You can't do push notifications on iOS from a web app. But apart from that there's a category of apps for websites that never should have been made, if that's the kind of apps you have been building in the past 5 years it's OK you realise it's time to stop making apps nobody uses. I've built some of those apps in my time but the majority of my apps couldn't be done without sacrificing or completely preventing functionality as a web app.
Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps
61–70 of 87 posts
Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps
#62Earlier 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…
Rendering engines are capable of turning html into on screen drawn pixels more than fast enough for the user to perceive and are capable of maintaining 60fps drawing.
JavaScript can certainly deal with handling user input faster than the user can perceive, rendering engines can 'inflate' html (cache the layer tree) of dom that hasnt been invalidated.
While a commercial failure I worked on Firefox OS and we built an OS and application suite that on low end hardware compared often favorably than the equivalent on Android. The web does not need to be slower than native applications it just needs to be built better
Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sure, and I use Debian on all my machines, and read my email with Alpine over ssh. But I don't think that tells me much regarding the overall tendencies of software development and use.
Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps
#64The author seems to really struggle with reconciling the click-baity title with the rather dull conclusion that native apps aren't that doomed just yet (if at all), within the last couple of paragraphs.
A better title would have been: A collection of highly useful resources for getting started with progressive web apps.
Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps
#65Native apps are helped by the weakness of HTTP/HTML. For some reason, the tech industry has been slow to admit what seems obvious -- that a technology designed in 1989 to let academics trade documents is a terrible solution for doing modern apps. At least for now, the tech industry has chosen a strategy of incremental improvement (of HTTP/HTML) rather than radical overhaul, but there does come a point when the pain i…
I'm sure there was plenty wrong with 1960s printing presses and the engineers working on them were looking forward to a radical overhaul of the technology, instead of supporting a cruft of legacy technology that was holding them back from designing fancier machines and fancier papers.
As we know, there indeed was a major overhaul in the way publishing works, just not in a way those engineers hoped for.
I think the same is true for the web. It's not an engineer's paradise, but it does a good enough job for the people who are using it, it gets gradually better, and it will probably experience a radical overhauled at some point -- just not in a way any of us hoped for or could even imagine at this point.
Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sure, and I use Debian on all my machines, and read my email with Alpine over ssh. But I don't think that tells me much regarding the overall tendencies of software development and use.
Well, the last three years I have gotten lots of nice projects coding greenfield native applications.
Outside the HN bubble not everyone is sold on web.
Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Rendering engines are capable of turning html into on screen drawn pixels more than fast enough for the user to perceive and are capable of maintaining 60fps drawing. JavaScript can certainly deal with handling user input faster than the user can perceive, rendering engines can 'inflate' html (cache the layer tree) of dom that hasnt been invalidated. While a commercial failure I worked on Firefox OS and we built an O…
> we built an OS and application suite that on low end hardware compared often favorably than the equivalent on Android
I haven't heard this before. I assumed firefox os failed because the web stack proved to be too crufty for the low end hardware. Are you aware of any resources that go into more detail?
Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rendering engines are capable of turning html into on screen drawn pixels more than fast enough for the user to perceive and are capable of maintaining 60fps drawing. JavaScript can certainly deal with handling user input faster than the user can perceive, rendering engines can 'inflate' html (cache the layer tree) of dom that hasnt been invalidated. While a commercial failure I worked on Firefox OS and we built an O…
> we built an OS and application suite that on low end hardware compared often favorably than the equivalent on Android I haven't heard this before. I assumed firefox os failed because the web stack proved to be too crufty for the low end hardware. Are you aware of any resources that go into more detail?
Most of the code and metrics are now outdated but https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox_OS/Performance will have some historical perspective, http://eideticker.mozilla.org/#/android/lg-g2x/mozilla-centr... was our test for comparison between android and fxos.
When we started it was an open question whether we could build a fast enough platform to compete with native applications, thats no longer a question I think about.
People think the web is slow because opening facebook.com takes >200 requests loading >4MB over the network of which a large chunk blocks any rendering (and all of which interferes with it). Build a web application which loads its UI from disk, caches application data, only touches the network for updates, does not block rendering waiting on bundles of JavaScript and uses proper practices for JS / dom manipulation (use transforms over animating top/left, dont attach process heavy scroll handlers) and your web app will be as fast as a native app
Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps
#69As 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…
You are following that guy on twitter, you will he is a avid javascript guy. So you can take his words with a grain of salt.
I never see any web app one mobile feel good. But you never know.
also, with kotlin and swift doing native app is not that complicated. Learning a new API on top of native API I don't think is safe.
Also, google, apple they can change the rules and parts of the apps don't work anymore for x reason.
Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
If everybody likes you, you're not being honest enough.