Editing 1174: App
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==Explanation== | ==Explanation== | ||
| − | Some | + | Some web sites have a {{w|mobile app}} designed for use on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. In theory this is because the main website will be more difficult to navigate on the small screen of a mobile, or some features won't work. In practice, this alternative is frequently worse than simply viewing the standard web page, for reasons offered in the comic: |
*You cannot zoom or change the text size in most of these apps, a feature available on mobile browsers. | *You cannot zoom or change the text size in most of these apps, a feature available on mobile browsers. | ||
| − | *The app is often of poor quality and is incomplete, lacks part of the content, or lacks features available on the standard | + | *The app is often of poor quality and is incomplete, lacks part of the content, or lacks features available on the standard web site. |
| − | The comic offers a brutally honest version of such a promotional popup. | + | The comic offers a brutally honest version of such a promotional popup. Alternatively to an app, some sites have a mobile version which is still an HTML-based website - just one that has been designed for mobile. These mobile versions (often denoted by being in an "m." subdomain) often have the same issues as above, or worse, because the sites do not have the benefit of the programmability of an app. |
| − | Compounding the frustration is that some sites aggressively promote their app/mobile version with a popup message that repeats the suggestion on every visit to the site, and as the title text notes, if you reject the popup, you end up on the site's homepage, rather than the subpage you may have been trying to reach via a web search. A similar effect (where the mobile version will only load the site's main page) is described in more detail in [[869: Server Attention Span]]. | + | Compounding the frustration is that some sites aggressively promote their app/mobile version with a popup message that repeats the suggestion on every visit to the site, and as the title text notes, if you reject the popup, you end up on the site's homepage, rather than the subpage you may have been trying to reach via a web search. A similar effect (where the mobile version will only load the site's main page) is described in more detail in [[869: Server Attention Span|comic 869]]. |
==Transcript== | ==Transcript== | ||
| − | :[A popup window on top of a webpage displayed in a smartphone browser | + | :[A popup window on top of a webpage displayed in a smartphone browser.] |
:Want to visit an incomplete version of our website where you '''can't zoom?''' | :Want to visit an incomplete version of our website where you '''can't zoom?''' | ||
:'''Download our app!''' | :'''Download our app!''' | ||
