[bloppe]

At this point, most of those "native" apps are actually just web apps packaged in Electron. The fact that you generally can't tell the difference is proof that there aren't any real reasons to prefer a native app. All the reasons have to do with either OS vendors trying to hobble PWAs, or web developers creating React monsters for no good reason. Web apps can actually be very performant.

[gymhasanapp]

The real reason is really simple tho, and we could identify it ahead of time even before apps existed:

The average users sucks at managing bookmarks.

Telling a user that a feature is a webpage instead of an app means that they, in their glorious tech illiterate brain, think they have to memorize the url. They don't want to do that. They want to "have it" so they don't forget it. And having it is easier in the app mental model to them than in the bookmark one.

I know sufficient 40+ year olds who have the most absolute disgraceful phone desktops, filled with garbage. And yet, this is what they want. They want their bookmarkrs in the one place they'll check. And they want no folders.

[oblio]

This is trivially solvable with a good mobile OS level feature to create phone desktop icons from websites.

Of course, Apple and Google will never do such a thing when their cut of app sales is ~$100bn globally.

[Calazon]

I just tried and it looks like I can do this in Chrome on Android relatively easily. The UI could be a lot nicer for it though.

And I did run into an issue where if the site allows me to install it as a PWA, Chrome will want to do that and won't want to bookmark a specific page on that site instead.

Also, maybe your point was that this could be done at the OS level rather than the browser, which is fair.

[BlackFingolfin]

Not sure what you are talking about (is this sarcasm?), but on iOS, Safari allows you to add any website as an item to your home screen. I am pretty sure Android has a similar feature.

[oblio]

Is that front and center in the UI? How many users know about this feature? Do they promote it as much as they promote other features they want to promote?

Location and marketing matter. Otherwise we're in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the aliens put Earth's demolition notice on the bottom of a cupboard in a cellar on a planet light years away from Earth.

[philipallstar]

In what UI? I've definitely done it by accident as well as on purpose before.

Most people like apps because they're often better to use, unless you have accessibility requirements (and even then an app that makes sure accessibility is good might still be better than a website that makes sure accessibility is good).

[pjmlp]

Agreed, except that on Android, you can easily bookmark any site as icon, when using Android Chrome.

Don't forget that Google also has ChromeOS, it is Apple that isn't that keen on the Web.

On the other hand, thanks to devs and Electron garbage, the Web is actually ChromeOS nowadays.

[bloppe]

You could tell the average user that installing a native app would require memorizing a URL too. You would be lying, but you would be lying just as much as if you told them that they'd have to memorize a URL to use a PWA.

[tcfhgj]

Everyone can tell the difference immediately due to the lack of performance

[bloppe]

You'd be surprised. Obsidian, slack, Spotify, figma etc don't usually get panned for lack of performance, and those aren't even very light weight. As wasm apps mature, it will only get harder to justify maintaining 5 different native apps instead of a single cross platform one

[palata]

Slack and Spotify really suck. I can't judge Obsidian and Figma, I don't use them.

The one example I know where they seem to have done a good job (at least in the beginning) is VScode, and even there it's not great. It's just not terrible. Put the same effort into a native app and it will be great.

[avadodin]

Not being unusably horrible in terms of performance and being required to do something I need to do doesn't mean I enjoy or even tolerate your JavaScript app, bro.

I'd switch over to the 16-bit VB4 form version as soon as available.