The web still sucks for phones. The formatting is better in apps and it runs faster than the browser. I don't have to double tap text to bring it to human readable size or deal with lag when scrolling. Until phone browsers and/or web sites catch up, apps such as this provide a lot of relief.

HN is unreadable even on a desktop browser, that's not a client fault. I read it on ihackernews.com

I half agree, half disagree with you. The web doesn't suck for phones, the websites suck for phones. If websites use a fluid layout or a mobile layout, nobody has to write an app for them. Posterous is great to read on mobiles due to their theme.

I hope more companies start using those tricks that let websites resize gracefully on any size screen, so you don't even need a mobile theme. Your layout just adjusts gracefully to the screen.

Sorry, by "web" I meant websites. Mobile layouts are nice when they are implemented correctly. The worst case is when a mobile version routes your request to a default landing page rather than the requested article or whatever or strips out functionality that exists in the regular version.

I expect that things will only improve as more people access the web via mobile devices. I think I use my phone more than a standard computer these days.

Yes, I think we're agreeing, but, to clarify, I meant that it's not websites in general (as in, the technology) that sucks, but particular websites (most of them) which haven't correctly implemented mobile-friendly versions.

We are agreeing, though, yes.

By far my favourite are websites which detects you are on a mobile device and then (automatically, no questions asked, no override available) "redirects" you to what is supposedly the same content on their mobile site.

And then the mobile site crashes for whatever reason? Malformed URL? Heck if I know. I just know I can't get to the website.

It also seems a lot of websites has a "standard" mobile-version (which is basically some iPhone-app like standard theme) which also always crashes when visited. Might be a WP-plugin, but I'm honestly not sure. 90% of the time though, it crashes and it wont let you go to the original web-page either.

Really. Until the web gets better at dealing with mobile devices, you will see applications like this being popular.

One reason is that if you load the web page, you have to download the UI every single page load. With an app, the downloaded data should be quite a bit more stripped down... but to be honest I couldn't say how the app gets its data. It might be scraping downloaded pages. In that case, I'd tend to agree with you about an HN app as it doesn't contain anything that requires a fluid interface.

"download the UI every single page load" - Client side XSLT resolves this. I'll admit that client side XSLT has other problems though. Compare these two urls:

https://grepular.com/

https://grepular.com/?response_type=xml

Then look at the source code of each

Cool, thanks.

No. Any well written web page can cache itself for offline use, and use AJAX to load all data after the first page. This is how iUI works, and therefore most iPhone-specific web apps.

You're basically right except I don't think HN does this at present. Good luck convincing PG within the next year... :)

I couldn't disagree more. The way we've always used the web is to have some content and a web server and let clients use an app to connect to our site and use the services. The difference is, we used a generic app (web browser) and had to encode all the presentation in with the content.

In my opinion this is going in exactly the right direction. Let clients worry about how to display the data and the web servers/services provide the content. Then your "web apps" can do anything. 3D, open GL, anything the device can support.

If you make all apps just be browser apps then you have to put all code for all possible clients on the server side. Doing things this way means I can write a really great web service and hire people for the different clients to make the best possible client. I don't need to worry about it at all, nor maintain these different clients.

At the same time as I agree with you, I also use these kind of apps. Typically they are faster and also offer better integration with the native features of the phone than a browser experience does. Perhaps you should take up the challenge and make an HTML5 equivalent and see how well you can do?

I agree. I never use applications written only for one website unless it provides additional features (e.g. the Facebook application includes hooks to the whole system for uploading pictures and such). I find it unnecessarily tedious to think beyond needing a web browser for web browsing.