| Micolithe |
|---|
| Agender |
| 36 years old |
| Philadelphia, PA |
 |
| Last Login: 08/30/2007 |
Agender Enby, Trans, Gay, AND the bearer of the gamer's curse. Not a man, not a woman, but instead I am puppy.
I got a fat ass and big ears.
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Yes I did the cooking mama Let's Play way back when. I post alot about Tech (mostly how it sucks) and Cooking and Music and Television Shows and the occasional Let's Play video
💖@FadeToZac
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We all do what we can ♫
So we can do just one more thing ♫
We can all be free ♫
Maybe not in words ♫
Maybe not with a look ♫
But with your mind ♫
So I finally discovered why people are weirdly clamoring for a Mobile App: There is an apparent belief that Apps are more performant than websites.
My guy. My dude. Friendo. All of your apps are just shitty frames around an embedded web browser.
The fucking windows version of discord is all electron. Hit Ctrl shift I with discord open sometime.
its just a bit annoying on a mobile browser
I mean I could pretty literally slop together an unofficial app tomorrow but literally all it would be is something that loads an Android WebView and loads cohost.org into it, just as the twitter app does. What's the annoying part you want to see alleviated?
theres a bit of bad UI on the mobile site, you have to scroll past the sidebar to get to the posts, but really its having to treat cohost as a Different Thing than the rest of the websites on ur phone is just annoying. its annoying having to use the web browser to launch something instead of launching it like an app. you can do the "make an icon for a link" thing and that works but thats an extra step that you have to know is a thing you can do beforehand. and it just being a tab is annoying too, a webview app would be better because it launches a new browser instance more or less. you wouldnt have to go find the tab to open it again if you opened another tab. switching apps is easier than switching tabs. the UX of a browser page is just generally worse than a simple webview app ime
Yeah, Cohost's markup and CSS really need some love and attention, especially on the mobile/responsive design side of things.
Twitter is native (or at least partially is, stuff like reporting Tweets goes to a WebView). Unless it's some React Native amalgam I guess, but when I was looking at TwiFucker to remove sports from the trending tab, it was hooking Json parsers in Java.
Don't at least some use (insert platform)'s API to handle information and then render it via (insert OS)'s UI frameworks as opposed to an entire web browser? Because I think that's what people want out of an app.
…which might be uniquely difficult to do with Cohost because the posts permit CSS. So, fair point, lmao.
I mean some do but I can tell you that Twitter doesn't, Tumblr doesn't, the Amazon app doesn't. Not every app is like that but most that are front ends for network services are. And yeah there's no reasonable way to render chosts without a WebView.
Oh, shit, yeah, that'd explain why Twitter felt way jankier than any third-party clients even back before API 1.1.
Yeah, no, a stripped-down CSS renderer written from scratch just to handle what Cohost allows would probably save tens of milliseconds here or there, but— not reasonable.
Twitter for android is definitely a different thing from Twitter for mobile web. The icons are different and the app has tweet view transitions and clearly retains some UI widget state to make that all smooth whereas the mobile site frequently does full viewport refreshes for simple navigation.
I don't know the details. Maybe Twitter for android just is.a big webview. If that's the case they should just serve that for the mobile site instead of what they have now. It feels much better.
I don't expect cohost to have mobile apps though so I agree with you there. I'd love it but it's an unreasonable ask.
pinning the website as an iOS desktop application is working fine. but some kind of push (or even just occasional auto-checking) notes would be great
I'd at least like a little scalability for mobile on the website.
on mobile the sidebar loads above the content, if i could hide the sidebar and just have it pop out of a menu or some shit it would be fine to me, but as it is, its annoying.
yeah 100%, the menu at the top is the only part of the mobile browser UI that really bugs me.
That should be a fairly easy fix with a bit of html and css to make it collapsible and sticky. I've already seen someone post a piece of css to make it sticky (if you use some kind of a user stylesheet extension on a browser)
as a person who never uses apps for soc med if i can help it: why do people want an app for twitter or youtube or any other social media site? i genuinely do not get the appeal of using an app over a website (cant have multiple tabs of the same site, cant switch between different sites quickly, no access to google if you want to google stuff, probably doesnt let you switch btwn portrait and landscape)
There are legitimate arguments is the thing, this is why I've been trying to figure out why people are so intent on it. Like an app could leverage system intents for providing nicer interfaces to things like file pickers for uploading or a more featureful editor for posts. There's some QOL possibilities there. But it doesn't seem like anything people want out of an app:
a) Require one, or, b) Would actually be solved by one.
in no particular order: you can't really do push notifications without an app (useful for conversations), having a separate app means it shows up separately in the app switcher (depending on the OS there may be OS-level 'treat this site as an app' thing), vibes, and the fact that in many cases the app is just straight up better than viewing the mobile website (youtube's mobile website suuucks)
Okay but taking these in order:
and with 4. the answer to why they want you using the app is almost always, irrespective of the app in question, that you can't adblock the app as easily
I’m grateful to iOS Safari for having native content blocking, but this is why I’m under no illusion that Apple truly has my best interests at heart. They’re letting me block ads so they can charge tech cos $99/yr for user tracking (a strategy i’ll coin ‘privacy-enforced racketeering’). I’m blocking ads because I want an ad-free web and do not care how many business models that destroys. We are not the same
wait i didn't know that you could actually do push notifications in browsers, i thought that didn't exist. rad.
also re 4: partly that but some of it is more intrinsic. i remember the browser chrome getting in the way a lot of the time, but i don't have details offhand
yeah Apple only added web push notifications to mobile Safari very recently but they should have existed in mobile Chrome for a bit now since it's basically a Google standard
hm, i can understand this for some apps then (twitter browser mobile is very keen on reloading the page at random and also causes some weird memory leak that makes it impossible to open apps),
this isn't broadly true at all. the server-backed commercial apps that i've worked on all used native UI. React Native apps are popular with some bigcorps (Facebook, Discord) and they're janky for other reasons, but they also use native UI components, not webviews. Mastodon clients have to deal with arbitrary HTML, but the three that i've seen the source for (Amaroq, Mast, Metatext) do it by filtering the HTML to what they understand and translating that to native UI components, and don't use any kind of webviews except maybe for OAuth signin.
i agree that it's pointless to end up with a mobile app that's just a webview wrapper around the website, but personally i wouldn't cry if a Cohost app dropped arbitrary-markup support since i'm not really here for the CSS demoscene stuff. actually, it'd be a useful feature for me to strip excessively cute markup; web browser reader modes generally don't work on Cohost.
it's always fun seeing people find out about electron or webview
not only is it an electron app, they didn't even remove the part of the web browser that prevents your display from sleeping if it's showing video, which is apparently triggered by .gifs 🙀
