Editing 1174: App

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==Explanation==
 
==Explanation==
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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:
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This comic is about how web sites design an "app" to front their website pages.  Site typically justify the app existance with that it is optimized for viewing from mobile devices, while in fact this is false since you cannot zoom or change the text size in most of these apps.  Regardless of that the sizes still try to prompt you install their app on every vists to their site from a mobile device.
  
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*You cannot zoom or change the text size in most of these apps, a feature available on mobile browsers.
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Usually, the mobile version of the web page is made separately from the regular version, so it's often incomplete. The app used to view it has also some other serious usability problems (e.g. it can't be zoomed), so it's usually better to just view the regular version of the web site with a regular browser even when accessing the web from a mobile device.
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*The app is often of poor quality and is incomplete, lacks part of the content, or lacks features available on the standard website.
 
  
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The comic offers a brutally honest version of such a promotional popup.
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In the comic, a mobile device user is trying to do just that: visit the regular version of web page through a regular browser.  However, the site keeps on insisting that the user really should "download our app to visit an incomplete version of our website
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where you can't zoom".  If the user chooses "no", it isn't really a "no", but rather a "no, but ask me again every time"; so this pop-up is going to get really annoying very soon.
  
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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]].
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In the title text, there's a reference to yet another very serious usability problem of the mobile version of web pages: the only page one can really see is the home page, and whenever the user tries to get anywhere else in the site, the server loses track of the navigation and sends the user back to the home page to start over again. This is the same effect described in [[869: Server Attention Span|comic 869]].
  
 
==Transcript==
 
==Transcript==
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:[A popup window on top of a webpage displayed in a smartphone browser that looks like Safari.]
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:[a popup window on top of a webpage displayed in a smartphone browser]
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:Want to visit an incomplete version of our website where you '''can't zoom?'''
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:Want to visit an incomplete version of our website where you '''can’t zoom'''?
 
:'''Download our app!'''
 
:'''Download our app!'''
 
:[OK] [No, but ask me again every time]
 
:[OK] [No, but ask me again every time]
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<!-- Note the official transcript actually includes more ranting! -->
 
  
 
{{comic discussion}}
 
{{comic discussion}}
 
[[Category:Comics with color]]
 
[[Category:Comics with color]]
 
[[Category:Computers]]
 
[[Category:Computers]]

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