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Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats

972: These Things Make Your App Feel Like Crap on Mobile

Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats

Wes Bos

Tech News, Technology, News

4.91.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2026

⏱️ 38 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Wes and Scott talk about why mobile web apps often feel “janky” compared to native—and how to fix it. They cover input zooming, accidental horizontal scroll, pointer/user-select quirks, frame rate consistency, full-page refreshes, and more. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 01:11 Brought to you by Sentry.io 02:57 Zooming inputs 06:11 Horizontal scrolling 08:49 Proper use of pointer-events: none, and user-select: none 11:27 Allowing zoom on everything 16:37 Cleaning up the “jank” 19:48 Full page refresh 24:05 Slow loading times 29:50 Cumulative layout shift 32:47 Address bars and viewport units Dynamic Viewport Units 35:34 Full-width scroll traps Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Your mobile apps might feel like crap.

0:04.1

And we're going to tell you what are the main things that make a mobile app feel worse than a native mobile app.

0:13.4

All of our pet peeves, all of the things that web developers could be doing better to improve their web apps on mobile.

0:22.2

My name is Scott Tolensky.

0:23.3

I'm a developer from Denver with me, as always is Wes Boss.

0:26.4

What's up, Wes?

0:27.4

Hey, I'm excited to talk about this because, like, I was talking to some people from, actually,

0:33.8

from Google, and they're just like, like, why everyone is still so hung up on like

0:37.8

native being better and there's some clear things like access to APIs and and whatnot

0:43.0

but I think like there's a lot of the reason why people like a mobile app better is

0:48.4

simply just because doesn't feel janky and I watch my kids use websites sometimes and it's just like,

0:56.7

oh my gosh, what have we done? You know, they're clicking the wrong thing. They're 3D touching

1:01.2

everything. They're highlighting text by accident. It's just, it's a nightmare. And these things

1:07.0

are all fixable if you know what you're doing. So that's what we're going to talk about today.

1:10.4

That's right. And a lot of these things can be fixed with Century. This episode is presented by Century at century.com. I.O. forward slash syntax. I know we get two months for free. Use the coupon code, tasty treat. I'll lowercase all one word. But Century is really cool for a lot of these things like rage click detection. Man, if you click a button

1:29.1

a whole bunch of times, Central alert you that, hey, your users are rage clicking this button,

1:34.5

and that's usually for a number of reasons. Your app is not responsive. Your app isn't showing the

1:40.3

user what it's doing. It's not making the button disabled while it's doing something. There's a number of reasons. And dead click as well. Do you know the difference between a dead click and a rage click, Scott? Tell me. A little trivia. School me. Speak on that. So a rage click is what you just expect, explain, right? People clicking over and over and over again. And a dead click is when somebody clicks something and there is no, nothing happens after there's

2:02.1

a certain threshold.

2:03.5

I think it's like 250 milliseconds.

2:05.5

So if there's no like UI that has updated or there's no network detection that has been fired

2:12.0

off, you know, there's, you can't tell that something happened.

...

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