the swift programming language is my fault to some degree. mostly here to see dogs, shitpost, fix old computers, and/or talk about math and weird computer programming things. for effortposts check the #longpost pinned tag. asks are open.
I've seen a few "where is the cohost app" posts go by. I know that bacefook had their big "native-first" epiphany like five years ago after trying webtech and everyone's been following their lead since, but it seems to me like the calculus has changed again, and as a user, I prefer web apps to "native" ones for a number of reasons:
I want slower websites with weirder UX made by smaller teams who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding
I don't mind the lack of the app, but I do mind the fact that the mobile site is still difficult to use because you have to scroll past the sidebar menu
Yeah that's fair. But that seems like something that could be fixed without having to write a whole new copy of the client in some platform specific language
I don't want to even think about the idea of @staff being forced to pay 30$ of the cohost Plus! sub to Apple or Google.
Or the ads. “You may also like: Twitter for Nazis, Semilegal Online Casino, Crypto Wallet”
I don't think you're wrong from an ideological perspective but this web app is pretty janky on mobile, especially if you're trying to run it from the home screen
as a user, i favor mobile apps because good ones:
i understand the need to prioritize, but the jank of a webapp is very grating for a heavy mobile user like me. it's death by a thousand cuts. honestly, it has been a reason why i don't use Cohost much.
ime the very best apps that a hypothetical ideal Cohost app should be imitating are third-party clients for services with rich APIs, written by people who don't care about the service's goals per se and just want to give a good user experience: Apollo for Reddit on iOS is the best example i can think of. Metatext for Mastodon is up there. Paperback the manga site client. stuff like that. (half points to Tweetlogix for being fast as hell but having some weird UI choices.)
the worst ones are the apps that reimplement everything available as native controls, but halfass it on top of web tech, so now it's clumsier than native and way worse than the webapp. Discord kinda falls into this category. most shopping apps definitely fall into this category — i'd much rather use a web browser so i can have multiple tabs and all the good web things you mentioned.
i literally can't get back to the top of the post now so let me just close by saying that i've worked on both commercial webapps and commercial iOS apps, and i'm really trying not to talk out of my ass here.
this is really well put, and a lot of things I also feel but couldn’t explain half as well!
I agree, I really appreciate the reply @Vyr. You brought up a number of things I hadn't thought about. It's frustrating that web and native APIs start off with such a disjoint set of ground-level functionality, and both require more effort than most devs bother with to meet the other's strengths. You can make a responsive PWA that uses caching and local storage well to load quickly, restore state, and remain responsive with a bad connection, but few bother.
I wish platforms would more readily embrace the fact that the web browser is an application platform now, and provide better integration with native app switching, notification, and other system UI features to web apps, though of course most platforms have an ideological and/or business bent toward keeping webapps second-class to "native" apps.
yep. while Apple engineering is honestly doing some great work to make native development extremely easy (SwiftUI/Swift async fangirl here) and there are arguments for not letting every pissant web ad company get at every API in your OS, Apple financial wants their 30% and they're in no hurry to make webapps much more useful, especially when most of the APIs for doing that have been spearheaded by known ad company Google. can't wait to see some EU action on that front soon 😄🍿
the fact that mobile browsers (particularly mobile Safari) just kill things Whenever, coupled with the way that I tend to just use private browsing for everything because there's no other good way to prevent browser state from accumulating, means that I basically can't stay signed in to any web site for any length of time on mobile. this is why I don't really use cohost yet: I have to be on a real computer and actually putting energy into it and right now social media is an iPad thing for me
I totally agree that the cohost devs shouldn't actually make a mobile app though. it's more than just the 30%, it also puts you at the mercy of Apple's arbitrary content moderation rules. see also Tumblr
It apparently is still impossible for a web app to even match the basic experience of a table view, without either tiny pagination intervals or breaking after scrolling through a couple pages, so it doesn't seem like we're very close to matching the experience of the Twitter app (which isn't even very good!) on the web. That's without even thinking about accessibility or offline/low connectivity scenarios.
It’s funny because while webapps are bad a those things, web pages are much better at low connectivity access and accessibility than most apps
For a small 30% surcharge, we’ll throw in the Table View Experience™️
all of these points are valid, but unfortunately the mobile web is extremely janky and fucked right now, especially on iOS (and that is almost certainly intentional on Apple's part). basically I agree with what @vyr said
I want the 5250 terminal data stream edition of cohost, complete with all of those funny IBM i verb-noun commands.
I briefly considered if it would be possible to write a small open source mobile client for Cohost, but I think it would probably be incredibly tricky as you'd have to render all the css crimes. You'd be writing a wrapper around a browser already, so why not just use the browser.
I was thinking that one thing a mobile app could do is munge posts so that css crimes work better on mobile, adding touch handlers for resizables and such. But maybe a bookmarklet or shortcut could do that too.
That would certainly be nice, but definitely far out of my league. My knowledge of web tech is a 2/10.
