Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jlarocco 3923 days ago
It's sad it's taken people so long to realize it, but at least they're starting to get a clue. Who'd have thought that an app that's essentially a web browser tied to a single site was a bad idea that nobody would want to use?

If desktop and laptop users access your content/game/social network/whatever from a web page, it's probably best to have mobile users access it that way, too.

1 comments

I absolutely agree.

And I don't buy their justification for going down the app route in the first place: "But by the middle of 2011, six months after we launched in our app, more than half of installed web browsers were still not HTML5 compliant."

Who cares? The app only targets iOS, so as long as mobile Safari rendered it, they were fine. And most of us here know that the app would be a pretty thin wrapper round a webview.

I suspect the real reason for going down the app route is because back in 2011 all the marketing types were screaming "WE MUST HAVE AN APP!!!1!!"

News International made the same mistake with "The Daily", which (probably) cost them over $60M.