I want to agree with you, but how many people are regularly surfing the web?

I actually think most people still are, but I keep getting this impression from HN and others in the tech industry that "everyone is on their phone and using apps", and I've yet to see any convincing research into the use of web browsers over the years. I don't know what I'm really supposed to think, but it seems that a lot of us in the industry are convinced that mobile browsing is "dead" or at least sits on the bleachers while apps do basically everything and use the browser as a webview for minor things.

I'd love to believe that most people aren't merely sitting on Instagram and Reddit all day, never touching their browser.

For the life of me I cannot imagine how painful it must be to spend your time only in apps like Reddit and Instagram. That sounds painfully boring and isolating.

I am the exact opposite as I spend all of my mobile time in the browser.

It's a complex study to perform it with any kind of accuracy. And if there's any concrete studies done this already then I would love to see citations.

How do you start your browsing day? I always start from the twitter or reddit app. Most people don't even know the "web", they just stay on Whatsapp, Instagram and Facebook the whole day. (I wish this wasn't the case since this makes so difficult to little people to compete on the space).

Not the OP but I strongly favor browser over apps whenever possible. I’m a news junkie so my progression usually goes:

Washington Post (I live in DC), WSJ, NYT, Hacker News, Maybe Facebook, If really bored, will compare Drudge Report / HuffPo / Fox News just to see the extremes,

Back to HN, eventually feel browsing guilt and go do something productive

I you read Reddit most articles contain a link to some website. That is what Reddit (and HN) discussions are about. So you still need to browse the web even if you start in an app.

I don't think it matters necessarily. It depends on the category your product falls into, and you have to look at how similar products acquire their users.

What software have you purchased in the past year? For my pesonal sample size of one, most of my non-game purchases were business productivity SaaS. And the decision generally happened after repeated exposure via word of mouth and/or discussion forums.

I definitely didn't discover any business productivity software in an app store. And signup that requires any significant amount of information is harder on mobile. I bet SEM and getting customers through Google still works online if you can pull it off.

I completely agree. This is also my advice to clients that initially ask for a mobile app as well.

Unless you _know_ you have a successful business, a website/webapp MVP is almost always a cheaper way to validate your business concept and a cheaper way to iterate as you develop it.

How many websites ever get passed the signup stage? I often will leave as soon as I'm tasked with creating an account and I'm not likely to come back.

What is especially frustrating that many sites don’t allow Mailinator and other similar ‘one-time’ email systems to be used for registering an account. No way I am going to give you my email address up front before seeing the product.

Now the solution is of course to have a separate gmail account to register. Most sites still allow [email protected] address syntax so that I can sometimes see who are leaking where.

I would be curious to know if there is some credible A/B testing showing that for a relatively unknown new product blocking Mailinators and it’s kin somehow results as a better conversion?

Yup. It's frustrating.

One benefit of switching to mail on my own domain (powered by FastMail at the moment) is that instead of username@mydomain, I can also use [email protected]. Which is hopefully less common and too dangerous to automatically filter out in "data cleaning".

Man I so want to do that, but the pricing just seems outrageous at minimum $3/user/month, standard $5/user/month.

I've been wanting to hack together some scripts to use a serverless cloud provider like SES. Since I rarely check my email and almost never send any, it's crazy to pay such a high monthly fee.

Register a domain name with mail forwarding and use wildcard aliases to forward all mail on your domain to your real mailbox.

I use mailgun to forward mails incoming on my domain to my usual web mail accounts. Free tier is more than enough, since i don't expect hundreds of mails per day.

Sending is a bit painful, though. Also sometimes mails fail to be forwarded and get stuck for a while... annoying when you're waiting for some kind of link / code.

If you get a lot of spam and it's all forwarded than some providers like Gmail will treat your email address as the source of the spam rather than the original sender.

Interesting, thanks for the tip!

Given how well known [email protected] is wouldn't many sites simply strip the +... part before selling the email data?

There is one surprisingly good feature in yahoo mail that I wish google would provide: the ability (requirement, actually) to create a custom prefix for disposable email addresses. Just pick something completely unrelated to your real username. You can only create it once and it is forever your prefix, so don't mess up this step! Also, unlike gmail, you have to register a suffix when you want a new address in the form of [email protected]. But this has the added benefit that you can delete any of the suffixes from the list, thereby stopping incoming messages from that address. You can have up to 500 active suffixes.

Finally, since the format uses a dash rather than +, I have never once had a disposable yahoo address rejected.

Not sure if that made any sense, but here's a link to the docs:

https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN28338.html

Why would they care enough to do so?

If I get a marked as spam notification, I'll strip anything after the '+' (and really any special characters that distract from the raw email address) to make sure I never send an email to the address again.

Yes, this is part of standard data cleaning practices. You always remove whatever custom formats a provider allows to get the raw minimum email address (this is only for export, you still send official communication with a user to their original specified address).

There's a simple solution for that: always include a label as part of your address, and treat any mail that doesn't include one as spam.

