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What kind of web app are you developing?

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Everywhere you look on Product Hunt, browser extensions and web apps are absolutely exploding. But if you look at real-world screen time stats, mobile apps still capture the lion’s share of daily attention. Is the market splitting in two?

If you built a web-first product, did sticking strictly to desktop actually help your retention, or did it hurt you?

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I built web-first, but with PWA, so it installs on mobile seamlessly. Two birds I'd say, but I'm not very techy so I don't know if this helps or not.

 same like my case

I’m currently preparing a few SaaS products for launch.

The idea that the market is splitting misses a huge detail: a massive chunk of the "mobile apps" dominating screen time are actually just web apps under the hood. HTML and JS run practically everything today - mobile, desktop, smartwatches, train schedule boards, and even McDonald's kiosks.

The core problem with pure native development is the overhead: rewriting the same app in different languages for iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows. Web apps solve this because they just work everywhere out of the box.

So, building a web-first product doesn't mean sticking strictly to desktop. By keeping the UI fast and lightweight, a web app works and feels great on mobile too. It hasn't hurt retention at all; it just eliminated the nightmare of maintaining multiple native codebases.

Web app for me is kind of out of date since more people use mobile apps now

Hey! My quick pitch was waiting for this thread!!

My web app is basically a compliance scanner for vibe-coded apps. Paste a URL, 10 seconds later you see what EU regulators would (or wouldn't) fine you for -- trackers firing before consent, missing policies. No signup.

Web-first because founders fix their site from a desktop, not a phone. And honestly retention doesn't matter for us right now -- scan, fix, leave. If you never come back, it worked.

As a rule, the backend is a stateless API - this allows me to connect anything to it (website, mobile and desktop apps, AI). Alignment with frontend is maintained by generating OpenAPI types.

And now I'm testing how one universal Expo application (Expo Router + React Native for Web) would actually work as both a website and a mobile app.