This is a special post for quick takes by Yeonwoo Kim. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Why doesn’t LessWrong have its own app? When I read it on my phone browser, sometimes the comments or buttons stop working if I haven’t refreshed the page in a while — it’s kind of annoying. I also feel like it’d be so much easier to stay engaged if I could read across multiple devices, you know? Sort of like how you can listen to Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky on Audible.
sometimes the comments or buttons stop working if I haven’t refreshed the page in a while
That's bad, and if the bug is reproducible, I'm sure the developers would want to fix that.
However, making an app sounds like a ton of extra work that most users would not appreciate, so the developers are not motivated to do that. Corporations typically make app versions of their websites in order to spy on you and sell your private information to a third party (for example, if you install the app, you need to allow it to read your contacts or the contents of your storage); Less Wrong does not do that.
It could be interesting to make a survey about how many people read Less Wrong on their phones.
A potentially-helpful option for the buttons issue in particular: https://www.greaterwrong.com/ . It's not an app, but it does give you an alternative frontend which might have different problems than this one.
(Also, it might be possible to install one site or the other as a webapp to your phone. If you're on Safari, you can do this by going to the site and selecting the share button in the top right, then "more", then "add to home screen"; on mobile Chrome, just tap the three-dot menu in the top right and scroll down until you find "add to home screen". The interface will be the same as in the browser, but it does give you a dedicated homescreen icon for opening lesswrong.)