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It's because apple pushed towards apps and didn't want web apps on their phone. Likely due to the profits they can gain from appstore sales

Native apps would be the better platform in my eyes if the Operating Systems would be better in terms of letting a user manage what a native app have access to and can do.

But currently they are preferred by companies despite more dev effort because they can get more user data without the user having easy ways to prevent that. And of course showing ads without the user being easily able to block them

by dansitu5 hours ago|

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You're not wrong at all, but it's interesting that iOS launched with only web app support for third party software, and it took community pressure to persuade them to support native apps. There was not even an app store to begin with.

by asdff2 hours ago|

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Pretty much every single feature added in the early days (and later) of ios was simply copying what was popular on cydia. That well started to run dry as they got better at whack a moleing jailbreaking exploits, severely contracting that community of tweak developers, and we've seen the resulting product stagnation for some time now.

by inigyou8 hours ago|

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There's nothing technical stopping us from investigating and modifying the apps we install - at least on operating systems that allow you to install unapproved apps. YouTube Vanced only got in legal trouble for distributing a copyrighted work (the YouTube app) which led to ReVanced which is a patcher that doesn't include a copy of the original app.

by ndriscoll7 hours ago|

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OP is about information, not functionality. In the early 2000s you would put things like that on a web page, and you'd put e.g. chat in its own application like Gaim.

In the 2010s the model inverted: now you need to keep an entire browser open to use google chat, and people try to get you to install an app to read a web page.

by PaulHoule7 hours ago|

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I was having that argument with everybody in the late 1990s and was vindicated.

In corporate IT, for instance, you have to roll out new versions of software all the time. There are better solutions for managing desktop fleets than there were back then, but with a web app you just update the server and... you're done!

by Izkata7 hours ago|

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Keep going further back, we had thin client terminals (not sure of the terminology, this was just before my time - I remember using them to look for books at our town library when I was a kid, green or orange text on a black screen, no mouse).

by RetroTechie33 minutes ago|

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"Terminal" will do. These were text user interface (TUI) based browsers accessing a remote database, before web browsers appeared (or even the web itself). Fixed, very limited feature set, talking to database over plain LAN, a dedicated phone line or similar.

Possibly not even that: just a dumb terminal sending keystrokes & displaying text returned by the server.

Setups like this have been around almost as long as computers exist.

I recall that these replaced library catalogs in the form of drawers full of cards. Each card representing a book located elsewhere in the library (or available upon request from a central location). Man I'm old...