Bolt has a cool web interface and they really don't want you to use it

https://toot.kuba-orlik.name/@kuba/108503475480137792

by kuba-orlik • 4 years ago

305 153 4 years ago

This reminds me of Reddit's approach to mobile. They make their mobile web interface excruciating to use, and block features client side just to push you onto their app.

I'm guessing it has to do with mobile users being more lucrative?

donatzsky• 4 years ago

More lucrative in the sense that they can collect a lot more information on the user :/

guilamu• 4 years ago

And that's it is a bit harder to block ads in-app.

martin_a• 4 years ago

Add the German site "ebay-kleinanzeigen.de" to this list. Some responsive design would be easy, but they'd rather have their users use the app with more ads and all the other sweet revenue juice.

laurencei2• 4 years ago

Its funny though - because their mobile web interface is SOOOO bad, I'm using the "Apollo" app, which means I dont see any Reddit ads, and its a much better experience.

If they didnt have such a crappy web experience, I would probably just use the native web page and see some ads.

So its actually driving people away to alternatives that reduces their revenue. Crazy...

throwaway2048• 4 years ago

I'm about 90% sure that reddit is going to pull a twitter and kill off API access so apps like Apollo no longer function.

stjohnswarts3• 4 years ago

I'm really surprised why the didn't just buy clients from developers like the ones who make Apollo. They are so much better than the one they make

kuba-orlik6• 4 years ago

My suspicion is that it's harder to monitor network traffic in an app than it is on the Web, and they want to push as much trackers as possible

nguyenkien• 4 years ago

You mean easier to track on app than web, right?

golergka2• 4 years ago

Reddit is just content that you browse and occasionally leave a text comment on, it fits browser perfectly.

A taxi app, on the other hand, has a lot of functionality that is very hard to fit into a browser and implement well.

stavros3• 4 years ago

I have a location where I am and a location I want to get to. I need a way to specify the two, and a way to enter payment info. That is literally all a taxi app should do.

edmcnulty101• 4 years ago

Reddit mobile web is so full of dark patterns.

It really put a dent in how much I used to love Reddit.

And the mobile app is terrible terrible turd of epic proportions. The person who designed it is a monster.

unsafecast3• 4 years ago

They do the same thing to old.reddit.com (cookie banners redirect there, etc)

Like, I get that you don't update it anymore, and I don't need (or want) you to, but the new version is insanely slow on my computer, so just let me use whatever I want please.

rekoil• 4 years ago

The "new" redesign is just so bad. Viewing a post only shows comments 1 level deep, and then to see the rest of the thread you have to click "continue this thread" and then you have to go back to get to any other threads, just constant tiresome clicks...

Reading the comments on a post in old reddit is a pleasure, but in the redesign it's a complete mess. Why?

Oh and what the hell is the deal with links to content containing other completely unrelated content as well?

The day they kill old.reddit.com or API access to force me to stop using Apollo (which is an insanely well-built reddit client for iOS) is the day I'll just reluctantly stop using reddit entirely.

cdrini• 4 years ago

You can actually disable the open in app prompt; it's kind of hidden, but if you open the menu > settings > uncheck "Request to open in app". This makes it usable for me.

retube• 4 years ago

try this www.reddit.com/.compact. No ads, a billion times easier to grok

growt• 4 years ago

I don’t install social media apps like Reddit, Facebook or Twitter. And all of them are trying to force me to install their apps. There is even a similar restriction with Facebook messenger, which you can use in mobile Chrome if you use the “request desktop site” feature, but not on the normal mobile site.

Fiahil2• 4 years ago

(I'm not going to share the particular details on which request and which query parameter that is)

Why not ? It's not like that would matter anyway...

kuba-orlik6• 4 years ago

Author here. I just don't want to make patching it easier for Bolt

natch• 4 years ago

About one thing you said, Apple and Google need not be lumped together. They are as different as night and day.

andrew_• 4 years ago

That doesn't add up. Even if they become aware of the thread and were oblivious as to the side effect of omitting the parameter, they're going to be able to enumerate the query parameters they use internally fairly quickly.

