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Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

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Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#41

Post by gbog »

pedalpete wrote: post #14
josephg wrote: post #9

As a web developer, I honestly hope the author of this post is wrong. Performance of modern web apps is simply awful compared to their native counterparts by any measure. They load slowly and consistently feel sluggish in comparison to proper native apps. Slack takes seconds to load and it'll happily sit on over a gig of ram while in use. (And remember, its a glorified IRC client.) Web apps only have two benefits ove…

Why would you want to solve the problems of native apps rather than solve the problem (there is only one) of web apps, which is the performance issue. Customers don't install apps for the most part. Why try to solve for that?

This. And performance is actually very easy to solve, it is already solved by the sites like hn, wikipedia, etc: focus on content and drop all the useless "beautiful" stuff.

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#42

Post by on_and_off »

SCdF wrote: post #24

I am building native webapps using PWAs at the moment. They are not there yet. He touches on navigation, but misses talking about the Android hardware back button, which in PWAs hooks up to the same mechanism as it does in the browser: it goes back. This quickly stops making sense when you're making an application, as you want that button to go "up" rather than back. Imagine you are viewing a list of contacts and you…

Navigation is usually the first way I discover than an app is web based and disappoints me.

For example Steam is just the worst app that I use often. Pages take ages to load, and navigation is simply broken. scrolling through a page, clicking on an element then hitting back makes often (they have started solving this in some pages) me lose my scroll in the previous page. Other times, the back action is just absent. As a result, window shopping is just awful in a shopping app. I ended up using the webpage for buying games, just ridiculous.

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#43

Post by caleblloyd »

josephg wrote: post #16
pedalpete wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want to solve the problems of native apps rather than solve the problem (there is only one) of web apps, which is the performance issue. Customers don't install apps for the most part. Why try to solve for that?

Why? Because building hack on top of hack is convenient, but terrible craftsmanship. The web today is a red hot mess of overlapping standards and inconsistent APIs. Google chrome is up to ~20M lines of code now, which makes it bigger than the linux kernel (with every device driver). Its basically a small virtualised operating system at this point. How many more lines of code do you think it'll take for chrome to feel…

> The stack is a mess, and I don't see any direction it can possibly go but fatter, bigger and uglier than ever before.

Yes, the stack is a mess! I am hopeful that Web Assembly will make things better.

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#44

Post by petepete »

grzm wrote: post #4
symlinkk wrote: post #2

push notifications from web apps isn't even supported yet on iOS

Personally, I'm thankful for that. I can see how some might find them useful. I personally disable them whenever the browser presents me with the request dialog. I'm glad I'm presented with the option.

It was useful on Facebook until they decided to try and strongarm everyone into using Messenger.

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#45

Post by unclebucknasty »

I prefer the "Native Apps Are Doomed" title the HN link originally had.

Yeah, it's a little click-baity, but it matches the article and better tells me what it's about. Everyone knows what a native app is, but I would have never inferred by name that a Progressive Web App had any relationship to native development.

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#46

Post by unclebucknasty »

SCdF wrote: post #24

I am building native webapps using PWAs at the moment. They are not there yet. He touches on navigation, but misses talking about the Android hardware back button, which in PWAs hooks up to the same mechanism as it does in the browser: it goes back. This quickly stops making sense when you're making an application, as you want that button to go "up" rather than back. Imagine you are viewing a list of contacts and you…

>you want the button to go "up" rather than back...you'd expect hitting back at this point would take you to the contact list.

Can this be handled by your app's design? For instance, could you have the toggle between edit and save take place on the same page (i.e. on the same URL) like a SPA, while the list is a different URL?

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#47

Post by sotojuan »

on_and_off wrote: post #40
millstone wrote: post #5

> From now on, I won’t be building any more native apps It looks like the author blogs exclusively about JavaScript. What native apps has this author built?

Well, at least it won't be too difficult for him to commit to this. More seriously, this kind of comment seems to almost entirely come from javascript devs.

The article is by probably the worst blogger in the JS community. Full of hyperbole, biased if any research, always trying to sell his courses, and strange sources (dude quotes himself fairly often).

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#48

Post by aikah »

daleharvey wrote: post #34
josephg wrote: post #9

As a web developer, I honestly hope the author of this post is wrong. Performance of modern web apps is simply awful compared to their native counterparts by any measure. They load slowly and consistently feel sluggish in comparison to proper native apps. Slack takes seconds to load and it'll happily sit on over a gig of ram while in use. (And remember, its a glorified IRC client.) Web apps only have two benefits ove…

Web apps do not need to be slow, they are slow because they are badly written or more usually rely on the network far too often. There is no reason is faster than

> Web apps do not need to be slow

They are slow because HTML rendering engines are slow, they are slow because Javascript engines aren't that fast compared to Java, C or Swift. Native frameworks don't need to deal with the complexity of an HTML layout and CSS. And native applications can be optimized to use way less memory than web apps. There is very little room for performance tuning in a web app, since it depends on the browser engine. Something good for a browser can degrade performances in another browser.

>

Isn't dynamic, it is inflated once and turned in a class instance.

>

Is highly dynamic as it can be replaced by anything at any time in an HTML page.

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#49

Post by izacus »

aikah wrote: post #48
daleharvey wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web apps do not need to be slow, they are slow because they are badly written or more usually rely on the network far too often. There is no reason is faster than

> Web apps do not need to be slow They are slow because HTML rendering engines are slow, they are slow because Javascript engines aren't that fast compared to Java, C or Swift. Native frameworks don't need to deal with the complexity of an HTML layout and CSS. And native applications can be optimized to use way less memory than web apps. There is very little room for performance tuning in a web app, since it depends…

The first one is also precompiled for quick parsing at compile time and doesn't burn battery/CPU every time a user accesses the app.

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#50

Post by dcarmo »

GeneralTspoon wrote: post #27
sssilver wrote: post #17

This is something I've been thinking about for a while, why not make apps not require to be installed, and put them behind URLs? Something similar to the way Blizzard does their games with the Battle.net client, e.g. you click "Install", and the game is playable after only a few megabytes, and then as you play things progressively load. That could really disrupt the mobile scene, and Apple is well positioned to accom…

Google are starting to do some work on this front with Android 'Instant Apps': https://developer.android.com/topic/instant-apps/index.html

I hope Apple does something similar and we can all move towards this direction, which seems to be the best approach, in my opinion.
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