• 4lan@lemmy.world
    4·
    3 months ago

    There was a website for a while that could emulate PS1 games in a browser on your phone.

    That told me that there is absolutely no reason to have everything be an app. Even games

      • pooberbee (any)@lemmy.ml
        10·
        3 months ago

        Laurel Hill is a historical cemetery with a few historical figures buried there. Actually, I think Adrian Balboa’s fictional grave is there, too. The app has audio tours and information about the architecture and stuff.

          • pooberbee (any)@lemmy.ml
            1·
            3 months ago

            Probably, but making it an app allows users to pre-download the whole thing beforehand so they don’t need to depend on cell data when they’re out in a field.

            • primrosepathspeedrun@lemmy.world
              3·
              3 months ago

              but I… it… it’s a PDF, its stored on my phone. I downloaded it. I actually still have it, if I need to prove I was on the train. its not in the app anymore, but I still have it here.

              you know you can’t make a PURCHASE on an app without network access, right? like, it has to interact with your bank and generate the code (and that’s done on their server, so you can’t make yourself free tickets) and update “this ticket is valid” in the system. the app is literally just a web site with fewer features. all the important math happens on the server. usually, not even a timetable is stored locally, and it still has to be retrieved from the network, it doesn’t even cache, I bet. I could check, but I would have to find my phone.

                • primrosepathspeedrun@lemmy.world
                  1·
                  3 months ago

                  download the whole thing

                  all the functional parts are server calls, app or website. all of them. buying a ticket involves authenticating with both the owner’s server and my bank. that’s a network thing. can’t download my ticket til I do that, site or app. even looking at a timetable (i dont see where in the app I can do that? but point to point trips) on the app doesn’t work when im in airplane mode, but I know for a fact my browser caches, and if I’ve looked recently or left the page open, it will still be there when I come back.

                  there’s no advantage of an app, unless you’re doing fancy graphics shit, which eats battery like a mother fucker and makes low end devices much more unhappy.

        • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
          1·
          3 months ago

          But I don’t want a app to get audio tours.

          I want a app to make their body spin 360 degrees. 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

          • pooberbee (any)@lemmy.ml
            1·
            3 months ago

            How about an app where you can take a picture of a tombstone and it’ll show you a live webcam of the inside of the coffin?

  • _number8_@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19·
    3 months ago

    it’s so depressing if you watch steve jobs introduce the iphone, he boasted how safari offered a rich browsing experience, beautifully rendering the full desktop version with intuitive controls to zoom and swipe around, no janky mobile sites. and look at us now. how we have fallen.

    (honestly i think tim cook wrecked the company, he’s a pure bloodless businessman, thinking only about numbers and value extraction versus innovation and changing the world, which jobs, for all his faults, objectively did)

    • tootnbuns@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      7·
      3 months ago

      I miss the old days where a macbook came with a bunch of creative apps that kids in the 60s-90s dreamed of.

      That innovative creative freedom train is long gone from that company

      • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
        2·
        3 months ago

        Care to name some of those apps? Genuinely curious, mac computers were (still are) prohibitively expensive and I never knew anyone who had one before the iPhone launched

    • Xatolos@reddthat.com
      11·
      3 months ago

      This was a choice by Steve Jobs for how it is now. This was also the time they were trying to push HTML5 as the future as removing dependency on specialty software. If mostly everything was only needing a website, then it didn’t matter what OS you were using. This would help allow iOS and OSX (at the time) be fully compatible against Blackberry and Windows Vista. But then Android got popular and Windows 7 was a major improvement, Linux was growing as well (netbooks, before MS tried to push into that market). Suddenly their push of any device would be on equal footing was not in their favor, so Apple pushed HARD on “There’s an app for that” to start the hard lock in of iOS leading to where things are today.

  • Korrok@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    20·
    3 months ago

    I hate that I need an app to change the colour of my fucking lightbulb, give me a remote instead, damn.