Not every service even allows you to have a label in your email address. So what then?

Get them to fix their broken systems? The concept of a "label" exists only in the user agent. To everyone else the '+' character is just part of the account identifier, and a perfectly valid element of any e-mail address. The entire portion before the '@' sign is potentially significant. If someone hands you an address [email protected], there is no guarantee whatsoever that mail sent to [email protected] will end up in the same individual's inbox—that could be a completely unrelated account.

On the e-mail provider's side, one way to work around such broken systems would be to let users generate random, opaque aliases which do not contain their primary e-mail username but route to the same account, with a predetermined label applied on receipt. These would look just like ordinary addresses and there would be no way for services to strip out the identifying elements.

> I would be curious to know if there is some credible A/B testing showing that for a relatively unknown new product blocking Mailinators and it’s kin somehow results as a better conversion?

Well, there's always this: https://articles.uie.com/three_hund_million_button/ -- trigger warning: that page has annoying delayed-by-few-seconds modal popup that begs you to subscribe and, incidentally, hand out your email address; the irony must have been lost on their marketing folks.

Unless your business is REQUIRED[×] to have user details on file, putting any kind of friction on the user's action path is equal to voluntarily giving up sales. No, I don't want yet another account on your shitty website, no matter what it sells to me. If I end up coming back often enough, then I may, voluntarily, create an account. But if your site requires to create one up front, I'm incentivised to take my business somewhere else.

The worst offenders try to do email domain TLD matching against country of residence. I've seen it only twice, but it's such a user-hostile pattern that it has seared itself to my memory (while mercifully having relieved me of the memory of where I ran into it).

×: cough gambling, financial services, insurance, etc.

Your email is public, there's no gain in keeping it secret.

For further reading: https://www.troyhunt.com/im-sorry-but-your-email-address-is-...

Yes but that doesn't mean I want my inbox receiving emails a year later from a service I used for 10 minutes. I generally trial services (that don't contain any personal information) with a separate mailinator email. If I feel like this is something I'm going to be using more of, I'll do a proper registration with my actual name and email.

There is a lot of temporary email services constantly popping into the Internet every month. Some of them are open-sourced so one can make own quick disposable email or forwarding service with cheap domain. "Resistance Is Futile" - no way any exclusion list can keep up to cover them.

every time i do a search i find services that require registration or even payment, and rarely ever anything that supports making up an email address on the spot the way mailinator does.

Tangent: I've been using a [email protected] for years, and it's only recently that I've encountered validation rejections. (Ironically, both times that happened, the form in question did allow [email protected].)

What is it that makes you actually sign up for a service?

Either I'm already certain or it's necessity/desperation.

If I'm actively looking for an certain type of application I will usually dedicate half a day to sign up for bunch of different apps all at once. It's pretty time consuming and I'm usually left disappointed. I will then spend the next half a day trying to remove myself from them all.

Then 6 months later one of those app companies send you an email update, by which point you've forgotten what they do, and yet they give you no hint of what the app is in said email.

Or year later they got bought by some other company and your account is transitioned to the new company but those emails automatically got sent to spam and now all of a sudden you’re a customer of a new company and you had no idea. It’s happened to me more than once.

Or they email you 3x a day for something you were interested in for no more than 10 minutes.

Could you point to research related to the 80% or similar stats?

I am in an internal conversation regarding building an app vs a website and would love to have some ammo for my arguments.

Consultant is trying to sell an app and to me that looks crazy given that a website could fulfill the same purpose without platform fragmentation, installation etc.

Not OP but I use multiple sources when doing consulting on mobile strategy. Not sure if every source allows to copy/paste data here so I'll just name the sources here :

- comScore MMX Multi-Platform, January 2017

- Deloitte Global mobile Consumer Survey, May 2016

- eMarketer, App Marketing 2015: Fighting for Downloads and Attention in a Crowded Market, July 2015

- Selio user acquisition costs

This would work unless, the client wants to monetize via freemium model; in that case an IAP with native app would be far more intuitive than a web app as integrating a payment gateway which accepts global payments (Stripe is not available in all countries) is harder than integrating In app purchase on iOS or android.

I've got many clients who aren't tech savvy but come to me talking about "mobile first". But after a brief discussion they've all agreed to go website first and it has saved them a lot of money.

Regarding uninstalled apps, during a productivity self-study last year I deleted probably 75% of the apps off my phone, and cleaned the home screen to only include 7 apps I use daily. Highly recommend it if you want to reduce distractions.

Where does that 80% stat come from? Do you have hard data or just gut feeling?

> Faster development/instant updates. Better tracking and UX anazyling.

That’s a horrible argument in my opinion. Yes, it is more convenient from a developer’s or a business point of view. But what if the user sees more value in an app than a website, shouldn’t that be the first thing to consider?

I think it's more of an added benefit to building a website first. Especially when trying to validate new ideas which is where the better tracking / UX analysis comes into play.

