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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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the web is always inferior to a native app

Is it? My phone's web browser is a native app, and although its programming language options ("Javascript" or "something more tolerable that transpiles to Javascript") aren't great, it seems to run pretty well, from my perspective anyway. It works much better than some of the apps I have. Some of the web browser characteristics that "run pretty well" from my perspective might be bugs from some providers' perspective, like how annoying notifications are opt-in instead of opt-out and nothing can demand my contacts list, so I can see why apps are popular to provide, but it's harder for me to see why they'd be greatly preferred by users. Is it just that providers stack the deck? When a web site that works perfectly well on my laptop instead gives me a "you should use the app!" blocker on my phone, I'm pretty sure that's not because phone web browsers aren't universal turing machines anymore, and I wouldn't be surprised if providers who want you to use their app anyway see things like substandard mobile CSS as a less intrusive way to help nudge you to it.

Agreed very much.

"Install the The Motte webapp by saving this page to your home screen!" is definitely my favorite kind of app.

Installing an app is basically inviting that random pale stranger with a Slavic accent into your house -- it allows the service you want to use to grow roots in your device.

For some apps, I judge they have good reason to be an app -- an OTP authenticator running on a website would seem slightly pointless, for example.

But we are in an age where people can build usable videoconferencing websites. Where you can play quake3 in your browser.

The Motte is very much running on text, the kind of content browsers have been able to display well for as long as they have existed. (Unless you are viewing comments on substack. Then you just need a bigger machine to accommodate all their fancy JS frameworks which save you from having to click refresh to view new comments.)

Besides, my feeling is that half of the apps are just glorified wrappers of some website in any case. For example, I would be utterly shocked if the imgur app had any advantages to the website, instead of just wrapping a browser engine without an adblocker and adding notifications.

I'm pretty much with you. Native apps are more powerful than web pages, but developers don't reliably use that power to improve the experience.

Sometimes they simply don't develop the (easy) features that web developers would struggle to make, and other times they make user-hostile features that web developers can't.

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