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Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App | Our phones are being overrun
(www.theatlantic.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
What's wrong with a web browser? I know it's not as seamless, but it's far less limiting and literally any company can create a site, regardless of their size. There's systems like Google Pay that avoid you having to enter your credit card details on every site.
Even the best websites don't feel as smooth as native UI elements, and somehow browser compatibility is still a very common issue. Signing in with Google and using gpay for checkout is kind of close, but each website has different design elements complicating the experience while giving up the same amount of your personal data as if using an everything app.
Among other things said, you lose access to push notifications / scheduling which a lot of apps are reliant on.
You could have those come in an email instead, but now it's not personalized to the app or notification type, and if you're like me, I actually disable alerts on my gmail because most of the things in there aren't important and it was too disruptive.
Web apps have supported push notifications for a long time now. I think even Safari supports them now.
~~Those aren't the same, they require the browser to be open.~~
~~I don't know if that means it works with a tab in the background though if the browser is open but you aren't on their page, but it'd make sense if it did work that way.~~
Edit: Further looking at this, maybe that's just on Android. They might work on iOS as expected but only if you add the web app to your home screen as an app, and that's only in 2023 when iOS 16.4 was released.
Edit: Okay it looks like it should work on Android too, I saw some older stuff. I'm seeing some complaints about delivery times though not being immediate.
It usually works well on Android. I use it on a few forums.
That's the same with every Android app, though. When you're not actively using your phone, some apps are put to sleep, which also stops their notifications. Very common on Samsung phones especially. You can usually add an app (or installed PWA) to a list of apps that you don't want to sleep.