Many folks that i know of don't keep browsing App stores for apps (some may look for new games now and then) and i wonder it may apply to substantial number of users out there. The app has to be some how popular (either by word of mouth or ) before it gets installed, where as browsing web sites is just a matter of clicking some link.

Just my observation but i rarely see or know of mobile users who browse app stores without first being taken then by a wish/link to download an app. Users who independently dive into app stores are mostly developer-oriented people looking to solve a problem with an app.

Apps go viral via memes or social channels and most of that is thus other apps.

Web, other than being much simpler, and easier to find, has the important benefit of not requiring a user to change context - they can switch tab but they are still in a browser - so their personal 'flow' is far less interrupted than when they change to another app. That interruption has flow on effect to retention, productivity, integration.

Bottom line is for a startup, esp a bootstrapping one, start with web MVP, get it out there fast even cobbled from existing apps and services. Prove your hypothesis as quickly as possible - and when data proves otherwise go pivot. Rinse-repeat.

Where does this metric come from?

As an illustration, I just downloaded and uninstalled the waiter.com app. Screw that, I’ll use the website.

Thank you! I personally think that mobile web and app design has been one of the greatest atrocities in tech. Not only is it trash on mobile, it's spread and made lots of sites trash on desktop as well because people seek a one-size-fits-none solution.

I personally go by the rule that if your service can work as a website, it should be a website. Not ever a standalone app unless there are important requirements which can't be met in a browser. That can only be good for feature creep, gimmicks, and of course data scraping and other violations. A lot of companies end up purposely hamstringing their website--or push you into a terrible mobile site and ignoring your browser's request for the desktop version, plus cover half the screen with multiple instances of begware. Yes I'm looking at you reddit, you filthy old turd. It's incredibly user-hostile. I'm sure it drives plenty of cheap, chintzy short-term engagement but y'all are going to perish like digg sooner or later.

I wish companies would start really putting forward desktop deployment as a major priority again. Maybe I'm old and behind the times. But it seems like all serious activity in my life is always done on the desktop. As soon as I encounter something where I'm going to be doing a lot of browsing or typing or any effort, I move to the desktop platform where the interface and experience are just plain better in every way. I hate interacting through a terrible, tiny touchscreen by swiping around like a finger-painting toddler or using a minuscule keyboard which autocorrects me into apparent illiteracy. If I'm not out in the field and have no other choice, I will always, always choose the desktop environment for its many enormous advantages over mobile. Mobile is here to stay, but the UX still sucks enormous ass and is only tolerable because it's ubiquitous, plus everybody sucks relatively the same from mobile platform to mobile platform so it kind of seems normal.

Once again, maybe I'm just old and now I'm like my mom who stubbornly sticks to VIM in CLI and resents anything that requires clicking a mouse. On the other hand, I kind of see her point and totally respect her cantankerous old-fashioned style of computer literacy. She may hate modern interfaces, but she still knows how to do plenty of fundamental things that even young people these days are clueless about. I believe that simplistic, overly-intuitive interfaces can cause people to live up to expectations and become worse with actual computer literacy, that the golden age of power users is fading, but that's another story.

I would love to have a phone that runs a desktop version of linux and has a slide-out keyboard like they had in the 2000s or whenever that was. Something that just sticks to a desktop user agent and runs desktop executables. Perhaps even something that runs x86 and has a swappable battery to compensate for its power inefficiency. Basically a desktop computer disguised as a mobile device that fits in your pocket. Not iOS or Android or some rooted variant of Android. I don't even give a damn if it has voice calling or not. I think that would have enormous potential and would command a small yet incredibly dedicated userbase, but so far I haven't found anything quite like it.

You might really like this device, it runs a real desktop Linux and has a really nice keyboard. Its still ARM but meets everything else: https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/gemini-pda-1

That looks a really nice and very usable modern incarnation of the amazing Psion.

I love that your mom is a VIM users. That caught me off guard and I lol'd. My mom: not a vim user (or emacs for that matter)

Technically she uses original VI on a Sun Solaris. That thing is still kicking. It's delightful, really.

Id suggest a cloud VM except for bandwidth/latency issues.

Where did you get that 80% from? I have hard time believing the average Joe uninstalls an app

The figures are in the order of magnitude that OP suggests, but only for a) games that b) are ad supported (which is how we know the numbers).

More serious apps get to stay a few extra days from the looks of this blog post (among other similar promotional ones on the topic that are a few googles away):

https://www.adjust.com/blog/unmasking-uninstalls/

Seeing how e-commerce, travel, and health are the only three categories that get more than a week I'd spitball it's because users of these apps kept them for a one-time event.

Either way, OP is correct in that as an app publisher, you're only one shot at getting that precious first impression, and odds are your new users will only keep the app around long enough to open it a few times; as few as once, in the case of games. Which sounds about right if my own anecdotal usage is anything to go by.

The web is the fax machine but it’s cool you advise your clients to use a dying technology.

What about the market caps of the top three tech companies combined makes you think web is the future? Just curious.