I’m not a huge fan of using mobile apps for social networking sites like Twitter and Linkedin. Part of it’s because the mobile experiences are basically the same as their more bloated app counterparts, and partly because I don’t want to temptation of distraction on my phone all the time from a native app.
Obviously this is counter to what the app makers want, and so they constantly present messages like “Linkedin works best on our mobile app” to get me to download it, blocking out the top and bottom areas of the screen to try to annoy users into submitting to their requests.
Lately it seems Linkedin is trying something new – the “dismiss” option on these messages now takes at least a few clicks to actually dismiss. Maybe I’m a little too paranoid, and it’s truly a bug, but my money’s on this as a designed feature to discourage users from ever dismissing the message. It’s clever, but also sketchy too, and opens the door to all sorts of possibilities of gaslighting users to behave the way marketers and product owners want by creating intentional errors.