Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by onion2k on Friday January 04, 2019 @11:39AM (#18825334)

On iOS you won’t get notifications or be able to run anything in the background.

Ok, but what are the downsides?

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by orev on Friday January 04, 2019 @11:46AM (#18825408)

As a user notifications are a problem, but as an app developer they absolutely work to drive engagement, which is why so many apps use them. So if you’re trying to run a business that’s a pretty important thing.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by wuliwong on Friday January 04, 2019 @12:27PM (#18825804)

You think notifications are universally "a problem"? I find many notifications to be quite useful. Appointment reminders are VERY important to me and not at all a problem.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by fromdowntown on Friday January 04, 2019 @12:38PM (#18825903)

They probably mean generally a problem. Things like reminders seems like a good use case, but with all the apps trying to increase engagement, it seems necessary to mute notifications to an app right after downloading it.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by ryanwaggoner on Friday January 04, 2019 @12:43PM (#18825956)

You don’t need to “mute” them, just don’t approve the notifications permission request. Out of the 100+ apps I have installed, I have zero that annoy me with notifications.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by ryandrake on Friday January 04, 2019 @12:48PM (#18826003)

Users don’t care about “driving engagement”. If your product’s user experience is important, or if is made with any empathy at all for the user, it won’t be spamming him with notifications purely to juice a startup vanity metric.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by askafriend on Friday January 04, 2019 @12:35PM (#18825872)

Notification management is the problem. Not notifications themselves.

One part is on the system to provide the right management tools, the other is on the user to tell the system what notifications are important.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by JohnFen on Friday January 04, 2019 @07:07PM (#18828963)

> Notification management is the problem. Not notifications themselves.

Notification abuse is the problem. Notifications have been so heavily abused by apps (and increasingly now by websites themselves) that makes the notification system itself look terrible.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by username223 on Friday January 04, 2019 @12:00PM (#18825554)

> As a user notifications are a problem, but as an app developer...

So do you develop apps but not use them? I can't think of a way the hypocrisy isn't shocking here. "Do unto others" and all that.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by scarface74 on Friday January 04, 2019 @12:04PM (#18825585)

I’ve developed software all of my career that I personally have no use for.

I develop software to pay my bills. We are talking about notifications, not killing puppies.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by username223 on Friday January 04, 2019 @01:25PM (#18826368)

We're not talking about whether or not you are killing puppies -- I don't think you're a sadist. Just "make stuff you would want to use." Or "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Or, if you prefer, "act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by JohnFen on Friday January 04, 2019 @07:09PM (#18828968)

> Just "make stuff you would want to use."

So I should quit my job developing enterprise software because I don't personally have a use for enterprise software?

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by sethammons on Friday January 04, 2019 @04:01PM (#18827568)

Unless I absolutely have to have the app (work or something), I avoid it. Webpage any day. It wont bug me in the middle of the night.

  3AM. Sleeping
  Phone: BING!!!
  Me: *groggy* shit, hope everything is ok...
  Me: *picks up phone*
  Phone: Rayman Adventures has updated!
  Me: *uninstalls Rayman Adventures, angrily goes back to sleep*

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by retromario on Friday January 04, 2019 @07:13PM (#18828989)

Not to sound condescending but why would you have your notifications on at night? 10pm-7:30am do not disturb has been a godsend.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by sethammons on Friday January 04, 2019 @09:51PM (#18829589)

Work. Slack, texts, calls (could be anyone in my department whose number I don't know), PagerDuty, the random number PagerDuty call from. More of a pain to whitelist than to just avoid random apps with notification.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by scarface74 on Friday January 04, 2019 @10:06PM (#18829637)

You have to specifically allow notifications after you install and launch the app. Just say “no” when it asks you for permission to send you push notifications.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by retromario on Saturday January 05, 2019 @03:11PM (#18833930)

Good luck, it sounds like a nightmare to be on call all the time.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by sethammons on Monday January 07, 2019 @07:12AM (#18844568)

One week out of five (rotation). Our software has to work (and work well) 24/7/365.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by scarface74 on Friday January 04, 2019 @06:08PM (#18828614)

That’s an easy one - set Do Not Disturb to start at 10:00 and end at 7AM. It will still allow messages through for contacts that you specify.