    That being said, I prefer using apps over the browser because they load way faster.

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
      5·
      3 months ago

      There’s a lot of reasons to use a app over a browser.

      Speed is not one of them.

      As a web dev, we can absolutely provide you faster experience. Depending on the service and needs, we can blow any app awaym

      But a app can access hardware tools that browsers cannot.

      • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
        3·
        3 months ago

        Of course a good website can beat a shit app. But there’s no way that you can build a website that’s faster than a good app.

        First of all, because your website has to run on an actual app, called a web browser. Additionally, you can’t magically remove the initial load time to fetch resources from the server. Those resources are already on your phone on the app so it’s instantaneous.

        • unlimitedmonads@lemmy.world
          1·
          3 months ago

          You…realize that when you visit a website more than once the resources are also available on your phone right? Even the most bloated JS monstrosity will have most of its data cached after the first visit and the initial load time will be as good as an installed app after the first visit. You’re not fetching all 200mb of its JavaScript every time you visit the site. Of course, if the site updates its code, you’ll have to re-fetch it, but the same goes for app updates.

          Obviously if your app is designed to work offline, a website probably is going to be worse. But that’s a scenario that actually does warrant a standalone app, which does not go for the majority of apps.

          Most apps just do CRUD and act as a thin client to fetch data from a server (this includes pretty much all social media apps). There is not going to be a real difference in speed between loading the site in a web browser with cached resources or a fully-fledged app you install, except the app can harvest data from you in ways that can be prevented by a good browser. Actually, a site can be faster in many cases since it leverages libraries and capabilities already built into and loaded by a browser while an app might have to load its own standalone resources. And being able to access the app offline in these instances is worthless because if your connection isn’t good enough to serve the website, it’s not good enough to use the app either.

          • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
            1·
            3 months ago

            If it’s a CRUD app and slower than the network, it is a dogshit app. Both the app and the webpage should be exactly as fast, since it should be waiting for the network for most of the time.

            The cache is not magic though. It doesn’t work for the first visit, and it doesn’t last forever. Some clients might not even use a cache. I don’t know if this is the case, but if the cache is validated to be recent (an HTTP HEAD request or whatever) that’s still a round trip to the server.

            • unlimitedmonads@lemmy.world
              1·
              3 months ago

              Well yeah. You have to download the assets on first load to cache them, just like you have to download an app first to use it. And an ideally designed app should perform as well as a website since it has access to all the low level optimization and performance an app entails. The point of the post is that most services don’t actually warrant the benefits you get with an app: namely, easy offline access, higher performance, and native feel/integration with the system. If your whole service is online anyways and every time I open the app it takes a moment to fetch data, it isn’t a considerable improvement over a web experience (with cached assets) and you still can’t use it offline. Like, why do I need an entire app to use your shitty CRUD service (sometimes it’s not even CRUD, just R). If I use it so infrequently that my cache gets invalidated, I could care less about a couple seconds initial load time.

              Obviously if you use something everyday a slick app is a nicer experience than a website. There’s nothing wrong with lemmy clients, even though the web client is gonna work fine on mobile and run fairly fast. The issue is when companies release shitty apps that don’t provide any more value as an app as they would as a plain old website, purely so they can get a persistent spot on a user device and mine more data, and then push a ton of annoying banners and feature blocks to mobile web users to get them to download the app.

      • Korrok@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        4·
        3 months ago

        I don’t know the technical reason but, on my phone, the browser takes a few seconds to load every page, while on an app it’s way faster.

    • evidences@lemmy.world
      3·
      3 months ago

      I have Phillips wiz bulbs in my house and I can do most of the stuff in the app from Google home. The only thing I can do is set scenes but I rarely use those.

      The only real downside is these use some Phillips API so of course to work they call back to their servers so that stop being smart without an Internet connection. Some day I’ll move my light bulbs out of the cloud but that day is not today.

