I hate using web apps. On desktop, mobile, wherever. The author's list of things they want supported by Mobile Safari is just aggravating: > Here are a list of things you still can’t do with mobile safari due to Apple’s refusal to support them: > > Create an app loading screen > Use push notifications > Add offline support > Create an initial app UI to load instantly > Prompt installation to the home screen through b…
As a developer, I would love push notifications in safari. The only alternative is a native app, which is much more work.
As a user, I think crappy or unethical web developers would ruin it for everybody. At least with native apps, there's a somewhat consistent way for me to manage notifications (and I have 95% of them turned off).
Push notifications? Every single messenger or anything that lets you set reminders. Note that features like push notifications are implemented with a discrete opt-in on every other platform already. Don't want notifications? Just say "Deny" when you're prompted. Offline support? Only if you happen to live in the 99.99% of the world that doesn't have 24/7 perfect WiFi/4G coverage with unlimited data. If you've ever ke…
All of these things are already available in native apps. Putting aside all the business reasons for why Apple wouldn't want to do this, why should Apple spend any time to enable this for web apps? You say the choice is between a web app and no app, and I'm sure on the margin this impacts companies that can't afford to create a native app, but why should Apple cater to the lowest common denominator? Steve Jobs' post…
These are good arguments. But they apply verbatim to Java, HTML, and JavaScript in the times of Windows and IE3/4, if Bill Gates had been asked publicly.
Safari engineers have attended all service worker working group meetings, and they do contribute. However, I do share the frustrations over transparency. It's tough to get developers to care about things like offline-first, because it's tough for them to convince managers to allow them to spend time on a feature that won't work on iOS (since it won't work in Safari, and Apple has banned other browser engines on their…
>Apple has banned other browser engines on their platform.
Can you elaborate on this a bit? I primarily use Chrome as my browser on iOS. Is it really just running the Safari engine under the hood?
This is not surprising of Apple. They've always been a walled garden, that's why I don't buy their products. I like to own products that give me full control as a user. When the iPod came out, I never understood why I couldn't just drag the music files directly onto the device and I had to get iTunes and use iTune's tedious interface. Now they have the app store; another unnecessary restriction. As a developer, it's…
I just want to note that as a developer you can run any code you want on your iPhone through XCode for free. You just can't distribute it in the App Store without a license ($100 a year). You can distribute the code though, and users can compile and install it. This is how Kodi distributes on Apple platforms. This is a newish change though, within the last couple of years.
Many entitlements still require you to buy a certificate from Apple. You cannot, for example, compile and run your own VPN software.
Watch the State of the Web talk from Google IO 2017. Certain native apps (Twitter, OLA) are 70-100MB in size when downloaded from the app stores. Their progressive web app version are 0.2-0.6MB. Extremely important in countries with very limited and/or expensive mobile data.
I'd say that's another issue. Duplicate frameworks in Facebook.app, monolithic tracking frameworks, etc. So much useless stuff prying on the user's privacy. I remember Twitter.app had code to get the currently installed apps, to "better target ads." It's user hostile and we are paying with the multi gigabytes of data.
The argument can't go only one way, though. If a web app doesn't get the UI in tune with the OS' look and feel, "the developer should be bothered to create a native app". But if a native app is a massive bloat, "that's another issue".
Watch the State of the Web talk from Google IO 2017. Certain native apps (Twitter, OLA) are 70-100MB in size when downloaded from the app stores. Their progressive web app version are 0.2-0.6MB. Extremely important in countries with very limited and/or expensive mobile data.
That doesn't have anything to do with native vs web though. Twitter's native app is heavier than their web app because Twitter has historically filled the native app with junk (like a fullscreen video just for the login screen, "moments", "highlights", hijacking browser URLs, a bunch of ads and ad tracking, etc). Facebook does the same, to an almost silly degree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8162342 The Twit…
In theory you could make a web app look like a native iOS app too, yet in practice developers don't either.