Fiahil2• 4 years ago

Well, I don't like to be a party pooper, but there's only two way this can go :

- nobody working at Bolt care that they geofencing is lame. The fault was there since the beginning and the two freelancers maintaining the web version have a long backlog, little visibility and no bargaining power. Plus, they haven't got their contract renewed yet.

- They have no idea your workaround exists. Even if they are bored enough to read Hacker News on a Sunday, their web app is going to be discontinued on the next API upgrade anyway.

Bonus point :

An app is just a nice frontend. I'm pretty sure you could make your own web client and order your own ride with a few API calls even if they patch the fault.

mojuba3• 4 years ago

There's an (unverified) myth that retention on mobile apps is better. This is one of those things that marketing people keep telling each other without ever verifying the facts. (Unless you deliberately make the web version inferior, of course.)

The reasoning behind it is that you should take real estate on the user's home screen at all costs, because your app's icon will serve as a reminder and people will allegedly come back to it and open more often.

But what matters at the end of the day is the product and the value it brings to the users. I'd argue that deceiving the users to provide real estate for your app does not help your business in the long term. If you get more installs today by coercing them (like Reddit does, for example) you will most definitely see some other metric such as retention decline over time.

Broadly, users - us that is - are not idiots. Deception works momentarily and can have an immediate effect on some metrics. Long term though, every user and no matter how smart or dumb, will eventually assess the value it gets them against the money, against their time, or against the "home screen real estate" they provided.

Speaking from my own experience with multiple mobile apps: there are many ways you can trick the users but you can't trick the longer terms statistics.

danpalmer3• 4 years ago

You say unverified, but I’m pretty sure there’s lots of verification for this. Obviously it will depend on the service or app, but it’s a well known trend.

At my previous job our app had much higher retention than our web product, despite the web product being much more mature, modern, and feature rich. We verified this across multiple marketing channels, and looked at long term user retention over years.

mojuba3• 4 years ago

Could it be that the mobile interface was simply better in terms of speed, usability, smoothness of the UX? Complex web apps honestly often look and feel shite in the browser.

jimmytidey• 4 years ago

How do you know that people use the app because they are already highly committed to the service, rather than the other way around? IE, the whole thing is a selection effect?

axiomsEnd• 4 years ago

Sometimes it looks like designers are using this without any kind of thought. A page in my country, that is used for managing appointments with medical specialists forces user to install it, to read some messages (mostly automated) from this facilities. After installation it tries to remind user that it's there by pushing notifications about it's existence, like anyone is going to be like "I'm bored, I'll check all local urologists and maybe make an appointment with one, just for fun"

manigandham6• 4 years ago

Why are you calling it an unverified myth? In reality there are petabytes generated everyday proving the efficacy of mobile apps vs websites. This has been tested and measured in pretty much every possible way at this point with 100s of billions in ad spend.

It's not just real estate on the screen, it's faster on-device processing with lower latency, rich offline abilities, better and more persistent access to more API's from notifications to storage, stronger identity with durable logins, and of course better analytics tracking.

It's not always the correct choice but native apps are the overall winner for mobile UX.

kuba-orlik6• 4 years ago

But in the context of Bolt, I believe they aren't displaying ads in their app?

spion• 4 years ago

Having petabytes of stats doesn't mean the interpretation of those stats is any good. The retention for your web app might suck, for example, because you're constantly showing popups to the users telling them to switch to the mobile app and once they leave you no longer see them in "the data".

The problem with data is that you can't see the things that are real but not in the data.

survivorBias• 4 years ago

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_Bias

More often then not, the front end devs responsible for the app are not very good with "normal" web frontends - so they sabotage the competition, to reduce work. Also, web pages, could be repackaged into Apps by others leeching from the products attention.

