Editing 1174: App

{{comic
| number    = 1174
| date      = February 15, 2013
| title     = App
| image     = app.png
| titletext = If I click 'no', I've probably given up on everything, so don't bother taking me to the page I was trying to go to. Just drop me on the homepage. Thanks.
}}

==Explanation==
Some websites 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.
*The app is often of poor quality and is incomplete, lacks part of the content, or lacks features available on the standard website.

The comic offers a brutally honest version of such a promotional popup.

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]].

==Transcript==
:[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?'''
:'''Download our app!'''
:[OK] [No, but ask me again every time]
<!-- Note the official transcript actually includes more ranting! -->

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Computers]]