I'm not the person you're replying to, but here goes:

It's not 2011 anymore, back when the mobile web was trash because companies maintained both a desktop site and a severly gimped "m.desktop.com" site. Back then you pretty much had to have apps if you wanted to capture the mobile market.

Today, we have mature Add to Home Screen capability, GPS support, push notifications, widespread support for CSS3 hardware acceleration, PWAs, offline capabilities and much more.

You can now make Uber and Lyft trips on the mobile web. That is a use case where I had previously thought I would always need to have the app installed.

So with that in mind, why would I even want to open the dumpster fire that is Google Play/App Store in 2018? If it's a new company I haven't heard of, I am sure as hell not about to open the app store and download > 50MB on my data plan to check you out.

you can add push notification from mobile web? I suppose i see the attempts for me to enable desktop notifications but ive never seen them on mobile web before.

Feels weird to applaud add to home screen but not want the app. Also im on wifi so often that i guess 50mb to download an app is a non issue for me.

I am biased because I build native apps vs web apps but ive always preferred a rich native experience and design vs the web. To each their own!

No push notifications is an added bonus. I do not want notifications. None. Zero.

The problem is most companies are not interested in building rich native experiences. Amazon is a trillion dollar company and their mobile app is horrendous. They don't see it as a priority, it's just something that has to exist, like how companies have to write awful PR blog posts that nobody is reading.

For me, the "add to home screen" means the PWA launches in fullscreen without any browser chrome and that helps the experience a lot. My home screen gets a tiny bit more cluttered but that's an acceptable tradeoff.

No, IOS does not allow notification in browser [1].

>Note: This document pertains to OS X only. Notifications for websites do not appear on iOS.

[1] : https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ne...

P.S: not assuming IOS is mobile, yes assuming significant amount of mobile economy is IOS browsers

Apps don't support multiple tabs.

I'm rarely looking at 1 restaurant at a time, I'm trying to compare 5, or 6 or 10.

The Yelp app has no means of doing that.

Also, I can't easily select some text in the app, like the name of a dish I'm not familiar with, and quickly trigger a web search in another tab to do some quick side reading.

Often not all text in Apps is selectable and copy paste-able.

I have the Yelp app installed, but 9 times out of 10 the browser is how I prefer to use search for restaurants.

Browsers also seem to have better low bandwidth performance than most apps. Probably because doing constrained network communications is hard and only browsers have the billions of reps needed to practice getting it right. With most apps I find that network handling in poor network situations (like is all too common when traveling and looking for a restaurant) is inferior to most browsers.

So yeah, Yelp would definitely win me over if they kept their site browser and low-bandwidth friendly.

A really simple thing is that sometimes I really don't need the website for more than 10 minutes a year, but dealing with turning off notifications, being forced to create an account, being asked about app updates, having it on my home screen, etc is not worth it.

I think some apps feel nicer than a website ever could (because the app can take advantage of stuff like force touches better, and offer a nice custom usage of gestures). But some other places it really just feels like the app exists to push notifications...

Far too many examples of companies making perfectly functional websites for mobile for me to believe an app is necessary for anything.

I'm actually not against downloading the app. What really grinds my gears is when companies screw up the "app links" in their emails, so that the link opens in the browser instead of the app, and then they show an "Install our app!" popup. Then I click the install button, and it takes me to the App Store. And then I click the "Open" button on the App Store page, and it brings me to the homepage inside the app, but there's no way to find the content that I was trying to read.

This has happened to me more than once, with Quora being the latest offender. I don't mind the broken app links, but at least add a query param to the URL and set a cookie so that you don't show a popup and ruin the experience for your existing users.

In general, native apps suck. It's a rigmarole to install them. They insist on all these awful rights, and if there's some sort of vulnerability in the platform they're sure to be exploiting it as hard as they can. Even if they're not exploiting my data, they're probably not protecting my data very well. Many of them are bloated monstrosities. They are poorly maintained and will eventually break. They enforce some sort of psychological commitment to continue to interact with whatever crappy organization published them.

Note: I'm not saying that you suck. You have an identity and worth separate from native apps.