JohnFen• 4 years ago

A lot of people I know will simply not use a service if the only way to do so is through an app, due to the dumpster fire that is security and privacy in apps. I understand that such people are a small percentage of the population, but I really do sometimes wonder if companies are even aware that they have a pool of potential customers that they've excluded from even trying their product out.

reducesuffering• 4 years ago

Deception works momentarily and can have an immediate effect on some metrics. Long terms though, every user and no matter how smart or dumb, will eventually assess the value it gets them against the money, against their time, or against the "home screen real estate" they provided.

Long term hardly matters for most these days, they're optimizing for $ and promotions as mercenaries. That metric bump will get the PM promoted where they'll jump ship to the next company and juice the app metrics the same.

mojuba3• 4 years ago

Exactly. Short terms tricks are often also used right before a funding round or acquisition.

addicted• 4 years ago

My Reddit usage has basically plummeted to 0 at this point because of their pushing me towards an app.

I think there are provable cases where an app almost certainly leads to less retention than more and something like Reddit, whose value lies in allowing you to explore the internet is almost certainly one of them.

thejosh• 4 years ago

Best thing reddit did to break my use of them:

1/ New UI, forcing people on to old.reddit.com 2/ Mobile pushes HARD for their app, which is pretty buggy on Android from what I can tell 3/ old.reddit.com now shows "other links" midway down the page! Absolutely useless. 4/ old.reddit.com now forces "show more comments"

This is why people left digg to go to reddit. :-)

All I want is the old reddit interface in the middle, feel free to place ads on the right. I even went reddit gold or whatever it was called for a while. I really miss the old reddit UI, there is so much good tech information on reddit for random things, that it's a shame.

manigandham6• 4 years ago

Reddit optimizes for user attention to sell ads. The mobile app is better at delivering that attention across the user base, even if a few users don't like it. Same thing with Quora and many others.

Lucasoato• 4 years ago

I really can't understand why Reddit is pushing the app so hard. I mean, keep that as an option, but why creating an awful UX for the mobile web users? You gather more data but the product is worse, less users are staying and you're losing value at the end...

bragh• 4 years ago

If reddit ever gets rid of old.reddit.com, that is the day that I stop using it.

andrepd• 4 years ago

I'm still shook that the i.reddit.com interface still works and is virtually unchanged for over 10 years now!

If only more companies followed that principle and just left the bloody interfaces alone unless that had a very good reason.

KronisLV• 4 years ago

My Reddit usage has basically plummeted to 0 at this point because of their pushing me towards an app.

My phone can't even work all that well with apps like that or Chrome browser/WebView for that matter. I use Opera on my phone because they allow me to have 50-100 tabs open with no issues, but maybe that's only passable because I never do anything important like banking on the phone anyways.

So, whenever I'm coerced into installing an app for actually browsing content, reading comments, looking at media (vs something more one-off like ordering food/a ride), I just look the other way. Ergo, I never use Reddit on my phone without spoofing the user agent or whatever the "request desktop site" option in Opera does, but then the UI becomes unusable on a phone.

Sadly, cases like mine don't show up in any metrics, nor do people care about that use case, so it's likely that this will keep being done a lot.

laurencei2• 4 years ago

Check out the "Apollo" reddit app. Its a 3rd party app for Reddit. I've started using it and would never go back to the native Reddit app. No ads, very fast, constant updates etc.

maneesh• 4 years ago

I agree that Reddit pushes too hard to get people to use the mobile app.

I found a good trick was to use AN app, just not their app. Apollo on iOS and Boost on android are really good alternatives to the official Reddit app, which is littered with ads.

northerdome• 4 years ago

The worst part of this is how the Mobile Web experience is actively hampered on iOS by Apple. When web apps on mobile do have a worse experience for me, it is often due to Safari. This is especially frustrating because the average consumer blames the website for the poor experience and doesn't understand Apple is at fault.

solarkraft2• 4 years ago

I personally stop browsing Reddit and Twitter when their fuck-you-banners appear. I have accounts with both, but installing the app or logging in is usually more friction than accessing the content is worth.

