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[return to "Do not download the app, use the website"]
1. rustys+Fg[view] [source] 2025-07-26 00:19:04
>>foxfir+(OP)
I cannot agree more and this has always been a pet peeve of mine.

Most native apps are some half gig large where even the heaviest website is a few mb. They dont let you highlight text and have other bizarre design choices. Even worse, they request importing contacts list which isnt even an option on the web.

Native apps could be butter but more often than not they are like margarine. Smooth, oily, and not good for you.

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2. ljm+tp[view] [source] 2025-07-26 01:58:28
>>rustys+Fg
A lot of native apps are just wrappers around a JS context with a few bridges into native APIs and they are pure data grabs.

Reddit always asks you to use its native app, for example. Why the fuck would I care so much about Reddit that I want it outside of my browser? Same goes for any other website.

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3. xtract+Ds[view] [source] 2025-07-26 02:37:32
>>ljm+tp
This is so funny. For me, it was as if the "monkey's paw" had played me.

Back in the early 2000s, I loved desktop applications. My thinking was that there's no way a web app could do what a desktop application could. I loathed slow, proprietary, online-requiring, HTML based web apps .

25 years have passed, and now we DO have some "native" device apps... but they are just HTML web elements bubdled in a freaking custom browser.

Edit: anyone remember the "PortableApps" wave? I loved having that in a usb drive.

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4. reacto+Ht[view] [source] 2025-07-26 02:52:10
>>xtract+Ds
You never experienced the horror that is XAML. Not HTML, not native control either, it’s a weird middle ground of platform lock-in that you couldn’t escape until recently.

What I miss are the days where one could Win32 call a window up, and it looked like every other. Not sugar for me and none for thee.

I cut my teeth programming GUIs, I still like making GUIs - immediate mode guis, event based guis, animated guis and informational guis. I left front-end web dev when every 6 months there was a new framework, a new new, and everyone dropped everything for it. I understand why React ate the world at the time but it’s gotten to the point where it’s no longer standards driven, its ecosystem driven, and even then it’s leaking.

What I love about these hybrid apps though is that from Apache Cordova (PhoneGap) onwards, they’ve all looked really really good. Proving that a normal user can’t tell the difference. Which makes solo-dev or small-dev dev easier. Go with what you know. No need to learn flutter, or SwiftUI, or Kotlin.

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