There's an (unverified) myth that retention on mobile apps is better. This is one of those things that marketing people keep telling each other without ever verifying the facts. (Unless you deliberately make the web version inferior, of course.)<p>The reasoning behind it is that you should take real estate on the user's home screen at all costs, because your app's icon will serve as a reminder and people will allegedly come back to it and open more often.<p>But what matters at the end of the day is the product and the value it brings to the users. I'd argue that deceiving the users to provide real estate for your app does not help your business in the long term. If you get more installs today by coercing them (like Reddit does, for example) you will most definitely see some other metric such as retention decline over time.<p>Broadly, users - us that is - are not idiots. Deception works momentarily and can have an immediate effect on some metrics. Long term though, every user and no matter how smart or dumb, will eventually assess the value it gets them against the money, against their time, or against the "home screen real estate" they provided.<p>Speaking from my own experience with multiple mobile apps: there are many ways you can trick the users but you can't trick the longer terms statistics.
This reminds me of Reddit's approach to mobile. They make their mobile web interface excruciating to use, and block features client side just to push you onto their app.<p>I'm guessing it has to do with mobile users being more lucrative?
I formerly worked at Uber. I’m surprised that Bolt blocks the web app from working. Uber also built a web app which is incredibly lightweight - here’s a summary on how it was built [1]. It’s a life saver especially if e.g. at an airport and you pay for data over roaming. Uber doesn’t exactly advertise m.uber.com, but there’s no blocking of it.<p>My suspect is that Bold wants you to use their app as they can eg send push notifications, and gather more metadata from users - some of which can be used for eg more signal on determining if a request might be fraudulent.<p>[1] <a href="https://eng.uber.com/m-uber/" rel="nofollow">https://eng.uber.com/m-uber/</a>
> So basically I made it easier for me to give Bolt money. You're welcome, Bolt!<p>This is the key takeaway I think, so many online businesses spend so much time trying to push me into their app, or accounts, or subscriptions, that they forget they're supposed to be taking my money. There are plenty of services I would have loved to use, but ya'll made it so damn hard to give you my money and order your services that I gave up.
Does this kind of stuff really never backfire? I can see maybe with Bolt or Uber since you're in a hurry you might just cave, but I see this behavior everywhere!<p>In a world where every app tries to exploit "spur of the moment" brain shortcircuits a big nag seems counterintuitive, e.g. Reddit's "Download the app or go away" is my free reminder that I have better things to do.
I don’t install social media apps like Reddit, Facebook or Twitter. And all of them are trying to force me to install their apps. There is even a similar restriction with Facebook messenger, which you can use in mobile Chrome if you use the “request desktop site” feature, but not on the normal mobile site.
I'm glad that geo-fencing was mentioned.<p>This is what I think all these apps - Kuba, Bolt and all those food delivery companies are. They are changing behaviour at present, they make things easy and advantageous for the user. Then the trap will be sprung.<p>Similar to how corporate petrol stations and corporate super stores drop their prices to force local shops out of business. Once they have control and a monopolistic position they can do what they like re prices.<p>Here these companies are working with governance directives to decrease traffic on the roads - it suits the corporates for consumers to have less ability to travel. Making it easy for food, local travel etc whilst making it uncomfortable to have a car (extra regulations, decreasing capacity on roads, greater licensing fees, etc) is part of the plan.<p>The concern is that once we lose the freedom of independent travel that we have with private cars, that won't be coming back. You will be geo-fenced.<p>This itself fits very nicely with the dystopian agenda I see on the horizon, where if you are not considered a good citizen, your ability to travel and interact with the system will be curtailed. We see this with the freezing of protestor bank accounts in Canada, China's social credit system, green passes to access shops, etc. Geo fencing will be a part of that.
I can't speak for others, but I refuse to use most mobile apps. Websites run in a much smaller sandbox with an ad blocker. I can trust them to stop running code on my device after I close the tab. It won't try to hijack my attention with push notifications and icon badges.<p>If a business forces me to use their app, I won't use that business until I'm out of alternatives.
Web too good and too free. So we get crap like Reddit harrassing mobile web users to use their app and purposely sabotaging their own web interface to further that.
As a daily Bolt user I have two main guesses as to why they want everyone using the app.<p>1) GPS tracking. They want to know where you are at all times. The app makes this tracking easier than a webpage.<p>2) Upselling. The Bolt app has front and center upselling to their car rental service, their scooter rental service, and their food delivery service. All these services share the same account and payment info too. -- Do these exist in the web version? I don't see them on the screenshots. These upsells can be implemented on the web too of course, but that probably hasn't happened as it requires web apps for those services too.
> (I'm not going to share the particular details on which request and which query parameter that is)<p>Why not ? It's not like that would matter anyway...
From the thread:<p>> So basically I made it easier for me to give Bolt money. You're welcome, Bolt!<p>But does Bolt even want my money? Maybe the real reason they push apps so hard is that apps allow more access to that sweet, sweet private data on my phone so they can sell it, which is their real cash cow?
Yeah, unless we are talking about games or special hardware access, mobile Web has become good enough for this kind of use cases.<p>Naturally these kind of dark patterns to force apps don't apply.
> we, the users, are compliant with such abuse of monopoly.<p>But Bolt is not a monopoly. There are many taxi services in Riga.<p>> I invite you to boycott any company that forces (or coerces) you to install an app...<p>I do not think I will boycott Bolt just because you hacked their product and somehow become outraged. Bolt rides are cheaper than the alternative and .. the app works. The alternative mainstream taxi app needs an ios upgrade, and the ios upgrade fails on my shitty old phone.<p>Edit: There is no uber in riga looks like. Nice work, but running a company that generates cash at scale is hard. So i am sympathetic to the app developer.
If I were to speculate, Bolt steals and monetizes a ton of your data. App gives access to GPS, which can then be sold to hedge funds, advertisers, etc., with some veneer of GDPR-compliance.<p>Perhaps customers are no longer sustainable without that.
<i>> without an annoying app!</i><p>I fail to see why an app that delivers the promised feature can be annoying. More annoying than installing extensions, messing with HTTP requests, etc?