Twitter and (old)reddit are better as mobile websites in every way.
We have 30 years of browser UX development, culminating in tabs and multitasking tools that allow you to open things to read later, wait while they load on a slow connection or form a queue of things to read.
Mobile apps for every social media site loose all of that. They are worse than useless. There is this internal fear at social media companies, they want to prevent their users leaving their little walled garden. That or the religious drive for managers to reach target metrics creates a net negative feedback loop for user satisfaction.
Social media apps have no multitasking features (at least last time I used them). It's absurd.
I've only used the twitter mobile website for the last three years. Will never install the app again.
(Aside: my (ridiculous) conspiracy theory is that React Native is an attempt to distract developers from the advantages of a WebView based app development process that would eventually lead to the success of PWAs, locking devs into the app stores as a distribution channel)
It's incredibly interesting that consumer operating systems have done nothing to try to catch the web browsing experience. They've let themselves go no where. Tabs, multi-document interfaces, managing many files at once, is just not something the OS is good at.
I remember the couple months or years where each Chrome tab was it's own app instance. I thought it was incredibly ambitious & interesting to make the OS try to deal with tabs, be a manager. And indeed Google backed it out. And so as usual, Android is in the background of daily life, hardly ever touched or used, and I just stay in Chrome almost all day letting it define every bit of my computing existence.
The web experience just has so many more hooks & so much more power, than these little self-defined bespoke inward experiences. Because so much part because browser gives us such basic & flexibility utility as we compute & surf.
Thanks for the good post, enjoyed reading very much, & two thumbs up!
Why torture yourself with any reddit website though? Popular websites like reddit have multiple open source native apps. Just slap F-Droid on your Android and download Redreader, Slide or any of the 10+ clients you find.
If you don't care about being logged in libreddit is even better, especially for especially for image-heavy subs. https://farside.link/libreddit should get you a currently working instance.
i.reddit.com is amazing but broken in small ways. you can't sort comments or browse multis. Also, trying to pull comments beyond a page breaks in some places.
We have 30 years of browser UX development, culminating in tabs and multitasking tools that allow you to open things to read later, wait while they load on a slow connection or form a queue of things to read.
Mobile apps for every social media site loose all of that. They are worse than useless. There is this internal fear at social media companies, they want to prevent their users leaving their little walled garden. That or the religious drive for managers to reach target metrics creates a net negative feedback loop for user satisfaction.
Social media apps have no multitasking features (at least last time I used them). It's absurd.
I've only used the twitter mobile website for the last three years. Will never install the app again.
(Aside: my (ridiculous) conspiracy theory is that React Native is an attempt to distract developers from the advantages of a WebView based app development process that would eventually lead to the success of PWAs, locking devs into the app stores as a distribution channel)