In Jeremy’s recent post, ‘The web on mobile’, he quite rightly bemoans the perennial experience of using websites on mobile phones:

Never mind the terrible performance penalties incurred by unnecessary frameworks and libraries like React and its ilk, there’s the constant game of whack-a-mole with banners and overlays. What’s just about bearable in a large desktop viewport becomes intolerable on a small screen.

The thrust of Jeremy’s post is to put the blame on developers and designers: This is not a technical problem. This is a people problem. Specifically, the people who make websites. Which I think is a bit unfair. Not the frameworks bit – that’s fair enough – but the overlays bit, and other aspects to the user experience that implies.

It’s true that overlays and banners are awful, and for me render a lot of magazines and news sites utterly unusable. But I wonder where the decision making is in that? Surely it goes far beyond the designer? Perhaps when Jeremy blames the people who make websites he also has in mind the product owner and commercial executive who will be forcing these decisions upon the user? I realise this is me gifting the ‘just following orders’ excuse to those designing hostile user experiences, but company culture will dictate how much agency those people actually have.

But that’s not the point I really wanted to make. Jeremy’s correct in that the mobile web experience has frequently been ruined by decisions made by the people responsible for making and shaping websites. But what he didn’t mention were the hurdles that mobile browsers also bring on both iOS (in particular) and Android.

Jeremy quotes John Gruber:

There’s absolutely no reason the mobile web experience shouldn’t be fast, reliable, well-designed, and keep you logged in. If one of the two should suck, it should be the app that sucks and the website that works well. You shouldn’t be expected to carry around a bundle of software from your utility company in your pocket. But it’s the other way around.

If web apps are to compete with native apps in the affections of users, then they need to be equivalent. Progressive web apps (PWAs) can do everything the native apps can do, so the barrier isn’t there. The path to installing a native app is well trodden. We search the App Store (or ironically follow a link from a website), hit ‘Get’ and the app is downloaded to our phone’s home screen, ready to use any time with a simple tap.

A PWA can also live on your home screen, nicely indistinguishable from a native app. But the journey to getting a PWA – or indeed any web app – onto your home screen remains convoluted to say the least. This is the lack of equivalence I’m driving at. I wonder if the mobile web experience would suck as badly if web apps could be installed just as easily as native apps?