Half-Finished Apps: When "Use Our App" Means Falling Back to the Web

A developer’s attempt to subscribe to an events calendar on a Pixel running Android 17 exposed a basic gap: the updated Google Calendar app can’t add a calendar from a URL at all. The only fix was loading calendar.google.com in the phone’s desktop-mode browser, adding the subscription there, and watching it sync into the app that couldn’t do the job itself. The point isn’t the one missing button — it’s that a trivial feature (add, validate, save) never got built despite the platform owner’s resources.

The piece widens into a critique of the app-first push across the industry. Companies chase a homescreen presence to juice engagement metrics, then ship apps that punt users back to the browser the moment they step outside a narrow set of supported actions. Drawing on experience building for Symbian, BlackBerry, and Palm, the author argues the core weakness of native apps has always been update friction: every change must be tested across countless devices and slowly distributed, so apps end up pulling functionality from remote servers — effectively reinventing the web browser.

The takeaway is pragmatic rather than anti-app. Native still wins for certain capabilities, offline use, and an icon on the homescreen, but the web is closing that gap and can already handle much of it. If a company insists on shipping an app, the ask is simply to finish it rather than leave users bouncing between a crippled app and the site it was meant to replace.