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Why are there so many apps that could be websites?
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this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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the free ad space on your home screen. Sure it's a small ad, but you see it all the time.
notifications. Even if only a small fraction of users allow them, it's a lot of free advertising. And yes, you can put notifications on websites, but that's not as reliable or as expected as native app notifications.
permissions. The more legitimate apps may provide some sort of additional functionality that their website can't provide on its own. The shadier ones sell the data they get from the sensors all over your phone.
data storage. Technically web storage is a thing, but it's definitely not something you want to hang your whole business on right now.
integrations. You can integrate, for example, Google Pay/Apple Pay on a website, but it's more of a hassle. In an app, it's practically drop-in. Same with the share functionality.
why not? If you already have a mobile site and can make an app from it reasonably easy, there's no reason not to. You've become multi-channel with no extra work.
There are probably other reasons, but those are the ones that make sense to me, being in the industry.
Excellent points. I'd just add one more: user friendliness. The average user prefers to click on an icon on their screen, rather than open a Web browser and either type in the URL or access bookmarks, which tends to be rather clunky on a phone.
Great observation. Yes, absolutely.
Also capabilities. Some things are a hassle that doesn't always work as expected (e.g. camera) and some things are just not possible at all (NFC). Even your airline app that simply shows a barcode that you scan at the gate will want to increase display brightness while it's doing so and be able to show you a notification when you have delay or gate change...
Indeed. I called this "permissions," but "capabilities" is a much better word for it