I am talking about possibilities provided by iOS SDK and what is provided by web stack. It is amazing that React Native does not even have something UINavigationControll-ish. UIKit alone gives stuff which is lightyears ahead of the web. Even some more basic stuff: how easy it is to add accessibility to PWAs? Localization?
Most Frontend-Frameworks do have Localization-features so that's kind of easy to do. But other features like Bluetooth are nowhere to be seen (Blink Browser can do this - but it's far far away from a standard)
Safari engineers have attended all service worker working group meetings, and they do contribute. However, I do share the frustrations over transparency. It's tough to get developers to care about things like offline-first, because it's tough for them to convince managers to allow them to spend time on a feature that won't work on iOS (since it won't work in Safari, and Apple has banned other browser engines on their…
>Apple has banned other browser engines on their platform. Can you elaborate on this a bit? I primarily use Chrome as my browser on iOS. Is it really just running the Safari engine under the hood?
Yes. For this very reason, Mozilla was not porting Firefox to iOS for a very long time. Now, Firefox is also running iOS provided rendering engine.
Sometimes I, too, pine for the days of "hyperlinks, text and images"-only web. So I turn off Javascript. You can too, if that's how you want to consume the web. That's the beauty of it - it allows for that by design. What I don't like is the position you are taking that "because I only want to consume the web that way, the Web itself should be hamstrung to my limited view of how it should work." There is no good reas…
That's true. I have started getting a militant attitude towards web apps and I really shouldn't think like that. I use web apps every day (JIRA, CircleCI, Slack, Google Docs). And reflecting on it, Google Docs has always been pretty damn good. But I get irked every single time I try to do something like paste an image, or drag-and-drop, or lookup in the system dictionary and it just fails or works weirdly. I let thos…
" ...I don't see the point of trying to "escape" the browser chrome, or trying to copy the look and feel of native apps. If web apps are going to be cross-platform then they should embrace not being truly integrated with any native platform."
I kinda feel you on that one - and to be honest, I'm not sure how you would "turn that off" but if memory serves I think it only happens if you opt to "add to home screen" which Chrome only prompts for things you visit a lot.
Push notifications? Every single messenger or anything that lets you set reminders. Note that features like push notifications are implemented with a discrete opt-in on every other platform already. Don't want notifications? Just say "Deny" when you're prompted. Offline support? Only if you happen to live in the 99.99% of the world that doesn't have 24/7 perfect WiFi/4G coverage with unlimited data. If you've ever ke…
All of these things are already available in native apps. Putting aside all the business reasons for why Apple wouldn't want to do this, why should Apple spend any time to enable this for web apps? You say the choice is between a web app and no app, and I'm sure on the margin this impacts companies that can't afford to create a native app, but why should Apple cater to the lowest common denominator? Steve Jobs' post…
I take it you didn't catch that that was all hypocritical bullshit :/. Steve Jobs can poke fun at Adobe all they want over Flash not adopting Cocoa and enabling developers to build applications using a third-party API layer over their platform, but it is totally duplicitous to do so without admitting that at the time iTunes was still written in Carbon and there was no timeline for that to change because their Windows implementation was ported to that platform as an API layer over the Win32 platform that allowed them to not have to maintain a truly native port of that product. To this day iTunes is written in that fashion; and, in fact, large amounts of it have been built on top of hybrid app web technologies so they can minimize how much stress they have to put on their increasingly abstract API layer. Seriously: go install iTunes on Windows and stare in awe at how Apple has essentially reimplemented OS X in a massive wad of DLLs so they can have iTunes sit on top. If Apple wants to be taken seriously, they should stop preaching and put their money where their mouth is and reimplement iTunes to work on both Windows and macOS as first-class native applications tied to the low-level APIs offered by the platform. The reality, of course, is that even a company as massive and successful as Apple understands the value proposition inherent in having one codebase that works on multiple platforms, and is willing to hamstring even their own macOS experience to make maintenance of their port to Windows easier. What is sad is that they can still tell these bold-faces lies about what their motives are, and people like you somehow still believe them :/.