There's an app for that

More and more websites are pushing you to use their apps. If you try to open their website while on mobile, you get a pop-up that says something similar to there’s an app for that.

People kept ignoring that, so, to push you to use the app, rather than the website, the messaging got updated with an unspoken … and we’ll enshittify everything to push you to it.

And, the app itself is getting worse and worse over time, so we can finish with and then enshittify the app too.

I started this because over the year I had to use LinkedIn on mobile, and each time I was using it in the browser every few interactions were followed by the pop-up to switch to the app. The web version itself was pared down, missing features such as the possibility to add someone by scanning a QR code – this exists only on the app, but the main reason why I was using LinkedIn on mobile was to add people I was talking with at the conferences I was at. In the rare case when I was trying to look at the feed, I was seeing 3-4 weeks old posts, with limited interaction potential.

But, the reason why I’m writing this is that they sent me an email – even though I have disabled email notifications – to announce that there is an 2026 LinkedIn wrapped content. In order to access it, I have to either read the email on mobile and click a link, or scan a QR code to open that link on mobile. Of course, both are then upsells to the app.

Why is everyone pushing us to use apps when the website version should be usable enough? It’s mostly a rhetorical question: ads, monitoring via overly-broad permissions, pushing to use an in-app browser which will ignore extensions, push more adds, track further, have more vulnerabilities, and so on.

At least if the app itself would not be bad. But, over time, even the app becomes worse. For this second part, I’m switching to the “X - the everything app”. In order to push everyone to use the new “e2e-encrypted” chat system, the old one got disabled (so you lose all those chats) and trying to save a link – by sharing it via email or in Google Keep, or other alternatives –, gives you a very large pop-up that says Before you can share posts with others, you will need to finish setting up X Chat. This is not true, the sharing buttons are still visible below the pop-up and you can click on them, the only one that doesn’t work is sharing a link via a DM (in the old system, which doesn’t exist anymore, or in the new system which is not yet set-up).

Before this forced pop-up was implemented, the link to the post contained the username, and the sharing message was also containing the tweet content. Sharing by email was using Post by ${username} as the subject. Now, the username is replaced by a generic i, and the only content that gets shared is the link. The email subject is empty. Why be informative, when your only motivation now is to force people to get locked into a single ecosystem?

There are other apps and other similar patterns where respect the user is no longer followed, but this is becoming a longer rant than what I was planning, so I’ll stop here.