
Annoyed by Mobile Sites That “Ask” You to Download Their App? You’re Not Alone - sssilver
http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/23/i-dont-want-your-app/
======
zippergz
Tapatalk is the most annoying one to me, probably because it actually pops up
a modal dialog. One of our local news websites is really bad too, asking every
single time if I want to install their (crappy) app. Worse, if even if you do
have their app, it offers no way to go to a specific article I clicked a link
from. 99% of the time that I'm on their site, it's because I've clicked a link
from a tweet or something. I want to go to that specific article. And the app
is totally broken for that use case -- I have to go to the home page and then
try to find where the article is.

I actually greatly prefer apps over websites in general, and if it's something
I use a lot, I'll install the app (assuming it's decent). But I don't want the
app shoved in my face when I go to the website. If I'm at the website, there's
a reason. Advertising it non-obtrusively is ok, especially if it remembers
after I've dismissed it once.

~~~
dceddia
Relevant: [https://xkcd.com/1174/](https://xkcd.com/1174/)

------
JohnTHaller
I've bailed on multiple sites that do the interstitial "Get Our App" page as
well as multiple sites that show a sticky banner ad that takes up 1/4 of the
viewport and have an X button that doesn't work.

Seriously, none of us want your poorly made app that needs 100 different
permissions to install and sucks up our battery. Pinning the bookmark to our
homescreen generally works better (seriously, try it with Facebook and enjoy
your 10% longer battery).

~~~
soylentcola
Yep. As much as people lament the sorry state of some mobile web browsing, I
find that with modern smartphones with up to date specs and a nice big screen,
I'd almost always prefer to use the bookmarked website over a dedicated mobile
app for each site.

Aside from the fact that many are just wrappers for their mobile site (and
often do a worse job at rendering the site than the mobile Chrome or Firefox I
already have installed), you get stuff like the aforementioned Facebook app
which love to run more background processes and pester you to install
additional apps for messaging or other features that work perfectly well in
the browser.

When I got my most recent phone I didn't install the Facebook app and instead
just use either the bookmarked mobile site or one of several third party apps
that "sandbox" your website login so Facebook can't pull other info from your
device. My battery lasts longer and I can continue to open Facebook when I
want to look at Facebook and ignore it when I'm doing other things.

Additionally, I would need to grant superuser permissions to run a system-wide
adblocker but in a browser, I can just install Adblock Plus/Edge/etc. and
avoid the ads on mobile where they suck up limited data and generally get in
the way on the smaller screen.

~~~
click170
There are other reasons why you shouldn't install apps from Facebook and
LinkedIn[0], but one thing I do wish is that there was an easier way to tell
Chrome to default to requesting Desktop sites[1]. The state of most mobile
websites is just abysmal and I find myself tapping the Request Desktop Site
option multiple times a day.

[0] [http://lifehacker.com/5921095/facebook-just-changed-your-
ema...](http://lifehacker.com/5921095/facebook-just-changed-your-email-
without-permission-heres-how-to-get-it-back) [1]
[http://www.guidingtech.com/16169/desktop-mode-websites-
chrom...](http://www.guidingtech.com/16169/desktop-mode-websites-chrome-
android-permanently/)

------
exstudent2
It's funny because, yes the app modal is super annoying but equally annoying
is Techcrunch asking me for permission for push notifications. Another modal
that steals focus as soon as you load the page.

Why in the hell would I want push notifications from Techcrunch?

~~~
CmonDev
Valuable industry insights!

------
heimatau
Shoving chocolate down my throat is terribly rude. No matter how much goodness
chocolate is, the shoving causes me to bail 10 out of 10 times.

I wish sites and apps were made better and the MobileOS could better switch
between the two but regardless of that peeve of mine analytics should do a
better job at remembering our choices. There are a few websites (like yahoo)
where I don't like the mobile app, the UI is totally foreign. Overtime, yahoo
continues to prompt me about their app, well...bye yahoo. You are not the only
one.

------
rebootthesystem
It's worst than that. The state of the usability of mobile sites on mobile
devices is horrible. I've run across so many sites who's "m" versions are
utterly unusable on an iPad. To the point that I wish Chrome (mobile) had an "
always ask for desktop site" setting.

The other problem how layout is sometimes handled. For example:

[https://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/PageObjects](https://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/PageObjects)

If you read this in portrait on an iPad with Chrome you get this tiny font
that is hard to read at 11:00PM when you are tired. Switching to landscape
doesn't help. I don't think there's a way to get a larger font. Zooming does
not help because you now have to pan right and left to read every line.

I get the feeling that the state of mobile isn't all that great in general.

------
amelius
Why aren't apps just "advanced webapps"? The technology is certainly here so I
don't understand why it is not happening (* ). With a few changes in the APIs
here and there, webapps could integrate perfectly into the OS, and still be
sandboxed like web-pages.

(*) Well, I do understand, it has something to do with locking people into an
ecosystem.

~~~
melling
People have tried really hard to use web apps instead of native. I think if it
worked well, it would have happened. People aren't writing many web apps for
Android, iOS, or Microsoft.

Rather than ranting conspiracy theories perhaps we could identify the path to
better web apps for mobile.

