Post #3019148
2026-02-20 21:18 UTC
@kp@mastodon.design for a less-nefarious reason: because users have been trained to trust apps more than websites on mobile devices.
At a previous company, they had a full-featured iOS app, but the Android app was literally a webview. They did that because customers kept using unofficial Android apps from the play store (which the company didn’t like because they wanted to prevent possible fraud. They just didn’t want that badly enough to write a native Android app)
Replies (1)
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@kp@mastodon.design 2026-02-22 06:58
@younata@hachyderm.io yeah. I sometimes try to explain to non-technical people that apps are a strange default but that’s how we’re trained. When someone has to use Safari to use a website the first question is; where is the app? It doesn’t matter if the app is a web view wrapper. It has to be an app in the App Store or people just won’t use the product. Apple (and Google) will happily accept and enforce this status quo though.