I have an app that is literally just a wrapper around the website. The mobile website and the mobile app are the exact same experience.
Before I built the app, people were constantly asking me to build a mobile app. Yes, I had a PWA but people still wanted an app.
I thought it was kind of silly but I eventually built that wrapper app. It immediately got thousands of downloads, users upgrading to paid plans increased by 10x, and app users have way better metrics that website users.
It's pretty interesting, but as a website owner, having an app is valuable.
It is silly but you have to meet customers where they are.
I think the problem is also that PWAs don't have any discoverability, and no standardization. I did some consulting work for a company that had a PWA. They had a 200-line long react component that was intended to determine what modal to show the user depending on what web browser and OS they were using to instruct them how to install PWA depending on the combination of OS and browser.
This is a lot of friction for the dev, and it's not clear to an average user what a PWA is. But they are familiar with, and for better or worse, trust, the App store. If I didn't know what a PWA and a site said "open menu and click on 'install!'" I'd be very wary of following those instructions!
I think Android and iOS should provide some sort of hook between the app store and PWAs before they really start to catch on.
Yeah, I had a lengthy customer service email template explaining how to install the PWA for when people asked about a mobile app. Almost nobody installed it.
I actually don't know what you mean by PWA. Is that a mobile web site? And by installing it, do you mean installing a link to it on a phone's launcher?
That, but with a little more ceremony. It gets treated as a separate app by mobile OS app switchers and doesn't show the browser's chrome or other open tabs.
Besides users being more familiar with apps in the past, PWAs are still kneecapped in some subtle ways to make them want apps. I wish PWAs were the norm, so much easier.
From what I gathered with my imperfect data, almost nobody was using the app as a PWA even with an in-app nudge for it. I instantly got lots of downloads when I released iOS and Android apps. My users just don't want PWAs for the most part it seems.
That's typical. I think it's mainly familiarity, which in turn comes from PWAs missing basic capabilities in the past or present so everyone made apps instead. Push notifications in PWAs is a recent thing. PWAs don't share cookies with browsers, which entirely breaks some auth flows like Firebase. It's still hard to tell users to install it as you mentioned. And PWAs didn't even exist at some point.
The other thing is, many websites have bad or broken PWAs. It's usually just the website without tabs or back arrow, which sometimes makes navigation awkward because they built it assuming a browser. I'll always use the browser over the PWA.
It could be that your app is amazingly well done. But most PWAs and web apps turned into an "app" are not meeting my quality standards. It's usually a clunky experience (well, like a browser).
I think once you've seen the actual possibilities of what e.g. an iOS app can do, when done correctly, everything changes for you.
My mobile app is pretty decent actually. Other than some stylistic differences, I can't tell where the native wrapper ends and then embedded view starts. The embedded view is a SPA though so it never does full page loads.
There's usually some random mandatory updates I have to do about 1-2 times a year, so you need updates even with no development.
My React-Native wrapper app handles native auth and native payments, so I occasionally need to tweak that, but it's rare.
I'm considering a rewrite in Capacitor so I can change those things without modifying the mobile app. It's not that releasing the mobile app is a big deal, but it's that it can take many weeks for users to update the mobile app, so I have to keep the website backwards compatible with the old mobile app. It makes testing new checkout flows and stuff more difficult.
Ugh, I run a B2B SaaS app that's mobile friendly, but people keep asking for an app (and I really do need push notifications, I'm spending thousands per month on text messages right now), but I've been putting it off. Did the App Stores have issues with you publishing just a simple RN wrapper app?
No issues at all. I have two tabs in the RN app. One tab is basically the entire app, which is just an embedded web view. The other tab is a basic account tab (sign in, log out, delete account, cancel plan). I also have native auth and native payments.
I'm not 100% sure yet, but I might regret using React-Native over Capacitor. I have to bridge things like auth and payments between the web view and the native app. For example, the web app has a flow where you need to login, so it opens the login modal. If you're inside the mobile app, instead of doing that, it sends a message up to the native app to open the native app's login modal. Then once login is complete, the native app sends a message into the webview with the auth token. Similar thing for payments. That all works great, but occasionally I want to make a breaking change. Since it takes many weeks to get an update rolled out everyone, I have to keep the webapp backwards compatible for a long time. That slows down iterating on stuff like AB testing checkout flows. I don't think I'd have to worry about this if I was using Capacitor because the native functionality would be mostly driven from the webapp code.
