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Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

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Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#421

Post by gpawl »

andreashansen wrote: post #13
IBM wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a reason for users to care about this at all? Because it seems to me that this just solves problems for developers while making the user experience worse or not as good as it could be. The same goes for Electron-based apps.

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.

0.6MB to launch the app, which downloads 100MB more resources as soon as it starts up.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#422

Post by LeoNatan25 »

pavlakoos wrote: post #419
LeoNatan25 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only a tiny fraction of the Facebook app is actually RN. Messenger uses none of it for performance reasons.

Huh? Isn't Facebook advertising their main app as no.1 use case of ReactNative?

Advertising is one thing, reality is different. The main, performant views are native. Some of the esoteric stuff is RN.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#423

Post by amiga-workbench »

scarface74 wrote: post #291
amiga-workbench wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a M3U file

If you're creating a m3u file you aren't just copying files to the player.

I handle playlist creation on my computer, and clone my entire library onto my phone, my playlist files contain relative paths and its pretty seamless.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#424

Post by emsy »

fredsir wrote: post #417
Sacho wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But to circle back to the original topic - if users would be much happier with 100/100 instead of 80/100, then Apple's refusal to allow developers to achieve 90/100 with the same effort is crippling user happiness.

Are they not allowing it? Do you mean that because you have to use their platform specific tech instead of some cross-platform tech, they are not allowing it? Maybe they don't believe that you can ever reach 100/100 with "webapps", except if you lower the general perception of what 100 is to what is actually 80? I certainly don't believe so. I think part of the gap is that some folks believe features are everything,…

It's not even that. I hate it when a website prompts me to install their stupid app for funtionality that could easily fit in a webapp. If this standard means I don't have to install an app for every website I would be very happy.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#425

Post by koffiezet »

hungerstrike wrote: post #287
overcast wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "walled garden" is what prevents the horrendous disjointed mess that is the Android phone market. Sure, for a guy who likes hacking around stuff, it's fun for you. But for everyone else, there is a thousand different phones, with a thousand different interfaces, all running different versions of the Android OS, that will never be updated by the phone manufacturer. I understand where you're coming from, I do. But…

The walled garden is not what prevents having multiple manufacturers of phones. Apple could easily tear down their walled garden and let users install whatever software they want on their own phones - and they'd still be the only one manufacturing iPhones. Your argument seems to indicate that you just like iPhones better. Otherwise, I think you would have said "I'd prefer that our company either standardize on one mo…

> they're missing a physical message-waiting indicator light!

I do use an Android phone on a regular basis, and there it's useful, since it only pops up when important messages arrive (read: on-call stuff).

But my daily driver is an iPhone, and sorry - this would be an absolute mess with the amount of apps installed trying to notify me of things. It's virtually impossible to determine what notifications or messages are important. Is a waze notification that a friend will almost arrive important? Not really. Is a waze notification that I should leave in 10 minutes important since the traffic isn't optimal? Absolutely. Relying on such an indicator simply doesn't work the moment you have dozens and dozens of apps installed that all send you mostly mundane low priority messages, but from time to time want to tell you something you really want to know.

In my case, a light like that would be on all the time or off when you actually have a pretty important notification - which would mean you simply cannot rely on it. Notifications are already too complex, and at the same time too limited. Simplifying it into a colored light is just adding to that mess.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#426

Post by Pigo »

antoniuschan99 wrote: post #356
Pigo wrote: post #177

Can someone explain the difference between progressive web apps and webRTC? Are they related, or completely separate technologies? I just heard about them around the same time, and it seems like they have some things in common.

PWA's use Web Technologies to build Apps. Remember jQuery Mobile? It's more like that than React Native or Xamarin. WebRTC is an API/Protocol that enables Real Time Communication between browsers.

Thanks, I got thrown off when I seen PWA talking about service workers, it sounded simlar to the data channels talked about in WebRTC. I haven't had a chance to dip in to either yet.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#427

Post by gaius »

falcolas wrote: post #142
drusepth wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But as an iOS user I expect you to use the technology stack provided by my preferred operating system. I don't want to use your app if you're targeting a lowest-common-denominator feature set. I would wager that the average quality of an iOS app written by someone like OP that "has a web experience and _has_ to learn iOS just to work on that platform" will probably be lower than if that person (with web experience)…

> iOS app written by someone like OP That's a business choice that they made, and will suffer for. If a developer and business choose to half-ass the native iOS application, there's no reason to believe it would behave any better on iOS when written as a webapp. > the tools they need to write the best product they can The best product that can be made will never be made with cross-platform tooling. It will always be…

There has yet to be an application which uses the same GUI code across applications that is as good as a native application.

I feel the same way about Jupyter. Sure it's very clever to run it in a browser but it is clunky as hell compared to native RStudio (free) or MathCAD (commercial).

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#428

Post by pas »

interpol_p wrote: post #184
pas wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do I want these things, as a user. App loading screens? Maybe because it's a business app, and the loading screen checks whether you are on intranet (corp wifi) or not. > I don't want push notifications, I barely enable them for native apps. I would enable them for important apps (eg. business apps), so I want the technology, but I absolutely hate the popups on news sites for notifications. So nobody wants that…

> Let's say a fitness app. Let's say a basic simple fucking calendar app. Or a whatever run of the mill business workflow shit app, that requires your attention from time to time. And it'd be easier if there were no need to build for every fucking platform. Yeah I wouldn't have been a Mac or iOS user if I wasn't anal about every single app on my system being a good citizen. From the simple fucking calendar app, fitne…

With cross-platform [Web or even native but shimmed] APIs even the "badly" written apps could be better.

I want to be passionate, but - let's say - I know CSS/HTML/Java and a bit of C#, and so while I could spend time building an Android app and maybe fiddle a bit with a Windows Phone app, but there's no way in hell that I want to venture into OS X territory, ObjectiveC creeps me out more than Haskell and f#, so I can't. (Okay, Swift is nice, but I'm still not allowed in the closed garden, because I don't have access to Xcode.)

I would gladly pay the 100 USD for the Apple Store Developer privilege if I'd get to use nice Web APIs. It can be whitelisted on the Store settings, and it can even integrate into the store, that'd be almost better.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#429

Post by scarface74 »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #423
scarface74 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're creating a m3u file you aren't just copying files to the player.

I handle playlist creation on my computer, and clone my entire library onto my phone, my playlist files contain relative paths and its pretty seamless.

And you think that's easier than iTunes was in the heyday of the iPod?

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#430

Post by ivm »

gpawl wrote: post #420
ivm wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it means learning something other than JS! It feels like many developers are adamant to never leave their comfort zone. Hence, JS everywhere.

Coders like to code. Product builders want to build products with a minimum of fuss.

Then they should use other technologies in the first place because web development ecosystem adds too much fuss to the process.

Also product builders usually want to provide good user experiences. You may be saving yourself from some additional code but delivering battery draining solutions with non-native UI patterns and broken accessibility to your users.

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