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If I visit any SE site on my phone, I get the following banner on questions encouraging me to download the app:

enter image description here

It is possible to dismiss this banner, but you have to do this for every single site individually.

The problem with advertising the SE Android App is that it is far inferior to the mobile site I'm already looking at. Right now, it actually doesn't work at all, it just crashes on start. This problem exists for at least 11 hours right now, likely for every user of the Android app. A problem like this affecting the actual website would have been fixed in minutes.

The app is essentially unsupported now, it lacks features compared to the mobile site and is just overall a much inferior experience. There is a single reason to use the app at all, and that is push notifications. SE never invested enough resources into the app to make it a good alternative, and I can certainly understand the reason why they abandoned it now.

It doesn't make sense to advertise an inferior solution on the mobile site itself. The vast majority of users seeing that banner won't know that the app is unsupported and inferior to the mobile site. The reasonable expectation would be that the app provides a better experience than the mobile site, but it doesn't.

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  • 3
    Can we do that for the iOS app too? Its quality is much better than the Android version, but still, it is annoying to dismiss that notification over and over again.
    – Patrick Hofman
    Feb 16, 2018 at 10:54
  • @PatrickHofman I don't know it, I've heard it is somewhat better than the Android app, so I'm simply focusing on the app that I actually know. It might make sense to do the same for iOS, but I don't have any experience with it.
    – Mad Scientist
    Feb 16, 2018 at 10:55
  • I still use the iOS app, work good except some minor bug, sad to see the android’s one work that bad
    – yagmoth555
    Feb 16, 2018 at 11:10
  • I never use the app anymore (I only have it to show me notifications)... I just log into the website on chrome app on my phone. This would be great to finally get!
    – Welz
    Feb 16, 2018 at 12:39
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    + the app isn't even being developed any more; there's no point in telling users to use an app that isn't even being patched
    – Zoe stands with Ukraine
    Feb 16, 2018 at 16:16

1 Answer 1

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I agree. I've gone ahead and disabled the app banner on all sites, hopefully temporarily until a point where we begin reinvesting dev time into the apps.

Sorry about the degraded experience, and sorry I didn't do this sooner.

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  • Is this android only or both android and iOS?
    – Catija StaffMod
    Feb 20, 2018 at 21:05
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    @Catija it's the same banner and the same switch to control both, so both.
    – Kasra Rahjerdi
    Feb 20, 2018 at 21:22

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