... So thanks for keeping my periods of distraction very short! Maybe they just care about their users' mental health and are sacrificing their engagement for it :)

choward• 4 years ago

The default Reddit web site on desktop is excruciating enough to use. On mobile it's unusable. I only use old.reddit.com. If that ever went away I would never visit Reddit again.

romwell• 4 years ago

I personally stop browsing Reddit and Twitter when their fuck-you-banners appears

That's what https://old.reddit.com is for. Simply prepending "old." to the reddit link makes everything work better.

Works on mobile and desktop, just as it always had.

And no fuck-you banners.

rapind• 4 years ago

I don’t think it’s really about retention, but rather the value of the richer data set you can gather on your users.

s1k3s• 4 years ago

There's an (unverified) myth that retention on mobile apps is better. This is one of those things that marketing people keep telling each other without ever verifying the facts. (Unless you deliberately make the web version inferior, of course.)

I own a platform with native apps + web, and I can confirm that retention on mobile apps is better, by the numbers. I'm not comparable to Bolt though, neither in the business model or the number of users.

moneywoes2• 4 years ago

How much of a delta? Does it justify having mobile?

hsuduebc2• 4 years ago

This is ridiculous. Why they assume that I'm picking because I saw them on screen? I'm picking them because of price and service quality. People from marketing voodoo...

derekzhouzhen• 4 years ago

People on HN are not idiots. Users, in a broad sense, are. There are people searching for wordle in the app store for Christ's sake.

skobovm• 4 years ago

This is a weird take, and I highly doubt retention is the primary reason they choose to limit the use of their web interface. In fact, I’m generally suspect of the hand-wavy speculation that some less savvy business unit made a decision in isolation. The two drivers that I would expect are: reducing friction and native compute capabilities.

People generally gravitate towards the path of least resistance, which is something you already see companies exploiting with things like unfavorable privacy settings defaults. Having an app is another instance of that. There is much less mental friction in pushing a button on a home screen compared to opening a browser, punching in a URL, possibly having to log in, etc.

Given that this is rideshare, this is important, because the services offered by other companies are effectively identical. If someone has Uber installed, they would be much more likely to go the path of least resistance — using the installed app — as opposed to going out of their way to use an equivalent offering.

Additionally, there are problems in mapping that would be very difficult, if not impossible, to solve in a browser. For example: localization (precise positioning) would be incredibly difficult without a native library, you wouldn’t be able to do any offline re-routing, like gmaps does, among other limitations.

Nextgrid3• 4 years ago

Deception works momentarily and can have an immediate effect on some metrics. Long term though, every user and no matter how smart or dumb, will eventually assess the value it gets them against the money, against their time, or against the "home screen real estate" they provided.

This doesn't apply to Bolt nor any of their competitors. They all work off VC money subsidizing rides and once the VC money dries up users will flock to the next competitor that's being VC-subsidized. This will happen much quicker than the users wisen up to the abuse.

muh_gradle• 4 years ago

I thought this was about Bolt, the payment and checkout app.

atlasunshrugged5• 4 years ago

I know, it's a bit confusing for non EU users, but Bolt (the ride hailing app, formerly Taxify) is quite popular at least in the Baltics and in a bunch of other random countries (I used it in Kenya a lot and it worked quite well)

gregdoesit2• 4 years ago

I formerly worked at Uber. I’m surprised that Bolt blocks the web app from working. Uber also built a web app which is incredibly lightweight - here’s a summary on how it was built [1]. It’s a life saver especially if e.g. at an airport and you pay for data over roaming. Uber doesn’t exactly advertise m.uber.com, but there’s no blocking of it.

My suspect is that Bold wants you to use their app as they can eg send push notifications, and gather more metadata from users - some of which can be used for eg more signal on determining if a request might be fraudulent.

[1] https://eng.uber.com/m-uber/

captn3m0• 4 years ago

Uber actually had two of these: m.uber and dial.uber.com which was geo-fenced to India and from what I understood (looking at the UX, API calls etc) built by a separate team.

