[csense]

I'm really sick and tired of going to a site on my phone, and getting inundated with popups and banners and crap telling me to install the app (Reddit, I'm looking at you).

I just want to view the same fricking website that I view on my desktop, but on my phone. You'd think that would be a simple and obvious way of working that would be supported by every single website in existence without any special effort on the part of web developers. And you'd be right, except web developers these days GO OUT OF THEIR WAY TO MAKE IT NOT WORK THAT WAY.

You'd think the simple and obvious fact, that phones these days generally have web browsers just as capable as desktop browsers, would have penetrated people's thick skulls by now. But for some reason everyone wants their own app, I darkly suspect so they can use the email, contacts, camera, microphone etc. for God knows what creepy spying and data harvesting purposes.

So if this guy's figured out that the way to convince The Powers That Be, who've already been convinced by someone else that You Need To Have An App Even If The App Is Literally The Same As Your Website, that it's actually okay to Not Have An App And Just Have People On Your Phones Go To Your Website, by simply re-naming your website from "a website" to "a Progressive Web Application," more power to him.

Me, I just want to look at websites, and occasionally look at them on my phone, and I'd like a web that allows me to have the experience I'm used to from my desktop, on my phone.

[omg_ketchup]

I work at a small business, and our customers are constantly asking that we make an app. We have a fully functional website that is completely responsive, and we do more mobile sales than desktop. But they keep asking for an app. I have no idea why- I guess it feels more "legitimate" than a website. I try to politely explain that I'm our sole developer, and I'd have to support the website, AND an iphone app, AND an android app, and they pretend to understand, and say "yeah, but an app would be nice...".

I mean, do you want the app so you can have an app, or do you want the app so you can make a purchase? I don't understand.

[ntaso]

Same here, except I had someone make native apps. They were bad and unmaintained for a long time (solo dev here as well, running a small business). But still, people used this Android app that didn't receive updates for 4 years(!) over a mobile website where I put a lot of effort into.

At some point, I gave up. If apps is what people want, I make apps. After a looong process of deciding between native and hybrid (build with Ionic), I finally settled on Ionic. The result is actually quite okay. People love it. I can maintain two platforms with a single code base and will probably rewrite parts of the web app with Node so that I can share core code between 3 platforms.

How all of this will turn out in the long run, I don't know. Maybe I'll outsource app development at some point again in the future, now that I have a working product that is exactly as I want it to be.

Seriously, consider releasing a Cordova-based app. Slap some functionality on top so that it won't be rejected by Apple (Website-only wrappers aren't allowed). Maybe an offline storage or whatnot. This shouldn't take too much effort and you might be surprised that new customers find their way to your business.

[dataqat]

I suspect they want the app to have an easy access icon on their home screen. I don't think most people know you can save a shortcut as an icon from a given web page on their home screen.

[duncan-donuts]

Hybrid mobile app?

[terminalcommand]

I was also skeptical of apps, but they do deliver a better more cohesive experience. I actually like the reddit app and it saves me a lot of time.

As for security, you don't have to grant permissions. All apps are also put through a scanning process.

For portability the browser wins. For quality well crafted apps prevail.