361–370 of 524 posts
TLDR: Chrome on Android supports Service Workers and WebRTC while Safari on iOS does not. This means Android these days is better suited for fully-fledged web applications that do not require a native app (or at least a native app wrapper).
I did the opposite and can't believe how much better my life had gotten because my iPhone is just a simple tool that I use for communications and don't think about it as a project. With Android, I always wanted to tweak silly things and run Cyanogenmod because the handset firmware was always so bad and vulnerable. On several occasions I'd bricked my phone requiring hours of recovery, or had transient failures of cell…
The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized I was solving for a problem that no longer existed. I've felt recently like I spend too much time on my phone. I don't want to play games and watch movies on my commute any longer. I don't want to read books on my phone. I want to read an actual book or, at worst, on a Kindle where all I can do is read. I want to work my brain more, basically and the phone has become antithetical to that.
So I purchased a Nexus 5X. Low storage, barely enough space for my music, etc. I saw it as going as far down the phone food chain as I was willing to go without going to a flip phone. I've been really happy with it. I talk to human beings. I look at the world. And my phone really only has enough space for a few smartphone things like maps and music. It's perfect for what I want now. Fairly simple and limited. In this case limited is good.
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This vulnerability was already fixed for Nexuses by the time the article was written. The exact same thing has happened for iPhone. People forget that to date, a far higher percentage of iPhones have actually been infected with malware than Google-flavored Android phones due to XcodeGhost and that actual Google Android devices like Nexuses have an even better security record than that.
> a far higher percentage of iPhones have actually been infected with malware than Google-flavored Android phones Citation desperately needed.
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> I visit far more websites in a day than I use strange new apps. From the article you have to "install" the web application for any of these features to be available. > Apps also don't suffer from XSS. From websites sure, but they do from other apps.
> From the article you have to "install" the web application for any of these features to be available. As far as the article is concerned, rendering a webpage as if it were an app takes away functionality (mainly, the ability to interact with the address bar). It does not discuss the security of web 2.0 features and it certainly does not claim that these features are only available when the webpage is pretending to…
XSS isn't about executing other people's code, it is about performing commands that you shouldn't be performing. There are a ton of instances in the pass where cross application communications have lead to privilege escalation in the same way that XSS does.
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> Nexus devices have a variety of manufacturers. The current 9 is made by HTC, the 5X by LG, and the 6P by Huawei Obviously only the latest matters? And those are manufacturers, not the company designing it, which what matters. Otherwise Apple uses a variety of manufacturers too, not just Foxconn.
The Nexus 9 is a tablet, and the 5X and 6P were released within a month of each other. So they're all pretty relevant, and are targeted at different markets.
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These things that you mentioned, you didn't really have to do. Buy a nexus, and it's as clean as it gets. What you're saying is that you left the freedom of your device to jail yourself into simple interface...? I do agree though, that those samsung/lg/etc phone have lots crapwares + carrier crapwares.
If you are addicted to junk food but want to eat clean, you rid your house of junk food. If you are addicted to TV but want to spend your time on more active pursuits, you get rid of your TV. If you're addicted to futzing around with your Android device…
Nearly all of the comments here are missing the point of this blog post. The author likes Progressive Web apps, they are important to him. He's moving to Android because it supports the web better. That's it. This isn't iOS vs Android and it certainly isn't web vs native. Yes, the article is critical of native apps (and the app store) so I can see how you'd go there but it's a distraction. I see this article as an"I…
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These things that you mentioned, you didn't really have to do. Buy a nexus, and it's as clean as it gets. What you're saying is that you left the freedom of your device to jail yourself into simple interface...? I do agree though, that those samsung/lg/etc phone have lots crapwares + carrier crapwares.
Android is far from "freedom". Having to find exploits in order to get root access on your own device is just wrong.
And the fact that every iOS version ever has been jailbroken only tells you how hard security is... specially against an adversary with full physical access to the device.
>I don’t know about you, but the idea of having a fully capable web browser in my pocket was a huge part of the appeal. A: Both iOS and android have fully capable web browsers, I'm not sure what's missing here ? >I’m talking about stuff that QA should have caught, stuff that if anybody at Apple was actually building ? apps this way would have noticed before they released. A: They do pass QA, that's why features are r…
> A: They do pass QA, that's why features are removed
Even if QA catches stuff, it frequently gets ignored by developers and product managers who don't want anything holding up the ship date.
If the software gets frequent updates, this becomes the norm. Bug fixes come in future development cycles, not when they are found.
QA is the least powerful group in any software engineering setup so it's amusing that consumers think of them as God-like powerful creatures who can hold up releases.
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I just tried the https://www.pokedex.org/ site on Chrome for Android, and I could add it to my home screen, but that doesn't add it to my app drawer. That is annoying, I don't want it on my home screen but it seems to be the only way to turn it into a 'native app'. I don't think Progressive Web Apps are ready for the mainstream, but I'm hopeful that in the next few years we can get there.
(I'm the author of Pokedex.org.) Unfortunately it's a limitation of the Android platform; you can't add arbitrary launch activities at runtime. So the Chrome team is unable to fix this AFAIK. However, you could imagine a future release of Android that sports a custom homescreen app that just includes Chrome progressive webapps in the main app drawer. Or someone might be able to write a third-party homescreen app alre…