[tuckerman]

The site that irks me the most here is New York Times. Opening an article in the mobile browser often has a toast over the bottom third of the article to open it in their app for "a better experience". I struggle to think how nytimes isn't a perfect fit for a site over an app. The only frustrating experience I have with the web version that would be better in the app is not seeing that that pop-up.

[skybrian]

Having signed up for the New York Times recently, they're surprisingly hostile towards new customers:

- Autoplaying videos on the front page with no pause button. I expect video from CNN, but not a newspaper. That's not what I'm there for.

- They send you many "introductory" emails with no way to unsubscribe.

I mostly gave up on the front page, but it's marginally useful for reading the occasional article linked to from elsewhere.

[ethagnawl]

I recently signed up for a membership (you can now supposedly cancel without making a phone call; WaPo has officially died in darkness) and this has been driving me mad, too.

If I'm paying for your service, you should not be degrading my experience using UX anti-patterns in any way, for any reason.

[xixixao]

Also they only have dark mode in the app, even though the app is (or was) clearly not native anyway.

[cush]

NYT occasionally uses fancy interactive articles. They have games, and other things that are better on the app. The NYT app is actually very good

[tuckerman]

For games I agree that an app makes sense (though I think at least the games I used to play were in a separate nyt games app). For interactive articles, I've not seen anything I couldn't use fine in my browser, but in theory I wouldn't mind covering up the interactive part with a "Open in the app for a better experience" button (similar to what YouTube does on the video portion of the page). Where I encounter this though is in standard, text-heavy articles that maybe include a photo or two.

I assume the reason they are pushing me to the app is that it benefits them not me (longer dwell times, maybe easier tracking for behavior/ads), and that is precisely why I want to stay in the browser. Covering up a good portion of the article and preventing me from scrolling until I click the tiny link to decline is hostile and is the only thing degrading the experience on the website for most articles I read.

[adzm]

Every time I end up trying an app for things like this, I end up missing tabs.

[tcoff91]

There is no reason they can’t have a native tab navigator. It kills me that Google maps app doesn’t have tabs.

[cush]

Yeah true. Tabs, history, etc on the browser are unparalleled.

[Tangurena2]

An HN post from last month discussed some of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945

NYT is one of the worst offenders.