The latter was shut down unceremoniously a few years ago, but that was always my favourite thing to point out how over-engineered Uber often was - to the point of having two separate mobile websites for the exact same purpose.

gregdoesit2• 4 years ago

Wow, I never knew of dial.uber.com!! m.uber.com was built by an engineering team in India, but for global usage.

mattlondon• 4 years ago

Just tried it in London - logged in as usual, all looks good until you try to book, then it tells you booking is not available and to use the app.

pbreit• 4 years ago

Lyft has a nice one, too: https://ride.lyft.com/

notpushkin• 4 years ago

I'm not sure if it isn't blocked now, but I remember m.uber being blocked for Russian users a couple years ago. My phone died and I had to change trains in a couple dozen minutes in the middle of the night, so this wasn't a very pleasant experience :')

Nextgrid3• 4 years ago

I tried this once in London and it wouldn't work.

current_thing2• 4 years ago

we, the users, are compliant with such abuse of monopoly.

But Bolt is not a monopoly. There are many taxi services in Riga.

I invite you to boycott any company that forces (or coerces) you to install an app...

I do not think I will boycott Bolt just because you hacked their product and somehow become outraged. Bolt rides are cheaper than the alternative and .. the app works. The alternative mainstream taxi app needs an ios upgrade, and the ios upgrade fails on my shitty old phone.

Edit: There is no uber in riga looks like. Nice work, but running a company that generates cash at scale is hard. So i am sympathetic to the app developer.

edvards2• 4 years ago

Not really, it is sort of a monopoly. The only competitor app we had was Yandex Taxi, but ever since the war we don't have it here anymore.

atlasunshrugged5• 4 years ago

Did Uber exit the market in the region completely?

kuba-orlik6• 4 years ago

But Bolt is not a monopoly. There are many taxi services in Riga.

My experience is that if you don't speak Latvian, Bolt is basically the only choice to order a ride in Riga. Oh trust me, how I've tried. I never use those ride hailing services unless there's no other option left.

No thanks I will not boycott Bolt because you chose to violate some ToS and hack their product and somehow become outraged.

Well, I'm not inviting people to boycott Bolt because I "hacked their product". I'm inviting to boycott Bolt because they are using dark patterns to take control away from users.

atlasunshrugged5• 4 years ago

At the end you talk about having laws passed. What sort of law do you want passed exactly (and do you mean EU, specific EU countries, US, elsewhere)?

current_thing2• 4 years ago

Agree with this part.

iamsaitam• 4 years ago

Which control are they taking away from you? You choose to use their service and yet you complaint because they don't allow you to use it as you see fit. As far as you know, the web client is not as well developed and maintained. I can't fathom where this sense of entitlement comes from.

Hamcha• 4 years ago

Does this kind of stuff really never backfire? I can see maybe with Bolt or Uber since you're in a hurry you might just cave, but I see this behavior everywhere!

In a world where every app tries to exploit "spur of the moment" brain shortcircuits a big nag seems counterintuitive, e.g. Reddit's "Download the app or go away" is my free reminder that I have better things to do.

ehnto• 4 years ago

So basically I made it easier for me to give Bolt money. You're welcome, Bolt!

This is the key takeaway I think, so many online businesses spend so much time trying to push me into their app, or accounts, or subscriptions, that they forget they're supposed to be taking my money. There are plenty of services I would have loved to use, but ya'll made it so damn hard to give you my money and order your services that I gave up.

pixl976• 4 years ago

There are some people's money that's not worth taking for one reason or another. In the software world it's not uncommon to loose customers because the features they need would cost too much in support and upkeep vs the revenue it brings in.

Nextgrid3• 4 years ago

What you're missing is that a large majority of tech was never about customers' money. It's about "growth & engagement" which can be leveraged to raise astronomical amounts of VC funding, much more than the product itself is ever expected to make (sometimes the product is fundamentally unprofitable and will never make any money).

gtirloni2• 4 years ago

without an annoying app!

I fail to see why an app that delivers the promised feature can be annoying. More annoying than installing extensions, messing with HTTP requests, etc?

