![]() How many native apps are on your phone - apps that have much greater access to your hardware and that can fingerprint you with a lot more ease - that realistically never needed low-level access to your hardware in the first place, and are only native because that's the only way to provide notifications or work reliably without a server? My experience has always been the opposite, if I ask a developer why they're building a native app instead of a website, there is a really high chance that push notifications are the reason they give me.Īnd there's honestly not a lot of reason for most apps to be native apps at all except that:Ī) data storage is unreliable and can get deleted unrecoverably without user prompts.ī) push notifications are unreliable on Android and don't work on iOS.Įmail, timers, alarms, every social media site, etc. I have a hard time believing that lack of notifications or the barrier entry to building iOS apps has made companies more likely to build websites. I have talked with users about how there are certain services (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) that I refuse to install on my phone, and their response has been, "well, I'm installing the native app because otherwise I won't get a notification when I'm messaged." I have heard push notifications on iOS used as justification for building a native app instead of a webapp so many times. Lack of push notifications is one of the biggest reasons why I still have a number of native apps installed, apps that could be sandboxed webapps otherwise. > and justifiable motivation for needing an "app" in the first place I'm fairly certain you can even scroll down and the Smart App Banner will automatically scroll off the top of the screen, resizing the website to fill the entire screen. If I’m browsing a website I don’t care about and they use this feature, I can ignore it or hide it. It is a very light “call to action”, of course. Even calling it a “prompt” is a stretch since it does not require any action to dismiss. I’m immensely bothered by all sorts of ads and anti-features, but just knowing if there is an app is a legitimately useful thing, so this does not bother me. I see at least one safari extension which claims to do this, but since this passive banner is extremely unobtrusive, why bother? I’m personally surprised that Apple doesn’t offer a setting for Safari to disable Smart App Banners, which would be a simple way to stop annoying the few users who are bothered by them. Smart App Banners are not shouting “INSTALL THE APP!” The way you have been talking about these things makes me believe you think those prompts were what is under discussion. They can do that no matter what you think and no matter what Apple implements. That type of prompt is not relevant to this discussion, at all. ![]() What really sucks is when websites like New Reddit provide their own custom modal prompts that cover the webpage and push you to the app, and they’re extremely hard to dismiss and oftentimes these half-baked implementations are broken even if you accept their suggestion to open the app. It isn’t jumping up and down, it isn’t playing loud sound files at the user screaming at them to click it. It is just a passive bar at the top of a webpage that informs the user of the option, which they can dismiss. The entire user-visible experience is completely controlled by Apple. There is no shouting in these Smart App Banners. To be clear, this is all we’re talking about. But please no PWA "click to install" prompts. If that's the cost of keeping PWAs from being able to prompt, cool, go for it. Removing native apps' ability to do so is fine too, IMO, but would also require removing the ability to link to the app store at all to not open up other potential issues. What I'm opposed to is letting PWAs prompt for installation. That would definitely make the mobile web even worse than it already is. I do not want PWAs to be able to trigger prompts or provide links that initiate PWA installation, even if native apps continue to be able to do so, "fairness" be damned (fairness, in this case, harms my UX because this functionality is guaranteed to be spammy-the "install the native app" prompts are already spammy enough, I don't need more of that). If both require "share -> install app" or "share -> install web app" (depending on what the site offers) that would be probably my single most-favored solution. Second-best would be if neither can (and that's not that much worse-I'd be OK with this). My persona UX is best if they cannot, but if "real" apps can. I might use them, but I do not want them to be able to prompt installation actions in the browser. My ideal world is not terribly friendly to PWAs. But, I like being able to open app store links from the browser. ![]() I don't want INSTALL THE PWA spam-prompts everywhere.
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