Maybe HN users, but an increasingly overwhelming percentage of the general population prefers to download an app to do something instead of using a mobile website.
Various industry surveys, like the one from comscore in 2019 suggest otherwise. IIRC it found that most American phone owners install only 1-2 new apps per year. I think they would've gone to more new websites than that.
That study doesn't imply what you suggest. Yes, most Americans install 1-2 apps per year: Facebook, Instagram and similar, and that's all they ever use. That segment of the population doesn't use the mobile web either; they spend all of their time in 1-2 walled gardens and you're not going to reach them with an app or website.
Couldn't you create a web-first app, then have the "app" that appears in the app just install a launcher icon that launches a browser window pointing to your website? This method (PWA?) I believe also lets you launch the browser without the browser control bar at the top (so it appears as a local app).
The best part of this is even if your app gets banned from the app store, it is still accessible to anyone that wants to bookmark your URL, and I believe that users can also install the local PWA icon without having to go through an app store (I may be wrong about that, just starting to learn about PWAs and what is currently possible, and what is coming up).
You seem to know what you are talking about, but from my personal experience this does not see correct. To me, it seems that it used to be that way, but now people only download apps for very specific purposes.
Do you have pointers to data on this subject? I am very interested in this subject!
The current state of webapps on Android has made good progress on these issues:
Supported on all major Android browsers:
- Progressive Web Apps can be added to your home screen
- Web Push lets web apps receive push notifications (Brave's implementation is broken, but they try to support the feature)
Experimental APIs supported by Chrome for Android:
- Web Share Target API, which lets homescreen'd web apps receive shares from other apps (the share pane makes no distinction between sharing to a web app or a native app)
- Contacts APIs to read the user's contacts list
I think PWA's competitiveness will get a lot better once other browsers adopt the Web Share Target (or something like it), but I'm skeptical that they'll really take off as long as Apple continues hold off on implementing features that would make PWAs competitive with native apps.
Let's not go into hypotheticals about what might happen if google started... what, inserting spyware, basically, into their own open source browser engine?
Chrome and even Firefox have already begun political policing of their browsers (https://reclaimthenet.org/google-chrome-web-store-bans-disse...). The next step seems like it’ll be forced curation of the web or blocking of IP addresses, since they’re already knocking on that door.
They banned a sleazy-looking extension from their extension stores. That's a far cry from "forced curation of the web or blocking of IP addresses". And, if that happens? Someone will just fork the browser.
Why stop there? Web apps can trivially be taken down if your domain registrar, hosting provider, datacenter partner or payment solution decides to kick you out.
You have alternatives for those things though, in other countries if necessary. Ok, ok, accepting payments is hard -- if you're getting booted from your processors because, say, you're in a controversial industry, you might have to get creative (look at the US cannabis industry for such creativity).
There many hosting provider, datacenter, payment gatway to choose from. But just 2 appstore to use (technically android can have as many as you want, but how many pp use 3rd store right now?)
The problem I have with third party app stores is you have to open up permissions to install any third-party app -- you can't just say "Trust apps from the following app stores" (at least that I've found, although it has been a while since the last time I looked into it).
compare to china where google is blocked, which as a result has dozens of competing appstores. each phone brand has their own, and then some.
i do believe that if google didn't have an appstore that it forces android licensees to use, then we would have a similar variety of appstores world wide.