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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

#51

Post by blub »

dasil003 wrote: post #23
josephg wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reason native apps have avoided that fate is because they are not cross-platform, they are entirely controlled by a single vendor. Of course you also have cross-platform GUI toolkits like Java and Qt, but they suck because they don't have true vendor support. The web has solved these things: it's an open standard which any serious device maker must support to be taken seriously. It can load applications in a rela…

The irony in all this push towards web apps is that browsers will become more and more bloated, out of the user's control and insecure.

Chrome is not a virtualized OS, it has become a mega-plugin similar to Java or Flash, except with better but still insufficient security. As more of the platform services are exposed to the internet, we'll start seeing new and interesting exploits, such as tracking users based on battery status and attacks on the local network (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12406310).

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#52

Post by blub »

paganel wrote: post #32
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…

> Performance of modern web apps is simply awful compared to their native counterparts by any measure For what is worth I can now only access FB from my phone using the browser (the web-app, so to speak), the native FB app has become ridiculously slow for quite some time. I use the native app only for uploading photos, once every 3 or 4 months. I'm using an iPhone 4 of which I'm still pretty happy, don't feel the nee…

The native app tracks you harder, better but alas, not faster.

This will be fixed once web apps get more capabilities, don't worry, the entire web development community (except the josephg fellow above) is praying for it.

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#53

Post by jaysoncena »

gioele wrote: post #33
SkyMarshal wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding #2 I feel like Oracle is dropping the ball here with Java for the desktop. They need to provide a lightweight JVM tailored specifically for desktop apps and for bundling into a self-contained install package, so that the app doesn't have to confuse users by downloading the JVM separately. Just pack it all into a single .msi/.dmg/.dpkg/etc, download one file, install it, and you're good to go. The JVM should…

> Qt is not open source Not only is Qt open source, it is also free software according to FSF. Core Qt and most modules are released under the LGPL, the rest under the GPL. https://www.qt.io/licensing/ Qt even has a binding poison-pill promise that will make the code BSD-licensed should Qt (the company) stop releasing it. See https://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/Software_License_Agr... and https://www.kde.org/comm…

He's probably referring to QT5. If you're a for-profit business and using QT, most likely your software is closed-sourced which requires a commercial license.

I've worked with a team who develops a windows app which still uses QT4. They cannot migrate to QT5 since it requires a commercial license.

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#54

Post by blub »

jaysoncena wrote: post #53
gioele wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Qt is not open source Not only is Qt open source, it is also free software according to FSF. Core Qt and most modules are released under the LGPL, the rest under the GPL. https://www.qt.io/licensing/ Qt even has a binding poison-pill promise that will make the code BSD-licensed should Qt (the company) stop releasing it. See https://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/Software_License_Agr... and https://www.kde.org/comm…

He's probably referring to QT5. If you're a for-profit business and using QT, most likely your software is closed-sourced which requires a commercial license. I've worked with a team who develops a windows app which still uses QT4. They cannot migrate to QT5 since it requires a commercial license.

Open source doesn't always mean that one can do whatever they want with it, nor does it mean gratis.

Still, LGPL libraries can be used for commercial software, this is a rather common use case.

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#55

Post by pjmlp »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #29
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…

Regarding #2 I feel like Oracle is dropping the ball here with Java for the desktop. They need to provide a lightweight JVM tailored specifically for desktop apps and for bundling into a self-contained install package, so that the app doesn't have to confuse users by downloading the JVM separately. Just pack it all into a single .msi/.dmg/.dpkg/etc, download one file, install it, and you're good to go. The JVM should…

I imagine you are out of touch with Java efforts.

Since Java 8, the JDK offers tooling to package applications, making it standard the way many third party bundlers used to work.

In Java 9 there is a linker, which will allow for an application personalised JRE, coupled with the startup code.

The biggest problem was that using Swing properly required a mix of programming and designer skills, which most didn't bother to learn.

At least on enterprise space of our customer base, we are still on Java and .NET for native applications, no Electron on sight.

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#56

Post by anuraj »

Native Apps Vs Web Apps is settled and Native Apps won. Web Apps offer compromised UI and performance and shall always remain a security threat - Cross Scripting, Link baiting, CORS my... . We are going to app less economy now - and contextual interactive interfaces that route to/from headless services based on advanced intelligence is the future.Apps are dying, long live the apps.

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#57

Post by pjmlp »

blub wrote: post #52
paganel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Performance of modern web apps is simply awful compared to their native counterparts by any measure For what is worth I can now only access FB from my phone using the browser (the web-app, so to speak), the native FB app has become ridiculously slow for quite some time. I use the native app only for uploading photos, once every 3 or 4 months. I'm using an iPhone 4 of which I'm still pretty happy, don't feel the nee…

The native app tracks you harder, better but alas, not faster. This will be fixed once web apps get more capabilities, don't worry, the entire web development community (except the josephg fellow above) is praying for it.

I am also voting along josephg.

Since I returned back to native apps development, couldn't be happier, instead of having to deal daily with the crap and hacks on top of hacks, to make a stack designed for interactive documents work as a virtual machine.

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#58

Post by pjmlp »

victorhooi wrote: post #11
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…

Is this a given though? What is stopping a progressive web-app from performing as well, or nearly as well (to be impercetible). I would have assumed that most of the time waiting is on network events - so using things like service workers to handle things asynchronously, and also handle caching would reduce things. I watched a presentation on how Google made the IO 2016 webapp ( https://events.google.com/io2016/ ): h…

That is the whole point.

Native apps are fast and enjoy every feature the OS has to offer.

Web apps are a pile of hacks that require conferences sharing clever tricks, usually browser specific, to make them usable at all.

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#59

Post by pjmlp »

icebraining wrote: post #30
chetanahuja wrote: post #10

Reading that post feels like sincere but wishful thinking. Both major mobile platforms provide the developer with sandboxed access to a more or less complete unix machine. This means complete access to things like underlying network interfaces (via sockets), Full File API access to local storage (inside the sandbox), threads, memory management (via JVM/ObjC or at a lower level in Native C), Graphics hardware via Open…

Yes, the web platform has more limitations, but it's a bit like when people wrote software for DOS (or bare metal) because Windows didn't give them direct access to all hardware features. They weren't wrong, but how many bare metal software do you see today? Eventually the platform provides support to the needs of 99%+ of software, and more unrestricted access becomes a special case, not the default. All of the thing…

I see it everywhere.

On my computers the only web based software is related to online travel agencies, discussion forums not based on email and news sources.

When there is a native alternative, it gets installed.

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#60

Post by HiroP55 »

Is it really that hard to build native mobile apps? No it is not. It does require learning something new. I don't hear any of my non technical friends complaining that this app isn't a web page or that I had to install a new app. I mostly hear developers who want to utilize their web development skills make the argument that native apps are bad. Is the native vs web argument actually just laziness?
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