You can't use Facebook Messenger on the web at all, unless you go to Facebook and switch to the desktop version. Then it's a simple matter of zooming in without accidentally clicking anything, using their fiddly interface to load up the conversation you're interested in, and get bounced around the screen as the input focus changes around.
Puzzled because I use Messenger web version all the time on the laptop. Works pretty normally. I don't use Facebook usually. Maybe if they detect a phone they refuse?
Usually they only break the mobile websites. They know they won't get people to install programs on their computers for "online things". Not least lots of people don't have admin rights in their computers, but also people are used to accessing "online things" via browsers on computers rather than an app per website.
But, they've managed to make "phones use apps, not browsers" a social norm that enough people accept tacitly, perhaps because near enough everyone has the ability to install apps on their own phones.
On iOS devices you can turn off the ability to allow apps to wake up on a one by one basis “background refresh”.
And if you are concerned with your privacy, it’s nonsensical to buy a phone run by an adtech company that only made the operating system in the first place to sell ads and collect your data
Pwa with permissions granted gives access to:
Location, create notification, phone state, phone #, IMEI, motion data
Mobile app with permissions gives access to
EVERYTHING a pwa gets PLUS, Contacts, sms, notification content, biometrics data, web browsing data, phone activity history, location history, camera access, microphone access, NFC access, near device history, nearby wifi listing, saved wifi networks, Bluetooth device ID, Bluetooth beacons nearby, some device settings, personal data access(photos/music)
Maybe on Android. Literally half of that shit isn’t accessible by iOS apps even with full permissions. This feels like you’re just throwing shit against the wall.
I was wondering if it's just me. I am using Brave on iOS with all the possible blockers enabled, so I'm not surprised when some website doesn't work well. Instagram literally freezes solid after 5-15s of being on the website, so I usually only quickly scan the top 2-3 posts in the feed. I only follow people I know personally, so this is usually enough to do once or twice a day and stay up to date. If I see a close friend posted a story I kinda want to see then it usually takes two or three hard closes of the browser to actually see it. Sucks, but sucks less than being mental gamed into doomscrolling every time I get an app notification.
By the stopwatch it takes 3x longer for me to upload a photo to the Instagram web app than it does to Mastodon. Facebook's blue website works pretty well but the Instagram site comes across like something that was vibe coded in a weekend or maybe a straw man that was made to prove SPAs are bad. Contrast that to the Mastodon application produced by a basically unfunded application that's fast and reliable.
Just hours ago I couldn't even copy-paste a description of a post I drafted in another app. Literally nothing happened when I tried to paste. No console errors, no feedback, nothing.
It was a bit of a longer one, but still far below Instagram's supposed character limit. The fact that they somehow broke copy-paste functionality really baffles me.
Surely at some point some team that writes this has to demo it and someone checks it. After however many years of it not working, surely that's strategic, not accidental.
It's such a pervasive pattern and somehow always in the direction: the app works better than the website. If there even is a website.
Sometimes it goes the other way, in fact enough it's a running gag that the banner that says "Download our app for a better experience" at sites like Reddit ought to have one of these
I don't know if big companies even know how to make web apps. Honestly. Which is extra insane to me because there's so much investment in web technologies. On my team at $BigTech there's like 1 or 2 people out of 30 people on our team that knows web, the rest are mobile. I'm a web guy but I refuse to touch our web-app because they butchered the tech stack and I don't have the energy to deal with that BS. We still have an mobile-web version distinct from the 'desktop' version because.... I don't know why, whoever wrote it never learned about responsive web design and we never bothered to move out of the stone ages because if people want to use the app on their phone, they should download the native app of course! And by "native" I mean we built our own half-baked framework so that we could cross-compile for Android and iOS.
Also I don't think these people know how capable PWAs are. There's very little you can't do in a web-app that you can do with a native app.
Uber for example doesn't seem to work from my phone browser.
What surprises me is how many engineers must be involved in this kind of scummy shit and keep it tightly under wraps.