner for a long time while it loads data. Are the ajax calls returning a lot of days that is never rendered? Are the ajax calls too slow? Why does it have to redirect so many times? Maybe if they had a mobile debugger they could figure it out.

An application like linked in should not require a native app. The website should just work well in a mobile browser.

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