Annoyed by Mobile Sites That “Ask” You to Download Their App? You’re Not Alone

http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/23/i-dont-want-your-app/

by sssilver • 11 years ago

92 31 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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... [1] http://www.guidingtech.com/16169/desktop-mode-websites-chrom...

bphogan2• 11 years ago

The biggest thing is that people don't want to install an app to do a single thing. That''s where the mobile web excels, when done right. Apps are great if you are a repeat user. But if I just want to get some quick information, let me get the information. I'll decide if I want to stick around.

wodenokoto2• 11 years ago

That is exactly why they want you to download the app.

heimatau• 11 years ago

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.

pmontra• 11 years ago

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?

amelius2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

amelius2• 11 years ago

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.

emsy• 11 years ago

I think the major factor is notifications. They basically bother you to download their app so they can bother you with notifications, which is why I think the current trend won't change anytime soon.

radmuzom• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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)

zippergz• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

Relevant: https://xkcd.com/1174/

codingvelocity• 11 years ago

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.

jkot• 11 years ago

Change User Agent header?

exstudent2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

Valuable industry insights!

ikawe• 11 years ago

From a couple years back: http://idontwantyourfuckingapp.tumblr.com

Randgalt• 11 years ago

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.

wodenokoto2• 11 years ago

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

arprocter• 11 years ago

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

ddingus• 11 years ago

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.

tajen• 11 years ago

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.

rebootthesystem• 11 years ago

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

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.

sillypog• 11 years ago

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

collyw• 11 years ago

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

kstenerud• 11 years ago

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.

Annoyed by Mobile Sites That “Ask” You to Download Their App? You’re Not Alone

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