Android

Imo all apps like facebook, twitter, Instagram, reddit, imdb, or anything else that requires network and gives almost no benefits are pointless (and always were).

I'm not gonna lie, this was like one of two sentences I understood lol

Speaking from someone who's worked on both, there absolutely is a case for native Android apps. The biggest is engagement, having push notifications is huge for getting people to come back to your platform. Quite frankly, once Lemmy apps start getting going with notifications, there will probably be a really nice uplift.

Secondly, you can currently do way more with code running on the device than Javascript in a browser. Video editing comes to top of mind.

theoretically app requires less bandwidth for requesting only JSON

This was the other half sentence I understood, and I think it's wrong. Most apps are SPAs with cache, so for a lot of cases the only thing going through the network is JSON.

I think the reason you can make that statement is because the mobile web got better faster than app SDKs got better. That's a good thing!

A few things apps can do that I sometimes appreciate:

• Richer notifications (especially on Android - it has a really rich notification system)
• Richer / more robust integration with camera
• Better sharing with other native apps
• Click on a link in an email or a website and have it open in the native app rather than navigating to a new page

If mobile web could do all of those things we'd be set.

I see most people are finally getting it and there are less useless rest clients nowadays.

I'm interested in hearing a source for this. Not saying I think you're lying, it's just still what I see a lot of devs are into. A lot our software engineering courses are tailored specifically to making cool android website frontends.

It's not difficult to see why they're developed though, while mobile sites are definitely feasible, browsing the web on mobile can be a cumbersome experience because we are trying to shove many features onto a device with no external input devices and a small screen real-estate. In a dedicated app we have a more granular control over UI that would be difficult to pull off in a browser. Also, apps do actually require less bandwidth for only requesting JSON.