I get that, if things are not changed on the Apple side, websites can’t have proper notification so you are forced to have an app but on android PWA (Progressive Web Apps - basically websites on steroids) are a real thing and you can just “install” the lemmy website of your instance and avoid any bloated app. Are you looking for an app with some feature missing from the website? Are you just unaware of the possibility of installing the website itself? I don’t want to sound rude (English isn’t my first language) but I don’t get what to me looks like an obsession to have a bloated app installed on your phone
I’m an Android developer, I usually spot a non native app immediately and the flaws in the ui are really annoying. Web apps are even worse.
A lot of the people coming in right now are specifically protesting Reddit due to the shut down of their preferred third party apps, especially Apollo, an iOS exclusive. Android has Jerboa and PWAs, but on iOS we just have the site (and mlem, but it’s very early days there). I think that if/when old Reddit gets shut down, the resulting exodus from that will not care as much about app access, as they were using the web previously.
The experience on the website is awful on mobile, while it’s fairly good on desktop
To me, properly optimized native apps tend to be less-bloated than their web equivalents. Have you ever used “RIF is fun” for reddit? It is amazing, lots of tiny UI optimizations make it a pleasure to consume content much faster than scrolling up and down reddit’s UI for both links and comments
PWAs work for sure, but you can really tell its just a full screen mobile website in a vast majority of cases. I am in no way saying PWAs are bad, but with apps that hook into APIs you have much wider latitude for how the data is presented and design choices
