Besides having to wait for the installation, one important recurring inconvenience for me (on iOS) is the lack of autofill. Especially autofilled user names and passwords.
I really wish Apple would add a password-manager extension point to iOS. Since they're trying to push iCloud Keychain I'm not optimistic about this happening, but it would be a really nice way to make password managers more attractive.
Maybe it's just specific apps integrating with 1Password, but Mint, among other apps, already can do this (and it brings up what appears to be an iOS share sheet). But this feature has largely become irrelevant to me thanks to almost every app I use that requires sign-in supporting Touch ID.
> I really wish Apple would add a password-manager extension point to iOS.
They kinda have in 2 ways - as of iOS 9 or 10 your app can utilize login credentials from your web domain name if certain requirements are met, and there's touchID for instant login after the first authentication.
If you see an interesting link on the web, you generally feel safe clicking on it, and often click on it. Sometimes you get rick-rolled or whatever, but you just hit back.
If you see an ad or pop-up article about an app, what are the chances you install it, even if it looks interesting?
I feel very safe installing apps on my iOS devices. The sandboxing and app store review process gives me confidence that it's not going to be malware.
I click on links more than I install apps because loading web pages is a lot faster than installing apps. The flip side is that I hardly ever return to those "interesting links," while I use my installed apps frequently.
Most people only use 4-6 apps a day, or less. Users are spending more and more time in fewer apps. I reckon a good bit of that is the friction of installing new apps.
But the alternative seems to be browser exposing APIs for all those permissions through Javascript and the end-user not really having any control over that. Perhaps I'm just naive about it, since I really don't do Javascript-based development, but this seems to be a worse idea than apps.
Even when you have tons of spaces on a huge sdcard even. This is incredibly frustrating as some devices were shipped with very very little space and too much of that taken up by the stuff that shipped with the phone that for whatever reason cannot be moved to your relatively large sdcard.
I think merged storage is either here in the latest version of android or coming which will hopefully let us stop worrying about storage again but many devices will sadly never see the update.
How much work is installing the app? Single tap? The same of less than opening a web page?
No need to remember screen and folder, just use global search on your phone.
Assuming I'm linked right to the exact app to install.
Click install. Review and approve permissions. Wait for some ungodly amount of megabytes to download. Wait for installation. Then open. Then approve some new permissions. Splash screen. Woo, content! But I'm not "deep linked" to the place I need to be.
Well, it's not a lot of work. But it feels like way more work. It's visible even in the way we talk about it - "viewing a website" vs "getting an app". Looking at something is effortless, getting it implies effort. Often, too much of it, if I just want to check some stuff out quickly.
Also, I feel like after installing an app, it takes more time to get to the actual content, because every app has a few screens of "Welcome to Foo! Here's how you do stuff in here." Websites are pretty instant compared to that.
Whoa. If you want content quickly many apps will offer it in widgets. Many will show you notifications with ability to interact with them without even opening the app.
There is nothing instant about websites.
My point was: There's no problem with casually checking out a website. But I'm probably not gonna install an app unless I'm pretty sure it offers me some value. Not rational? Possibly :)
Similar, but web pages are usable before fully "installed". Data has repeated shown that users quickly abandon websites that don't load extremely fast. Apps are like that, but even slower.
It's simple, when you want to do X, you want to do X, you don't want to do a lot of setup work before you start doing X.
In what world native apps are slower than web apps?
And where do you find "extremely fast" websites, with all this JS frameworks crap and gazillion of trackers being pushed to your poor browser?