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by locutous 1263 days ago
> Is it? Native buttons also come with things like affordances, accessibility, recognizability.

And web views come with things like scaling, accessibility, page/document search. The recognizability and discoverability is up to the designer. Between the two, I miss browser features a lot more than native look and feel.

Then let's not forget the privacy nightmare that mobile apps have been.

I can also often fix poorly built web with some css or other hacks that I cannot do on mobile for poorly built apps. I helped a user do just that the other day, if it had been native he would not have been able to work around the design issue.

The native bias here is crazy. Most users just don't care and can't tell if they are on something that's native vs a web view. What they care about is, does this provide me value? That's real UX. Not blowing out development budgets on duplicating the same features on 3 platforms. You can spend that potential budget on refining and improving the features.

Does it matter sometimes? Yes! The are limits to what you can reasonably do in a web view. But most of the time a web view works fine.

1 comments

> The native bias here is crazy. Most users just don't care and can't tell if they are on something that's native vs a web view.

They can. You just don't know how to listen. "It's slow to open", "it's janky", "it stutters when it scrolls", "I tap/click and nothing happens" etc.

Does this happen with native apps? You betcha. It is significantly more prevalent with web because web has never been and never will be an app platform. It's core is to display text and images, and it can barely manage that.

> They can. You just don't know how to listen.

I've worked on many mobile products. This has been true of none of them. Please provide some evidence of otherwise?

> Does this happen with native apps? You betcha.

Something I agree with. It is the indian and not the arrow. I've seen native, multiple cross platform apps of different flavors, and web views. All of the major problems were due to institutional shortcomings. If our app is bad, it isn't a tooling problem it's because we fail to execute.

> It is significantly more prevalent with web because web has never been and never will be an app platform.

Ummm... I sell web apps. Many major vendors have products that are, at heart, web apps. Progressive web apps, web apps, electron, phone gap, Cordova, capacitor, etc. I find this observation a demonstration of your ignorance of this market.

> Ummm... I sell web apps. Many major vendors have products that are, at heart, web apps. Progressive web apps, web apps, electron, phone gap, Cordova, capacitor, etc. I find this observation a demonstration of your ignorance of this market.

As a user I've seen and used this crap. My understanding of the market is much better than yours, it seems, because I approach it as a user. And yeah, you definitely don't listen to the users.

I've yet to see a single [1] web app that didn't have the shortcomings I partly listed. I've seen this crap in banking apps, ride sharing apps, hotel apps, calendar apps, travel apps, ride and car sharing apps... The list is endless. Every time there's web, there's deficiencies: long loading times, bad scrolling, elements out of bounds, bad touch and tap targets, abysmal animations, layout shifts, you name it.

[1] This is a slight exaggeration. I vaguely remember a couple when I went "hmmm... it's a webview, but nicely implemented"

> As a user I've seen and used this crap. My understanding of the market is much better than yours, it seems, because I approach it as a user. And yeah, you definitely don't listen to the users.

Declaring that you always know best. When you are asked for evidence your only cited evidence is yourself. That your personal experience is representative of the primary needs of entire markets of users. And that you know better than what transpired between myself and hundreds of users. You seem to be remarkably arrogant.

This isn't productive, I'm done.

Good day.