Call it the return! -- the mobile web app coming back to center stage. Recently?, Apple used a keynote to announce that starting next year they'll unbolt the WebKit-related standard features that had been locked away inside Apple only. What's interesting is that I came across the response to this news not anywhere else, but on Rocketpunch, so I'm jotting down a few thoughts.
#Personally I'm a pretty heavy user of Rocketpunch. Whenever I change jobs, one of the first things I tend to do is coordinate with the management-support team, persuade my teammates, and register both personal and company profiles on Rocketpunch more or less as a top priority. There are still plenty of functional issues that are inconvenient or, unintentionally, make you commit small rudenesses to other people. The most representative case: when the other party sends an important message -- say, negotiating an interview schedule -- notifications sometimes fail to fire even though both the app and web are logged in. Still, lots of attractive startups and companies who want to look "startup-ish" register their profiles there. It's hard to put into words, but I think it has a similar-yet-different texture compared to traditional job boards. The co-work? merger? with Jibmuusil in particular is genuinely nice. It feels less like drawing the user's journey within the boundaries of one's own app, and more like encompassing the whole domain of the user's life. That phrasing is fuzzy; in more planning-jargon terms, you often see solutions that consider not just the product-scoped user experience map, but a broader, more fundamental user journey map. It overlaps in my head with that feeling of IDEO, when asked to redesign a train seat, not designing the seat itself but doing service design for the user's journey. Of course there are many inconveniences. But irresponsible criticism of a project I'm not part of is pointless; as a user, I just make good use of what I need, be thankful for it, and learn what there is to learn -- so it's not really a big issue.
Rocketpunch is changing?!
1) At some point, sync performance between the web app and the app got better...
Shortly after that, native-service (product) areas started getting added one by one...
And recently, they've gone as far as guiding users to install the web app (add a shortcut icon).
2) What struck me as even more impressive in the middle of all this was
that clicking the shortcut icon... presents the same splash screen you'd see on clicking the native app.
Wow, you can do it like this too! Amazing...
3) What's interesting is that Rocketpunch's changes started on the native app first. Sync performance improved, simple mirroring disappeared, and then the web app appeared. At this point my curiosity is burning: which team raised the web-app-shortcut issue (epic)? Are there separate PMs (POs) for the web app and the native app? What scenarios are the web app and the native app planning to interact through? Haha. Pure fun to watch.