AntonyGarand• 4 years ago

Have a look at the images on top of the post, the bolt websites highlight 5 reasons why you might prefer to use the browser.

If Bolt didn't artificially geo-restrict this feature, navigating to their site would be all you need to do, and that's less annoying than using their app. The current method, installing an extension and making a rule for it, is the result of this restriction, but would not be needed without bolt's restrictions.

gtirloni2• 4 years ago

I'd just have installed the app and got on with my life. But I admire the effort.

whywhywhywhy• 4 years ago

We’re only a few more years away from very few services being available outside of the google/apple app ecosystems.

Most apps don’t do anything that couldn’t just be a webpage yet we’re being forced into handing control and service cut to apple and google and opening up more intimate data to service providers.

verisimi2• 4 years ago

I'm glad that geo-fencing was mentioned.

This is what I think all these apps - Kuba, Bolt and all those food delivery companies are. They are changing behaviour at present, they make things easy and advantageous for the user. Then the trap will be sprung.

Similar to how corporate petrol stations and corporate super stores drop their prices to force local shops out of business. Once they have control and a monopolistic position they can do what they like re prices.

Here these companies are working with governance directives to decrease traffic on the roads - it suits the corporates for consumers to have less ability to travel. Making it easy for food, local travel etc whilst making it uncomfortable to have a car (extra regulations, decreasing capacity on roads, greater licensing fees, etc) is part of the plan.

The concern is that once we lose the freedom of independent travel that we have with private cars, that won't be coming back. You will be geo-fenced.

This itself fits very nicely with the dystopian agenda I see on the horizon, where if you are not considered a good citizen, your ability to travel and interact with the system will be curtailed. We see this with the freezing of protestor bank accounts in Canada, China's social credit system, green passes to access shops, etc. Geo fencing will be a part of that.

AtNightWeCode• 4 years ago

Yes. The trend I have seen is that companies reversed the process when it comes to blocking. They block everything and then open for the traffic they want. Any new or minor ISP is blocked by default.

verisimi2• 4 years ago

This is what I think all these apps - Kuba, Bolt and all those food delivery companies are.

I meant Uber, Bolt and all those food delivery companies are!! Not the author's name!

darepublic• 4 years ago

Web too good and too free. So we get crap like Reddit harrassing mobile web users to use their app and purposely sabotaging their own web interface to further that.

Strom2• 4 years ago

As a daily Bolt user I have two main guesses as to why they want everyone using the app.

1) GPS tracking. They want to know where you are at all times. The app makes this tracking easier than a webpage.

2) Upselling. The Bolt app has front and center upselling to their car rental service, their scooter rental service, and their food delivery service. All these services share the same account and payment info too. -- Do these exist in the web version? I don't see them on the screenshots. These upsells can be implemented on the web too of course, but that probably hasn't happened as it requires web apps for those services too.

nicbou• 4 years ago

I can't speak for others, but I refuse to use most mobile apps. Websites run in a much smaller sandbox with an ad blocker. I can trust them to stop running code on my device after I close the tab. It won't try to hijack my attention with push notifications and icon badges.

If a business forces me to use their app, I won't use that business until I'm out of alternatives.

blagie• 4 years ago

If I were to speculate, Bolt steals and monetizes a ton of your data. App gives access to GPS, which can then be sold to hedge funds, advertisers, etc., with some veneer of GDPR-compliance.

Perhaps customers are no longer sustainable without that.

dreamcompiler• 4 years ago

From the thread:

So basically I made it easier for me to give Bolt money. You're welcome, Bolt!

But does Bolt even want my money? Maybe the real reason they push apps so hard is that apps allow more access to that sweet, sweet private data on my phone so they can sell it, which is their real cash cow?

pjmlp• 4 years ago

Yeah, unless we are talking about games or special hardware access, mobile Web has become good enough for this kind of use cases.

Naturally these kind of dark patterns to force apps don't apply.

Bolt has a cool web interface and they really don't want you to use it

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