~~~
amelius
I was not so much hinting at a conspiracy theory, but rather that the
motivation of vendors seems to not align with the idea of web-apps.

~~~
potatolicious
Disclaimer: I'm a mobile dev, almost exclusively native apps.

I think the motivation of _users_ doesn't align with the idea of web-apps, or
at least not their current incarnation.

There are a few variables here:

\- Frequency of use: you won't install an app for something you use once a
week, you will install an app for something you use every day.

\- Performance of webapps: hint, extremely poor, though largely as a result of
bad decisions rather than bad tech.

\- Pain-in-ass-ness of installing native apps: extremely high, but we know
this already.

The problem here is that modern websites perform extremely poorly because of a
bloated reliance on JS and a completely un-contained explosion of HTTP
requests to load something simple. Multiple people have complained about
it[1], and the complainers themselves are part of the problem[2]. Even with a
warm cache modern webapps still require a ridiculous number of requests before
rendering/becoming interactive.

The problem is exacerbated in the mobile context where the OS is throttling
the number of simultaneous requests, this is why apps that are little slow on
desktop become unbearable on mobile. Users, once they have the app installed,
largely prefer native _because_ native apps are so much faster in general.

This isn't a limitation in the tech - well optimized pages not filled to the
brim with extraneous JS imports and bullshit tracking pixels render quite
fast, and there's no reason they can't work well on mobile (as an app or
regular page), but we seem incapable of doing this.

Native apps are still preferred by users (barring the PITA install process)
over web-apps not because of some inherent technological advantage, but
because native apps generally do not do the bullshit things that make the web
nearly unusably slow.

[1] [http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/20/9002721/the-mobile-web-
suc...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/20/9002721/the-mobile-web-sucks)

[2] [http://blog.lmorchard.com/2015/07/22/the-verge-web-
sucks/](http://blog.lmorchard.com/2015/07/22/the-verge-web-sucks/)

------
pmontra
I never download the app. I get to the site either following a link (example:
from HN) or from Google. The site is a commodity I might never come back again
to. I only need that article. Which sites hosts it is not important. Why
should I lose time installing an app (with who knows which permissions) I
might never use again? And if I come back to the site for another article the
browser is good enough. What's the rationale for those kind of apps?

------
arprocter
Does this mean Google News is going to stop doing it?

It's much easier for me to have multiple tabs open in a browser than having a
separate app for every site I look at

------
radmuzom
Glad that I use a Windows phone - I get less of these annoying messages as
most people do not bother to make a Windows app anyway (at least at first).
And just to be clear, I will not install an app even if available. I like
minimal clutter in my phone and uninstall almost everything except maps, the
browser and those related to basic smartphone functionality (e.g. camera).

~~~
toast0
I use a Windows phone too, and see plenty of these, usually targeted for other
platforms (not that I can blame them given the current user agent of
"Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; Windows Phone 8.1; Android 4.0; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch;
rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; BLU; WIN HD W510u) like iPhone OS 7_0_3 Mac OS X
AppleWebKit/537 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537" I think that is going
to catch any targeting regex)

------
tajen
I get it that 69% people leave the website, but what about revenue? Corporate
sharks can still claim that we didn't care about most of those 69% who weren't
going to be customers anyway. The remaining 9% who installed the app may be
the target, make revenue, are easier to track, are exposed several times a day
to invasive push notifications, provide they contact details and dozen photos
_, and maybe even end up purchasing a subscription to said newspaper.

I'd be a big fan of the HTTP Header "X-I-Dont-Want-Your-Goddamn-Iphone-App:
true", I'm just trying to understand better the economics of annoying
customers with an app.

_ Now that I think about it, Facebook should claim copyrigts on all photos you
give it access to on your phone.

------
codingvelocity
I'd install every app if they didn't all seem to need access to my identity,
wifi state, phone state, etc to display some simple information on a screen.

If I have visited your website from a browser there's a good chance that's how
i want to interact with you.

------
Randgalt
Worst offender: Facebook. I still refuse to download their messenger (I
already have too many message apps). If I have to do messaging on Facebook I
do it in my mobile browser.

~~~
wodenokoto
I'd really recommend you to download it. The split was brutal, but it was
actually for the better.

------
ikawe
From a couple years back:
[http://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com](http://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com)

------
sillypog
I developed one of the fullscreen ads called out in the article - imagine how
annoyed I am by seeing it 100 times a day!

------
ddingus
I don't do it. Ever.

Truth is, I've got a browser for most use cases and that works really well. An
app can shave some off the data use, but then again, it can be data hungry
too.

I like to use Chrome and it's data compression service and find that works
just fine for the sites I like to use.

------
collyw
Great when you have an Ubuntu phone, which their app almost certainly won't
install on.

------
kstenerud
The other annoying one is the "subscribe" popup that blocks whatever you're
about to read. Why would I subscribe to your service? I haven't even seen what
you have to offer yet! All I've gotten is this giant flier thrown in my face,
and that makes for a pretty bad first impression.

------
jkot
Change User Agent header?

