“It works better in the app”

The strongest consensus was not just that this is annoying, but that app forcing has become a signal of misaligned incentives. People read “install our app” as shorthand for more tracking, more notifications, more dark patterns, weaker ad blocking, and less user control. Social networks got cited over and over because they aggressively degrade mobile web to push installs. Banks, gyms, parking systems, airlines, insurers, and even routers came up too, which made the complaint feel less like tech-user grumbling and more like an infrastructure problem. Several people said they now simply walk away, switch vendors, or defer tasks until they are back at a real computer. There was also a practical engineering argument underneath the venting. Many mobile apps are just WebView wrappers, so users lose browser advantages like tabs, content blockers, link handling, and inspectability without getting the upside of a true native app. At the same time, a few commenters pushed back that native still wins for certain categories. Background location, NFC passport scans, offline-heavy workflows, hardware integration, and latency-sensitive media are still easier or only feasible in native apps. That left the conversation in a sharper place than “apps bad, web good.” The useful line was simpler: if an app is mandatory, it should earn that privilege by doing something the web genuinely cannot, and if you ship both app and web, basic feature parity is the minimum bar. A big part of the mess was pinned on incentives at large companies and platform owners. Product teams get rewarded for new launches, not boring polish, while Apple and Google still make the install path for progressive web apps awkward enough that companies chasing mainstream adoption keep defaulting back to app stores.