I get that, if things are not changed on the Apple side, websites can’t have proper notification so you are forced to have an app but on android PWA (Progressive Web Apps - basically websites on steroids) are a real thing and you can just “install” the lemmy website of your instance and avoid any bloated app. Are you looking for an app with some feature missing from the website? Are you just unaware of the possibility of installing the website itself? I don’t want to sound rude (English isn’t my first language) but I don’t get what to me looks like an obsession to have a bloated app installed on your phone
I’m an Android developer, I usually spot a non native app immediately and the flaws in the ui are really annoying. Web apps are even worse.
A lot of the people coming in right now are specifically protesting Reddit due to the shut down of their preferred third party apps, especially Apollo, an iOS exclusive. Android has Jerboa and PWAs, but on iOS we just have the site (and mlem, but it’s very early days there). I think that if/when old Reddit gets shut down, the resulting exodus from that will not care as much about app access, as they were using the web previously.
The experience on the website is awful on mobile, while it’s fairly good on desktop
To me, properly optimized native apps tend to be less-bloated than their web equivalents. Have you ever used “RIF is fun” for reddit? It is amazing, lots of tiny UI optimizations make it a pleasure to consume content much faster than scrolling up and down reddit’s UI for both links and comments
Jerboa is almost 70 times bigger than the PWA …
Are you going to ignore the rest of what I wrote? lol
Have you ever used “RIF is fun” for reddit? It is amazing, lots of tiny UI optimizations make it a pleasure to consume content much faster than scrolling up and down reddit’s UI for both links and comments
The app just feels better/faster. Think of this way: a webapp = browser + pwa. You have all of the resource requirements of the browser itself, plus whatever it needs to render the html/css of the webapp running on top of that. many webapps are just written so poorly (like the new reddit page) that the browser struggles to do simple things like smooth scrolling). Plus being native means there is better support for things like save/print dialogs, themes/dark mode, helper apps/intents, etc)
If none of this matters to you and a webapp feels ok to you, that’s great! use what you want! I’m happy for you
But you came in here asking why people prefer native apps and we gave you an answer, you don’t have to be antagonistic
first things first … English isn’t my first language and I’m sorry if I sounded antagonistic. I’m a bit frustrated because, a lot of users doesn’t even know about PWA and they asks for the development of mobile apps when their needs can be fulfilled with a PWA
I don’t recall using RIF for reddit, I remember trying a lot of app and feel like I was let down by them so I switch to the browser. It did what I need, I didn’t even feel it lagging while scrolling. Ok, PWA doesn’t have access to some native API (and I’m not even sure if apple finally gave up and let its users have browser push notifications) but for some usecases this isn’t a problem …