In iOS 12, you can turn off notifications directly from the Notification Center for an app that bugs you.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by noobiemcfoob on Friday January 04, 2019 @11:38AM (#18825311)

Too many applications abuse notifications and background processing anyway. If you need those features, you have to convince of far more value before I'll install a thing.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by billmalarky on Friday January 04, 2019 @12:04PM (#18825595)

I'd wager you are not a great representation of the market that 99% of apps serve. Apps abuse those features because it works well for their business.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by M2Ys4U on Friday January 04, 2019 @12:38PM (#18825907)

>Apps abuse those features because it works well for their business.

In the short-run anyway...

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by reaperducer on Friday January 04, 2019 @01:53PM (#18826597)

This is true.

I allow certain apps to use notifications because there are things that I want to be notified about. My card balance from the Starbucks app, or breaking news from the New York Times app.

Both of those companies started abusing notifications. Their apps are no longer on my phones.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by noobiemcfoob on Friday January 04, 2019 @01:32PM (#18826443)

> I'd wager you are not a great representation of the market that 99% of apps serve

I'd wager no one is. Snapchat has 200 million users. There's some 4 billion people on the internet. Niches are niches, and no one serves everyone.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by mktguru on Saturday January 05, 2019 @05:40PM (#18834742)

I wish "no one" was my customer then I could get a $40B IPO serving everyone :)

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by scarface74 on Friday January 04, 2019 @11:41AM (#18825347)

If you want an iOS app not to “abuse” background processing, there is a setting that will disable the ability on an app by app basis. Of course you have granular control over notifications and how they are presented on a per app basis.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by cschep on Friday January 04, 2019 @12:29PM (#18825824)

Using email as a notification service works in this case. The user probably gets a notification for new emails.. at least if they do they chose to. :)

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by scarface74 on Friday January 04, 2019 @12:33PM (#18825851)

Email delivery has its own set of problems - mostly spam filters.

Even when the email does reach the end user, most people get so many emails it’s easy to get lost in the noise.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by reaperducer on Friday January 04, 2019 @01:54PM (#18826613)

Using notifications to bypass spam filters speaks to the quality of the notifications you're sending.

If your e-mail is important, people will find it.

If your e-mail gets lost in the noise, then notification is probably not essential.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by scarface74 on Friday January 04, 2019 @08:22PM (#18829266)

Getting caught in spam filters has little to do with whether the email is legitimate - just whether it is seen as a bulk email.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by cschep on Friday January 04, 2019 @02:14PM (#18826805)

It does have issues when it comes to getting users to do something they don't want to do, but it is more than good enough to communicate with users about something they actively want to do.

I have no interest in the former.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by Jhndb on Friday January 04, 2019 @11:39AM (#18825331)

I think the point stands, and the article explicitely says "start with". Apps can come later in lots of cases. A personal example - I was hired to build the MVP Android app for a new greeting card company. 1 year later: It's been done for 6 months, no one's using it, no one wants to use it, everyone's using the web app.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by tracker1 on Friday January 04, 2019 @01:04PM (#18826149)

With cordova you can create a thin wrapper that can add those features you need, starting with a PWA and extending.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by simplecomplex on Friday January 04, 2019 @12:07PM (#18825610)

Service workers allow for push notifications and other background tasks.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by scarface74 on Friday January 04, 2019 @12:14PM (#18825677)

iOS doesn’t support push notifications for web pages.

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by reaperducer on Friday January 04, 2019 @01:56PM (#18826620)

Are Safari push notifications desktop only?

https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-notifi...

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Re:Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App by scarface74 on Friday January 04, 2019 @02:05PM (#18826726)

Yep, desktop only

https://www.izooto.com/blog/ios-push-notifications-safari

And this might be why....

Web Push Notifications have clearly made difference in every marketing campaign it gets involved in.

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