Tech Report: The Passive-Aggressive “Get The App” Banner
A strange priority
Tech sites are littered with intrusive “get the app” banners, often covering content that works perfectly fine in a browser. As Ethan Marcotte points out, these prompts imply native applications are a more worthy investment of a company’s limited resources than the website itself — a curious stance given the web’s ubiquity.
The human cost
The banners also raise an uncomfortable question, one once voiced by developer Tim Holman: What would it feel like to work on the web team at a company like this? Countless engineers spend their days building and refining websites that sit behind big, dismissive prompts urging users to abandon their work entirely. It’s a demoralizing dynamic, to say the least.
A better path
The ideal endgame would be a world where companies don’t really care how you access their service. If the product is built on shared technology, it should offer full functionality regardless of the device or delivery method — making the banner not just annoying, but unnecessary.
