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Everyone knows all the apps on your phone

(peabee.substack.com)
1192 points gniting | 4 comments | 29 Mar 25 21:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.689s | source
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turblety ◴[30 Mar 25 05:53 UTC] No.43521702[source]▶
I still, will never understand the need for native "Apps". To this day, I have never seen an "App" that couldn't simply have been a website/webapp. Most of them would likely be improved by being a webapp.

The only benefits I can see of "Apps", are the developer get's access to private information they really don't need.

Yeah, they get to be on the "App Store". But the "App Store" is a totally unnecessary concept introduced by Apple/Google so they could scrape a huge percentage in sales.

Web browsers have good (not perfect) sandboxing, costs no fees to "submit" and are accessible to everyone on every phone.

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xxprogamerxy ◴[30 Mar 25 07:35 UTC] No.43522181[source]▶
Simple, UX.

The reality is, most webapps for mobile just suck. The UX is nowhere near that of a native application. I don't want any text to be selectable. I don't want pull to refresh on every page. I don't want the left-swipe to take me to the previous page.

You can probably find workarounds for all these issues. The new Silk library (https://silkhq.co/) is the first case I've seen that get's very close to a native experience. But even the fact that this is a paid library comes to show how non-trivial this is.

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nodar86 ◴[30 Mar 25 13:22 UTC] No.43523982[source]▶
> I don't want any text to be selectable

Disabling text selection is not just worse UX, it is actively user-hostile

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crazygringo ◴[30 Mar 25 14:24 UTC] No.43524455[source]▶
I have literally never needed to select text in a UX element.

In the past, occasionally there would be an error message in a message box dialog that I wanted to copy and paste. And then I discovered that despite it not looking selectable, it actually was.

I don't want to accidentally select the text of my menu bar, or of a text box label, or a dialog tab title.

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sitkack ◴[30 Mar 25 17:42 UTC] No.43525979[source]▶
I, I, I. Empathy is a weakness.

Lots of limitations for you to not accidentally do something, maybe there is a way to not accidentally do those things and also help people that need them.

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1. crazygringo ◴[30 Mar 25 19:15 UTC] No.43526709[source]▶
No, not providing concrete examples is a weakness.

You're awfully arrogant in making a judgement about my empathy... if you want to make this personal.

Or maybe you can justify why people need to be able to select menu labels in the first place? That's not standard on any OS I've ever used, so it's up to the person who wants to change things to justify why.

Maybe be less judgmental of people here on HN, and contribute something factual instead? I at least gave a factual account of my personal experience, which is a data point. Describing one's experience isn't egoism.

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2. nazgul17 ◴[30 Mar 25 21:29 UTC] No.43527842[source]▶
A simple and concrete example is, go to Japan, find yourself in need of using any Japanese-only app, be extremely frustrated in not even being able to select text to translate it.

At least in recent versions of Android there is that OCR (?) powered functionality to select text when you're in switch-app view.

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3. crazygringo ◴[31 Mar 25 13:39 UTC] No.43534930[source]▶
Thank you for the example!

I would suggest that these days you'd be much better off taking a screenshot and putting that into Google Translate.

That way all the text remains in-place, and you can keep it as a visual reference to refer to.

If you were selecting text, it would wind up in a kind of jumble that would be much harder to use.

4. umbra07 ◴[31 Mar 25 23:32 UTC] No.43541183[source]▶
Circle to Search can translate everything on your screen without you needing to go through the whole "copy text, open Translate, paste, switch back to app" workflow. You just hold the home button, then press the translate button.