This. I dislike most mobile websites as much as I hate the mobile apps. So to pick my poison, I have a formula.

- Banking: Install it on a different android profile because my websites forces me to use the App one way or the other anyway.

- If the site uses an existing open protocol to interact (IndieWeb, Fediverse, etc), use a non-browser/non-electron app that can handle multiple instances of such protocols.

- If not, and it has PWA, is responsive, and I use it at least twice a day, use the PWA (so far I have one).

- If it does not have PWA, but have has nice responsive layout, Firefox Android with uBlock Origin (I use Iornfox).

- For everything else, if I'm outside without a laptop, whine, complain, and use the website in the mobile browser, enable desktop mode if it has a crappy UI.

- If I'm not outside, browse it from my laptop.

I honestly hate PWAs. Last time I tried it, I realized I couldn't open a link in a new tab. Some people tried to make me use the PWA instead of browsing the website, but to me, it just makes my life harder.

On desktop you can, but it opens the tab in the browser.

right, and the problem is that even if you have a good site on mobile it is sitting in the browser, the gateway to all the awful site experiences, to get to your good site people may go through a bunch of crap. Thus they would rather have an app.

The problem is not just to make your site mobile friendly, it is also that the rest of the web isn't.

I hate everything on mobile. The apps are badly put together. The web sites are crap.

I think Apple's core apps that ship with iOS are about the only things that don't annoy me. They work offline and disconnected for days at a time quite happily and generally work as intended. No one else seems to bother with that and rather ships some fat web turd instead that works occasionally and forces you to sign in all the time.

Mostly that's because devs want to drive people to the app, where they can track you a lot better, so they make their mobile sites shitty on purpose. Plenty of mobile apps are just webapps anyway under the hood. There's absolutely no reason for a mobile site to be massively worse than the app unless the devs want it that way.

I think this is a much more accurate characterization, especially in AutoTempest's case. Their experience on mobile has always been slow and glitchy. I'm not sure what makes their web "app" so heavy, but it's very noticeable.

Can you share details? Or feel free to email me directly, nathan at autotempest. I'd like to learn more about your device, browser, and search criteria so we can try and reproduce what you described.

Firefox on a Galaxy S24. I've had issues with search results not showing up until I refresh, and search filters getting glitchy. Of course, now that I'm trying to reproduce those issues, I can't! So who knows, maybe you guys already fixed it.

Thats because you don't use mobile firefox with ublock origin (on android). I very much prefer sites for stuff I do, they provide 100% of same experience, with one exception - can't easily block ads in apps.

Thus mobile is often even a better experience.

Your experience matches that of roughly 0% of users, unfortunately. Usable browser was one of the many things I missed when switching from Android to iOS.

Many of those things are true in general, but fwiw I think we've done a decent job making the site fast and usable on mobile. It's comparable to the app in most ways, but many still prefer it.

I refuse to use Facebook's app. It's been years, I don't remember why, don't ask me.

Their web app is fundamentally broken in half a dozen ways, and has been for years. A couple examples (not all):

If you are in the middle of typing a comment and switch to another app, when you come back, it will reload the display, losing your comment.

Video shorts load in a way that hides the video after about two seconds. Editing the URL to remove the parameters fixes this.

The layout of comments/posts often breaks, forcing me to switch to "ask for desktop version" to make one feature work, then switch back to "mobile version" to make another feature work. Neither is completely functional.

As I said, there are more. As I said, I don't even remember why I rejected their app, but at this point, if they can't make a mobile web site, why would I trust them to make an app?

>If you are in the middle of typing a comment and switch to another app, when you come back, it will reload the display, losing your comment.

This is the rule for a lot of apps and mobile websites now. I don't understand why - we have so much RAM available - but they love to refresh whether there's a reason to or not. And even if there's a reason not to. I can't count the number of times I've tapped on a tab that has a minature version of all the information I want, only for it to be replaced by a loading screen or 404.

A while ago I noticed my battery usage had gone way up. It was because any time I was distracted from my phone (or lost internet connection on a train), I would just leave the display on. Locking the phone meant that I'd lose whatever context I had.

It's probably refreshing because iOS is aggressive about killing websockets, even if you only backgrounded safari for a few seconds. And it's easier to do a reload than determine which messages were missed. It's hard to even tell if the websocket is dead since it just stays open but is unable to receive / send messages.

Or at least this was my experience working on a mobile PWA a few years ago. I don't even own an apple device, it's just the ios bugs were always the most painful / memorable.

> I don't understand why - we have so much RAM available

It’s not even that. There are APIs to persist state beyond app termination. Even if your app gets killed due to memory pressure, it should continue where it left off.

Companies intentionally make their web experiences worse because they can track you better in apps. Even if the trackers are technically the same, even somewhat savvy people using blockers or browser protections generally don't use them on their phones.

This is a satisfying narrative but I feel like you are overestimating the technical competency and/or malice of these companies. The more likely explanation is that they have simply bitten off more complexity than they can chew.

Of the tech companies I've worked for, I can't even imagine how the web team would react if they were instructed to intentionally nerf their website.

Why are people still using Meta's products? Their products are among the most unbelievably user-hostile things I come across on the web; I wonder why there hasn't been a revolt yet against them

Because people are stupid and do not realize how the choice to support a user-hostile company is going to bite them in the long run. They make it worse for the rest of us who refuse to support companies that feed off of peoples data without recourse.

> You get all these popups everywhere, ads are much more intrusive.

I've literally never had that problem. Firefox Mobile + uBlock Origin eliminates ads.

That works well on Android, but on iOS not so much I think? Also, those damn cookie banners in EU.