[manfredo]

Yeah, it's a web browser in essence. But the UI, scrolling behavior, etc. are all handled by the app rather than the website. The result is often a much cleaner experience, especially compared to the average website's mobile web experience. There's also often extended functionality, like saving entire galleries of images, saving threads, etc.

What I'd imagine Artstation doing is releasing a "generic art showcase app" (or exposing APIs to let 3rd parties do so themselves), where users can manually specify www.artstation.com. The app would provide all the features that the Artstation app did.

[ndnxhs]

4chan works really well on mobile. The only thing an app did for me was presaving content so I could view it offline.

[lozenge]

And how will they include ads? API users can just not display those.

[manfredo]

Maybe when it pulls a gallery of photos from the API, it injects a few ads. Or the ads could be served by the app itself.