Some practical benefits are
  • Much friendlier/intuitive installation process (compared to web app)
  • The app can register itself into "Share" dialog, so e.g. you see some good article in any app, click on share, SN is an option to immediately create a post out of it
  • Easier to do the views and animations (it's possible with web app, but somewhat tricky to make it performant)
  • Good notifications when you earn sats, or a person you are following posted something (again can be done with web app, but it's not that easy)
  • The post detail view can have two tabs - one to see comments and one to see the actual iframe. That would make it really easy to go back and forth between the article and comments.
  • Thumb friendly UI - e.g. the common actions are on the bottom so those can be reached by thumb. Also "tap" targets would be bigger...
  • Standardized/intuitive experience, e.g. hamburger menu in the usual place as in other mobile apps, etc. When you you swipe the left sidebar shows up.
  • Potentially can act as a mobile wallet (this is more of a brainstorm, but it would be cool to earn some sats on Stacker News and buy a beer with that immediately...)
  • Idea: Could have a "Read later" feature to essentially create a backlog of articles that I would like to read when I have time...
I also like the web app and it should always be an option to use web app, but there are some practical benefits to mobile app.
The other option is to also improve the current web app to add the features that I mentioned above (e.g. you could set manifest.json, set ServiceWorker, give it mobile icons, use the JS API to register notifications, do the element swiping, etc...)
Isn't there a way to then wrap that web app by some WebView and put it on app stores?
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yes! to all of this @nout
great vision!
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