I've got an iPhone X. It's not the latest and greatest, but still runs fine and does basically everything I need it to do.
However, it seems like any time I need to visit an actual web site from my phone, the entire experience is just terrible. Nearly every web site fills the screen with resource-intensive ads, enormous newsletter sign up dialogs with tiny close buttons, and of course, the obligatory cookie notice.
I don't want to have an app for every single business I visit or service I subscribe to, but I also do what I can to avoid visiting their horrid web pages.
How do you tackle this? Or am I just making a big deal over nothing?
At Google some PMs used to lament that Android users spend more time in the browser than in apps versus iPhone. In my experience using browsers on Android are much better than on iPhone and not everything really wants to be an app.
Id point the finger at Google actually allowing different web browser apps (Safari drives every browser on iPhone and lags in many areas) and just natural competition. (If ads really bothers you an ad blocker is an install away).
My only complaint really being cookie banners but they suck the fun out of desktop web too.
It only gets laggy and slow when the app is obviously some poorly put together react native, Xamarin app, or some other non native app. You can tell usually because they just kept the exact same design from their iPhone app. You have to put a lot more work into those kind of apps to make them not run like garbage.
When there are speed differences, it’s often because the app in question was only ever tested against Chrome and/or makes use of Blink specific quirks (as YouTube did/does). I’ve also seen some talk about over aggressive polyfills gunking things up under non-Blink browsers.
I would wager it’s not Safari mobile though just your standard website got way more resource hungry due to SPA proliferation etc.
TL;DR hard to verify your claim as Safari is the only allowed browser engine on iOS.
If somebody had a jailbroken/dev phone that would eg allow compile and install of Firefox then we could actually know.. I’m very skeptical it’s down to the browser though. Not sure if typical benchmarks are telling as hardware always different. Again “badly optimized” websites and 6+ years old hardware; albeit should be fast enough…
Does "the web" work better, or the Google ecosystem?
One reason I don't want to move from iOS is their embedding of their stuff into the OS, which in turn beams my queries etc through GOOG.
But it's been a long time (multiple years) since I messed around with an Android tablet.
(Don't have the money to take risks rn, though ironically the next laptop will probably be anything but a macbook -- touchbar is terrible, heart my f keys)
the relentless nagging by some sites to install the mobile apps needs to die.
Just like the other popular post today lamenting the terrible state of scrollbars and other UI elements that has degraded the desktop UX in recent years....
Even the attention to mobile web experience seems to have degraded.
There was huge focus on optimizing the very limited bandwidth and resources on mobiles... there was WAP and XML ...people atleast tried. Now a 2 year old phone that is effectively a supercomputer struggles to load simple list pages and blogs.
It seems all about the hope that you can keep the user engaged long terms. I don't blame them, competition for user attention is brutal in the age of the SEO content farms, oligopoly of social networks and the "Tyranny of the Marginal User" as posted here a few days ago.
But probably way less effective now that most users seem overwhelmed by so many push notifications and instinctively learned to mass ignore or dismiss them (myself included, just randomly noticed that background habit a while ago). And then we end-up with piles of installed unused apps just like lost websites in the browser history.
Apple has been incredibly greedy and their user experience suffer tremendously. There really is no justification for shipping phones so expensive with so little RAM for so long besides ultra-greed. It makes the phones obsolete much earlier than they should be because while you can wait the work of a slower CPU if you can't fit your workload into RAM you are basically out of luck.
If you had spent as much money on a flagship Android back then you would have gotten 4GB minimum with a Galaxy S9 but more likely 6-8GB with a S9+ or Note 9 that were the real price competitors of an iPhone X (still cheaper).
So yeah iOS is aggressive in saving memory because it doesn't have much choice. Your iPhone 14 Pro has 6GB of RAM. This is 2GB less than a Galaxy S23 that cost almost half as much ; the Ultra version with 12GB of RAM still cost about as much. Even going with a 14 Pro Max would still only get you 6GB which is even worse of a joke considering the price.
It's infuriating because considering how cheap RAM chips have become they only save a very small amount per phone but their faithfull users who paid the high price to get "the best" are thanked with these kind of real-world use case annoyances...
To be honest I think it's kinda masochist to keep buying Apple products at the moment. I'm a first time iPhone user and I like iOS overall but the value proposition of even their cheapest product doesn't make sense anymore...
If I can avoid having to use an app I do using the website instead.
I think your experience is a result of apples restrictive appstore policies.
But in response to your title question, yes! Not just mobile, IMO, but it's usually worse there. Web site experiences are generally terrible these days.
I wish we hadn't come to the point where we _need_ content blocking to browse the web sanely. I constantly feel like I'm using sites where the people deciding the user experience are not themselves users of the site. Or if they are, they just don't care about usability over bottom line and A/B metric testing results.
The issue also is that often when using the back button the page reloads ( I suspect due to memory issues on my iPhone 11) and I lose track of my reading position.