James Nash (@cirrus.mstdn.social.ap.brid.gy)

The web on mobile Here’s a post outlining all the great things you can do in mobile web browsers today: Your App Should Have Been A Website (And Probably Your Game Too): > Today’s browsers are powerhouses. Notifications? Check. Offline mode? Check. Secure payments? Yep, they’ve got that too. And with technologies like WebAssembly and WebGPU, web games are catching up to native-level performance. In some cases, they’re already there. This is all true. But this post from John Gruber is equally true: One Bit of Anecdata That the Web Is Languishing Vis-à-Vis Native Mobile Apps: > I won’t hold up this one experience as a sign that the web is dying, but it sure seems to be languishing, especially for mobile devices. As John points out, the problems aren’t technical: > There’s absolutely no reason the mobile web experience shouldn’t be fast, reliable, well-designed, and keep you logged in. If one of the two should suck, it should be the app that sucks and the website that works well. You shouldn’t be expected to carry around a bundle of software from your utility company in your pocket. But it’s the other way around. He’s right. It makes no sense, but this is the reality. Ten or fifteen years ago, the gap between the web and native apps on mobile was entirely technical. There were certain things that you just couldn’t do in web browsers. That’s no longer the case now. The web caught up quite a while back. But the experience of using websites on a mobile device is awful. Never mind the terrible performance penalties incurred by unnecessary frameworks and libraries like React and its ilk, there’s the constant game of whack-a-mole with banners and overlays. What’s just about bearable in a large desktop viewport becomes intolerable on a small screen. This is not a technical problem. This doesn’t get solved by web standards. This is a cultural problem. First of all, there’s the business culture. If your business model depends on tracking people or pushing newsletter sign-ups, then it’s inevitable that your website will be shite on mobile. Mind you, if your business model depends on tracking people, you’re more likely to try push people to download your native app. Like Cory Doctorow says: > 50% of web users are running ad-blockers. 0% of app users are running ad-blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that’s a felony (Jay Freeman calls this ‘felony contempt of business-model’). Matt May brings up the same point in his guide, How to grey-rock Meta: > **Remove Meta apps from your devices** and use only the mobile web versions. Mobile apps have greater access to your personal data, provided the app requests those privileges, and Facebook and Instagram in particular (more so than WhatsApp, another Meta property) request the vast majority of those privileges. This includes precise GPS data on where you are, _whether or not you are using the app_. Ironically, it’s the strength of the web—and web browsers—that has led to such shitty mobile web experiences. The pretty decent security model on the web means that sites have to pester you. Part of the reason why you don’t see the same egregious over-use of pop-ups and overlays in native apps is that they aren’t needed. If you’ve installed the app, you’re already being tracked. But when I describe the dreadful UX of most websites on mobile as a cultural problem, I don’t just mean business culture. Us, the people who make websites, designers and developers, we’re responsible for this too. For all our talk of mobile-first design for the last fifteen years, we never really meant it, did we? Sure, we use media queries and other responsive techniques, but all we’ve really done is make sure that a terrible experience fits on the screen. As developers, I’m sure we can tell ourselves all sorts of fairy tales about why it’s perfectly justified to make users on mobile networks download React, Tailwind, and megabytes more of third-party code. As designers, I’m sure we can tell ourselves all sorts of fairy tales about why intrusive pop-ups and overlays are the responsibility of some other department (as though users make any sort of distinction). Worst of all, we’ve spent the last fifteen years teaching users that if they want a good experience on their mobile device, they should look in an app store, not on the web. Ask anyone about their experience of using websites on their mobile device. They’ll tell you plenty of stories of how badly it sucks. It doesn’t matter that the web is the perfect medium for just-in-time delivery of information. It doesn’t matter that web browsers can now do just about everything that native apps can do. In many ways, I wish this were a technical problem. At least then we could lobby for some technical advancement that would fix this situation. But this is not a technical problem. This is a people problem. Specifically, the people who make websites. We fucked up. Badly. And I don’t see any signs that things are going to change anytime soon. But hey, websites on desktop are just great! https://adactio.com/journal/21728