Why do websites insist on taking me to the homepage when I don't decide to download their "TOTALLY AWESOME APP"?
There isn't a real point to having a mobile version. Unless your website is displaying Crysis or some exceptionally intensive data, you're really not saving the user any time.
The consensus seems to be that mobile versions allow users to streamline browsing on a website when they have limited bandwidth and time.
But that's shit. I have to relearn an entire website when it goes mobile. The learning curve destroys all efficiency imagined by "streamlining" (read: reducing content) the website. For every website that implements mobile browsing correctly, there are four that absolutely suck at it. Terribly.
Then there's the difficulty of finding where the hell I was. It's wonderful that a google search led me to your website, even promising me a relevant page for the answer I need. But instead of being free to find that particular article, the website deliberately gets in the way and sends me on my merry way to a homepage that's nothing more than a column of categories. It's a mobile website template designed by an imbecile.
But wait, that's not all. To top it all off, I don't even have the choice to view the website natively, not without some kind of jailbreaking solution (even more fraught with errors).
So mobile browsing:
1. promises me an answer to my search query,
2. interrupts my resultant happiness at finding an answer with some bombastic, screen-sized advertisement for a mobile app,
3. punishes me for not choosing the roundabout way of going to the app store and downloading their shitty app by forcing me to thehomepage instead of the answer I need, and
4. denies me any freedom to choose whether or not I can avoid this hell by viewing the native site.
Fuck you, mobile web design.