TikTok Android Sideloading

As much as I hate for TikTok to be the example of this, my thought was exactly the same as yours. We used to have these things called web pages. I don't understand why everything has to be an app. Apple was too successful, and Google with them. People don't even remember that these are all just websites with extra steps.

I've been watching youtube through their webpage on my phone for two years now. In the beginning there was something I missed from the app. Now I can't remember what it was.

It has the fullscreen, tap to skip ahead/back double speed etc.

As long as notifications isn't super important (and I can see why they would be) I think most social media apps could work really well as webapps.

The app is more about the companies getting information about their users than providing benefits for them

And in principle notifications (webpush) should be working now if the PWA is on your home screen.

Responsive, smooth UI? Simple installation process from the store?

Nah. In the end, and although I find the use of the web as an app delivery platform distasteful, ultimately there's no principle reason that PWAs should not be feasible on iOS.

But easy sideloading would be better.

Yeah, a proper web app is a really good approach to solving parts of this conundrum and I don’t think there are a lot of reasons for consuming content (TikTok Live and PIP might be two areas that are problematic, especially since Safari PWAs are so half-assed), but the problem is that TikTok isn’t just a client app, it’s also a creation app and in some ways, a live streaming app.

Now, obviously web technologies do exist that will let you livestream just fine from a web browser. Companies have made billions of dollars doing that. But not on mobile and I’m not sure mobile Safari could support that (regular Safari’s RTMP support is still weak compared to Chrome and even Firefox). But the bigger issue is uploading and editing content. The filters and green screen tools and AI stuff that TikTok uses in their app isn’t something you could replicate on mobile web with feature parity, especially not in a performant way. And the upload cache alone with mobile Safari would almost certainly choke.

I doubt Android is any better, even tho it should be better, given the investments that have gone into ChromeOS (where there is a TikTok app but I don’t think it does uploading stuff and now it’s probably impossible for me to even check).

So in the short term they could definitely just make the website better for browsing but that doesn’t solve a much deeper problem which is, if you’re reliant on content getting uploaded from mobile (which their algorithm historically valued more than the desktop uploads). Creators making money will go through the hassle of uploading from an actual computer but the masses won’t.