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It's frustrating how "mobile-first" has become "mobile-only". I've encountered several utility companies, banks, and other important services, who have fairly important features only present in the mobile apps (whereas I prefer to do "important business" like that sitting at my desk with a large screen and physical keyboard). The worst is when they don't even tell you this, offering a desktop web UI that is essentially in maintenance-only mode, and you only discover things are missing if you happen to install the app


The irony of this, for me, is that when the iPhone came out, I was annoyed that people kept building "mobile-optimized" web UIs that had some trivial sliver of the functionality that their desktop website had... even though the iPhone pointedly comes with a full browser capable of rendering the full website: someone had just decided "people on their phone will only want to do these four things so let's make a simpler website with painfully-large text that only has four buttons on it to make that easier for them".


It was also fun seeing how long some of those sites held onto their pinstripe backgrounds.


Mobile apps can be useful but please let me do tasks from desktop web browser if I want to. Sadly, with the general shift to esp. younger people mostly using smartphones for many things, I expect the trend will continue.




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