      • Korrok@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        1·
        3 months ago

        I have one from a brand called Enki and not only they made me dowload an app but I had to make an account as well. And every time I want to use that damn app it has logged me out and I need to type my credentials once again.

        I didn’t know about Google Home, I’ll check if I can use that one instead.

  • frezik@midwest.social
    21·
    3 months ago

    As a side point, what the hell is wrong with Snapchat’s UI? It’s a mess of buttons arranged by a monkey on cocaine. How is this shit popular?

    • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      3 months ago

      I spent most of my programming career working for small companies and doing almost everything myself (including collecting requirements, design etc.) but the last few years I spent with an enormous tech company working on apps with teams of professional designers and UI/UX experts (I’ve avoided the scare quotes around these terms, with difficulty). The designers always designed on paper, and violently rejected any suggestion that their designs be put in front of focus groups of actual users and modified according to feedback. “Users have no idea what they want” was an actual, frequent quote from them. As a user who does know what he wants and rarely gets it from modern mobile apps, I found this attitude a bit surprising. Not surprisingly, our apps usually averaged barely above one star (thanks to corporate instructions to employees to vote our apps up), with many comments along the lines of “only voted one star because you can’t vote zero stars”.

      • Schmoo@slrpnk.net
        15·
        3 months ago

        “Users have no idea what they want” was an actual, frequent quote from them.

        It’s because they’re not designing for the users’ wants, they’re designing for the users’ engagement (or whatever flawed metric they use to determine that). The designers mindlessly equate what keeps the user engaged with what the user wants.

  • adavis@lemmy.world
    26·
    3 months ago

    So I bought a new mouse, of course it came with RGB nonsense. Before purchasing I checked it could be disabled.

    Software to control RGB? 300MB. Who knows what the hell else that’ll be doing.

    Plugged it into my Linux laptop, download OpenRGB, 1.7MB application that supports more than just this brand. Turn off the rgb, click save to device.

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
      7·
      3 months ago

      Same energy - whole different thing. I remember in 2005 having to install a special printer software. You can install the drivers, but to understand error messages, you needed “the suite”.

      So furious at the ordeal, I hoped that the future, we don’t have to deal with this.

      Apparently the future hates us and we are STILL dealing with this

  • bitwolf@lemmy.one
    149·
    3 months ago

    I hate that websites will purposely block a perfectly working website feature if it sees you’re on a mobile just to refer you to their mobile app.

  • bitball@lemmy.world
    33·
    3 months ago

    there is an alternate universe out there where every shitty social media website has good rss services and doesn’t degrade you for not using the app

  • HexadecimalSky@lemmy.world
    23·
    3 months ago

    Bro, my city just made an app it has a news button, a quick link to city code compliance and a quick form for reporting illegal fireworks. City is depreciating email newsletter and website for app and facebook. and I hate so many places advertising decent deals behind apps. I am not downloading an app for every fastfood chain and grocery store. Stopped going to del taco, mcd and Wendy’s over shitty apps.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
    49·
    3 months ago

    Unironically this. There’s nothing these stupid apps do that they couldn’t do on a fucking browser from 2018. If you want people to use the stupid app over the site, then please have only the stupid app and ditch the “just pretending it works” site and for fuck’s sake, don’t make the stupid app a javascript mess, because THAT could’ve been a fucking site instead.

  • FrozenHandle@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
    34·
    3 months ago

    I am really confused about this meme template, didn’t its usage used to be satirical (not sure if that’s the right word)? I remember seeing ones like “Nobody ever needed maths”, but recently I am seeing them inverted where the subject matter is actually criticised for being useless. Instead of claiming something useful to be useless. Can someone explain? when did the usage shift?

  • menas@lemmy.wtf
    17·
    3 months ago

    A lot of website use so much ressources, I couldn’t visit its with my 5 years old laptop or my “smart” phone. The only way to access their services is with apps. Fortunately, I could choose FOSS apps on F-Droids

    However, loading textual information shall not consume all my RAM and most of my CPU. There is an issue with today web