I converted an Android app to a webpage
33 points by abhin4v
33 points by abhin4v
Great work, I'm glad I'm not alone in being sick of this app bloat nonsense, for what's otherwise a webpage.
Creating a shortcut on Android devices is very obfuscated to users, so I'm generally not terribly surprised companies prefer apps. But this is a case where you're distributing a password presumably via text alongside a link to an app. This would be an ideal web app! Link to the password page directly and call it done.
/e/OS has a "web apps" section on their app store for Google Maps web, etc. PWAs are fairly easy to use, but I'm not sure what the default Chrome Android, or even vendor Android, does in terms of prompting to create a shortcut and making it discoverable.
Clearly the users aren't being served here though, and I'm not sure what we need to do to help them.
To complete the comedy: What even is the difference between an app and a webpage to the average user (read: computer illiteral person)? It's the shortcut on the desktop/homescreen.
If only you could ship a desktop shortcut to your webpage, that would be a very inexpensive way to develop an app, and what probably most apps could have been.
If you have a webpage open in Safari on iOS, you can click the share button, "View More" and then "Add to Home Screen". It adds an icon to the home screen. Tapping the icon does not open another browser tab but rather spawns a standalone window, like a regular app.
This is how I distribute my "home-cooked" family expenses tool without publishing to App Store.
I find it amusing that, originally, Steve Jobs claimed that web apps were so good that you wouldn't need native apps and would just write web apps for the iPhone and now Apple's approval process is so painful that people prefer to write web apps for the iPhone.
I thought of that story, too, but I'm wondering to what extent it was his genuine belief, versus needing to say something because they didn't yet have a software distribution method he liked.
Reading this 9to5mac post from 2011, it seems at least part of the issue was he didn't think they had the moderation bandwidth (which of course presupposes that they had to have a centralised, monopolistic app distribution platform to begin with).
Tangentially, there's also this bit at the end:
Jobs enthused how there was nothing like the App Store before the iPhone came along. After Mossberg objected that pre-iPhone devices were able to run third-party apps, Jobs responded by saying that the carriers controlled everything, including the design of cell phones, noting there was no easy way for a guy in his bedroom to create programs for cell phones and distribute them with ease. “It’s huge now,” he quipped.
I had a number of Symbian phones in the 2000s, and there definitely were apps clearly made by just regular people. Yes, they way you found out about them was from "best applications for your Nokia smartphone" type websites (of varying levels of jank), or enthusiast forums, so discovery was hard if you didn't know about those. But once you had a link to a .sis or whatever, you just downloaded and installed the thing.
I guess those phones were never popular in the US, where carriers did control everything.
I guess those phones were never popular in the US, where carriers did control everything.
This was also the reason I didn't think the iPhone would be successful. The US carrier environment made it really hard for any phone to show of its benefits and a phone designed for that environment would appear very bad in the rest of the world. I didn't take into account how much Jobs would be able to persuade AT&T. Even then, the iPhone was pretty bad. It didn't support 3G (my old Nokia did), it didn't sync with the Mac without a cloud thing (my old Nokia did), it couldn't make SIP calls over WiFi (my old Nokia did), it couldn't run third-party apps out of the box (my old Nokia did). It wasn't until Apple shipped the iPhone 3G and removed iSync from OS X that they reached parity.
I wouldn't mind the approval process itself that much* but I do mind having to buy a macOS machine and paying Apple ~€100/year just to publish something in App Store.
* Although I do think that sideloading should be available.