What difference does it make to them? Why are apps pushed so aggressively when they have to maintain the desktop site anyway?
In: 7691
I’m a software engineer working on both a website and an app for a startup. (I won’t say which because this is not an advertisement.) My company’s practices may or may not be typical, so anything I say here doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone.
Foremost: The reasons my company push for users to be on the app have nothing to do with tracking. We don’t track user data other than stuff like, which features are people using and what kinds of errors are people getting. We track these things exactly the same on web as we do on the app. We don’t show advertisements on either the website or the app.
A quick primer on how we write code: We use libraries, which are volumes of code written by others that handle common things like taking in user inputs and displaying things on the screen. My company uses libraries called react for our website and react-native for our app, among many others.
A big reason we prefer users get our app is that the amount of control we have on react-native is way better when dealing with touches. React is designed primarily with mouse-and-keyboard interaction in mind, meaning our mobile-web interface works nicely when users tap things (it’s exactly like a click), but has trouble when dragging or swiping, since doing these things would normally scroll you down the page. (Click-hold-dragging on a mouse is, in contrast, really easy to detect because there’s nothing else a user could be attempting when clicking and holding.) React-native automatically figures out whether a drag should be a scroll or a grab-and-drop, which saves us a lot of effort.
Because of the above, we actually design our app differently from our mobile website: You can only interact with the mobile website through taps, but you can do all sorts of gestures on the app. This actually means we show fewer buttons on the app and more movable elements. Fewer buttons means the screen looks less cluttered.
Just generally, the browser model of everything being a page is kind of annoying to deal with on mobile. For example, it’s very common on mobile to travel between a lot of different screens, so naturally you’d want your back button to go to the previous screen. In a browser, this is kinda awkward because the browser probably deloaded the previous page when going to the current page (this saves memory), and now we have to load that previous page again. But react-native has an add-on that automatically and efficiently remembers where you were on the previous screen whenever you open a new screen on top of it, and takes you there when you hit the back button.
Note that all the data required to use the app is saved on your device, meaning we don’t need to transfer nearly as much data to your phone when loading, meaning our app loads much faster than our site. For desktops, that time spent is usually unnoticeable, because desktops typically have good internet connections. But mobile devices are often on data with spotty connection and minimizing data transferred is really important. Also, websites don’t work at all when fully offline, which is fairly important to our users – they’re often using the app when offline, just by nature of what our app is for.
We actually previously did use the website for everything. But we started building our app because it actually can provide users with a better experience.
TLDR: The way websites on mobile work is often slightly different from the most comfortable way to use a phone. Apps are better at optimizing for the latter.
Latest Answers