Its a monthly/annual subscription. They can pay on the website or via native payments in the mobile app. The subscription works no matter where you bought it.
Fwiw, I stopped using ChatGPT and went to a competitor because the checks slow down ChatGPT so much that the webapp becomes unusable in anything but a new short chat. CPU usage goes to 100%, you can't type, the entire tab freezes, etc. It's a miserable experience to use and I'm on a relatively new MacBook not some old computer. If you read around it's a very common problem people have been having for a while now.
Looking back, how do you feel about your slate of past projects?
I'm curious as TinyPilot is your most successful project and it looks like the most business-oriented thing you built: as in, its a product aimed at serious businesses. Whereas Zestful is a niche micro-saas and Is It Keto is a niche website. Perhaps I'm characterizing things wrong, but that's my rough perception.
>Looking back, how do you feel about your slate of past projects?
I feel like I learned something valuable from all of them.
The ones I'm most proud of are TinyPilot, my book, and my blogging course (in that order). Those are, uncoincidentally, the ones where I found product-market fit, whereas the rest never really achieved that.
TinyPilot was business-oriented by mistake. When I initially made it, I thought the market was entirely hobbyists who would rather make a DIY KVM than buy a $600 enterprise-y device. As I continued working on it, I found that my customers were much more interested in paying a higher price for a pre-made device than saving money with a DIY solution.
But yeah, I think the fact that it appealed to businesses made it more viable than my other business attempts that were consumer-focused.
>> I found that my customers were much more interested in paying a higher price for a pre-made device than saving money with a DIY solution
This could have been a 50-yr-old comment about the Apple I computer! Lol
>> Wozniak intended to share schematics of the machine for free; however, Jobs advised him to start a business together and sell bare printed circuit boards (PCBs) for the computer, without any components soldered on.
...
Terrell told Jobs that he would order 50 units of the Apple I and pay $500 each on delivery, but only if they came fully assembled – he was not interested in buying bare printed circuit boards with no components.
How odd. I googled their name and a few sentences from their post. They post stuff in a few other places too. They appear to be some sort of electronics installer from China. I don't see a single promotional link anywhere but it's all the same content for months, obviously written by AI. Must be some bad attempt at marketing.
I see junior devs hyping vibe coding and senior devs mostly using AI as an assistant. I fall in the latter camp myself.
I've hired and trained tons of junior devs out of university. They become 20x productive after a year of experience. I think vibe coding is getting new devs to 5x productivity, which seems amazing, but then they get stuck there because they're not learning. So after year one, they're a 5x developer, not a 20x developer like they should be.
I have some young friends who are 1-3 years into software careers I'm surprised by how little they know.
If I find myself writing code in a way that has me saying to myself "there has to be a better way," there usually is. That's when I could present AI with that little bit of what I want to write. What I've found to be important is to describe what I want in natural language. That's when AI might introduce me to a better way of doing things. At that point, I stop and learn all that I can about what the AI showed me. I look it up in books and trusted online tutorials to make sure it is the proper way to do it.
Companies do the least they can to employ people. That means paying them just enough and giving them just enough perks. I'm sure they'd provide housing if it was needed to competitively hire.
I've seen big companies like Microsoft offer company housing for new immigrants to ease their move to the US. It's also not uncommon for companies to pay for your cross-country move and temporary housing until you can buy a house.
The best clear example I've seen of LLMs making money is a company that now generates custom email text instead of using standard email templates. They increased engagement by some meaningful metric like +15% which translates into hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
I know the original email was something like "Alert: you have a new thing: X Thing"
And the new emails are a prompt something like "we know all of this about the user and all of this about the X thing, write an email alerting them to the new thing with these particular goals".
I really don't know much about it so I'm being pretty vague and generic.
Before I built the app, people were constantly asking me to build a mobile app. Yes, I had a PWA but people still wanted an app.
I thought it was kind of silly but I eventually built that wrapper app. It immediately got thousands of downloads, users upgrading to paid plans increased by 10x, and app users have way better metrics that website users.
It's pretty interesting, but as a website owner, having an app is valuable.
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