TO ALL DEVIANTART ARTISTS AND USERS

On November 3rd, the DeviantArt team has announced that the native IOS/Android mobile app will be decommissioned. The announcement backfired quite badly, with more than 12k negative comments under the post on DeviantArt. Apart from insults, the considerable amount of negative comments highlights a great sense of discontent among the users following this announcement. The main reason behind this outrage lies in the decision of replacing the mobile app with a "web app". According to the DeviantArt team, the so-called "web app" should offer a better experience under all aspects, representing a great leap forward beyond the now obsolete mobile app.

They say that the mobile app is outdated and obsolete, and they are actually right: it has not been updated for years and lacks many features which are instead included in the desktop version of the site. However, despite all, the mobile app remains a trustworthy and user-friendly way to navigate the platform through a mobile phone. 

Now, this imperfect but reliable application is being replaced by a "web app". Despite what the team says, this web app is nothing but the DeviantArt website, since it requires the phone browser to be run. The new interface is laggy, chaotic and loads pages at a snail's pace. Many users have stated that it's difficult for them to navigate through the platform's content due to a bad integration between the interface and the browser. In a nutshell, this replacement betrays the main reason why an app is built: to simplify and improve the mobile users' experience on a site.

What's even worse (and what actually caused all this discontent among the users) is the fact that the DeviantArt team seems not to care at all about the people's opinion. The decommissioning process is still undergoing: in these weeks some features previously available on the mobile native app have been removed (the chat and notes functionality has been turned off some days ago) and the app itself is no longer available for download in the Play Store/App Store. This confirms the team's will to definitely deactivate the native app despite the negative feedback. 

With this petition, we DeviantArt users and artists demand the native app to be brought back (or, at least, we demand the decommissioning process to be stopped). We know perfectly that the native app is full of imperfections and gaps, but there is no point in replacing a mediocre thing with something which is even worse. We also know that DeviantArt is run by a small team of devs and that keeping up an app is not easy, but we also think that replacing it with a laggy desktop interface masked as an app will definitely worsen the experience for all users on the platform. 

Please DeviantArt team, listen to us and save the native mobile app!