> Plus, isn't this website undissmissably "better in the app" after a few minutes of attempting to use it on a phone? Where's that at?

This is the most annoying thing on the internet. There’s a site I’d like to use, but “try the app” takes up the entire page (and appears to be impossible to dismiss?). Actually, is there a way to permanently request the desktop site for all future visits to a domain on iOS? There is no reason to visit this full-page app advertisement.

eBay stops me from typing in the thing I want to search for so they can try to persuade me to use the app that I have expressed zero interest in for a decade or so. Guys, I'm trying to press money into your thieving little hands - why are you trying to stop me?

Wells Fargo went so far as to remove their best feature from their website: the Spending breakdown page! they now say go to the app but the app is far worse than the browser version was before they removed it. i might even stop using them just for this mess.

Its always confusing to me since I'm already accesing it through an app.

On iOS Safari, tap the three stacked lines on the URL bar (depending on which Safari view you use), tap Website Settings, then you'll see a Request Desktop Website switch, which should persist for that domain.

I'd recommend using Libredirect if you're on a Firefox-based mobile browser. It can configure redirects to alternate "frontends" that will serve you much more agreeable HTML (though because we live in hell, it will usually still involve antibotting out of sheer necessity. But I accept this.)

For Reddit, my choice for now is safereddit. If I need to view a Reddit link on mobile and old Reddit is blocked as it sometimes is, I just swap the domain to safereddit.com.

For Twitter, my choice has been xcancel for ages. I have no idea how that manages to stay up in spite of Twitter's hostility but it is a Nitter instance that seems to just work.

You can also run these frontends yourself, too, but I assume it requires accounts.

(edit: Also I hope it goes without saying that I don't really have any specific trust that my activity is necessarily more "private" with these frontends, although honestly if I was forced to bet I would have to bet that they are much more respectful to my privacy than Twitter or Reddit are. I just use them for functionality.)

Good luck fellow traveler. If there was more to do in real life, I'd probably had thrown my phone into the ocean by now. I'm about halfway there in spite of the lack of many appealing third spaces.

And don’t ever save the user’s “no” for next time. We need to needle them to use the app EVERY SINGLE TIME the visitor the website.

I wonder sometimes how the team doing the website feels about being treated as second class. Or if it’s the same team and they have to hold their noses to work on it.

The third dumbest smart person I had to work with obviously hated HTML and kept trying to get us to use a DSL instead. At least it wasn’t an in house one, but he had a couple other devs interested in his madness as well. But the two of us who were doing the bulk of the performance work and tricky bug fixes would have been absolutely sunk if we’d allowed that to happen. One of the worst things about React is trying to track back an HTML bug in someone else’s complex React project to the templates that are misbehaving together. The Grafana UI code is madness to debug.We would have been there very quickly and without the dev toolbox to help.

I have Firefox setup to not launch apps on android with permission. I don't have Instagram/Facebook/etc installed. Attempting to view a Instagram link on mobile is the most hostile thing in existence. You essentially can't, but it so aggressively routes you to the website based Google play store it's horrifying.

Some Fucking MBA (SFMBA) heard that apps build customer loyalty and increase eyeball time on their sites, so now their company needs an app.

Repeat (without rinsing).

If the site happens to be a discussion site that starts with 'R', clearing cookies will let you through for a while. In Brave, there's a setting to do so when you leave the page.

National cinema chain has a banner on their web site that says something like “film lovers prefer our app” so they manage to employ a little guilt / social proof as well.

It’s such a small thing in the grand scheme of things but it’s just that final straw for me, someone made the decision to be this shitty to their users because they want to employ extra tracking/data collection / advertising in their app.