Web and native apps
August 17, 2026 at 2:19 PM by Dr. Drang
This is sacrilegious among some parts of Apple fandom, but I like using web apps. Oh, sure, I can imagine a world in which there’s a carefully crafted Mac app that has all the functions of a website I use but has all the Mac-like interface features I love and isn’t hobbled by a web UI. But I don’t live in that world and don’t expect I ever will.
For example, will the Python Software Foundation ever make a Mac app that includes all the documentation I regularly use? And even if they do, is it likely they’ll put in the effort to make better than just visiting the Python Docs web page? Would that be in keeping with their mission? So instead of waiting around for something that will never happen, I used Unite Pro to make a Python Docs site-specific browser.
Launching it takes me straight to the standard library home page, from which I can quickly jump to the docs of whichever module I’m invoking in my current script. I have similar SSBs for the Matplotlib and Pandas documentation.
You might argue that these SSBs aren’t really web apps, that they’re basically a set of static web pages connected by links. That’s nearly true, but while they don’t have the kind of interaction that you see in, say, Google Sheets, they do have search features that make them more interactive than just a list of links. Regardless of how interactive they are, they serve my needs.
You might also suggest I use Dash, an actual app, instead of an SSB for browsing documentation. It incorporates many many sets of documentation and uses local copies so you don’t have to be online to use it. These are all good points and are why I tried Dash several years ago. It just didn’t fit me, probably because searches in Dash returned too many results across too many libraries. There are probably ways to get it to serve up more focused results, but I didn’t want to become a Dash expert (I’m not Brett Terpstra). I just wanted to see documentation relevant to what I was working on at the time. Initially that meant going to the appropriate website; now it means launching the appropriate SSB.
But I’m not a web app absolutist. I recently ended a web app experiment that’s brought me back to a native app. This was with Mastodon and Mona. When Mona 7 came out at the end of last year, I decided to hold off on buying its Ultra in-app purchase. After all, I thought, Mastodon exists on the web. Does it really need an app?
So I made an SSB with Unite Pro for the Mac and used the free versions of Mona on iOS and iPadOS. Eventually, I felt guilty about using an app without paying the developer, so I did the Add to Home Screen thing on my iPhone and iPad a couple of weeks ago to even things out and use the web on all three platforms. It was terrible.
The biggest problem was the lack of timeline syncing and updating. In theory, this problem should have started when I was using Mona on two devices and an SSB on the third. In practice, it wasn’t so bad because I do almost all of my Mastodon reading and posting on my phone. It was when I started using “web Mastodon” on my phone that I noticed how poorly Mastodon updates the timeline.
On the web, Mastodon puts a link at the top of the page saying there are new posts to load into your timeline. When you tap the link, the new posts load, but your position in the timeline can jump around wildly, and then you have to scroll to get back to where you were. A small annoyance, perhaps, but one that happens again and again every day.
And there’s no syncing between platforms with web Mastodon. This is, as I said, less of a problem for me because I’m mainly reading and posting on my phone, but the scrolling necessary on one device to get to where I had been on another just reminded me of all the scrolling described in the previous paragraph, and it seemed worse.
So I subscribed to Mona Ultra and switched to it on all three platforms. The Mastodon web Home Screen icons are gone from my iPhone and iPad, and the SSB is gone from my Mac. Ultra’s extended settings are nice, and I’m happy to pay for them, but the main advantage is the smoother experience I get with a real app written to use the features of the platform(s) it runs on. In this case, one of those features is iCloud syncing.
(By the way, if you feel tempted to tell me about another Mastodon app, like Ivory, don’t. I know about them—I’m happy with Mona.)
In summary, I don’t have any magic tricks for choosing between web apps and native apps. I just know that it’s worth a little time to try out both and see what fits. Every app and every person is different, and you have to decide from direct experience.