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I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

debuggerdotbreak.judahgabriel.com

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Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#61

Post by techsupporter »

jarsin wrote: post #32
jbob2000 wrote: post #9

I know your pain about the D&B issue. That was a huge slap in the face when I saw that. Apple, one of the largest companies in the world, has presented some random company as the face of their Developer portal? "Couldn't be... No way... wait a sec they are that stupid... goddammit". Then, at the end of the day, all it ended up being was a phone call that verified the information I entered on the D&B webpage. Stupid w…

On top of that DnB sales the shit out of your info. Then if you setup a private llc with a registered agent it allows a way for people(patent trolls and attorneys) to find out who you are etc. Way to focus on privacy Apple!

And if you make the error of giving D&B valid contact information for you, they will bug the everloving shit out of you until the heat death of the universe. When I was a young pup of a business owner, someone asked me for my DUNS number so, foolishly, I just went to D&B's website and filled out the enticing form there with my cell phone number and company e-mail address.

The spam e-mails and phone calls were unceasing. They wouldn't stop calling me with sales pitches, "unique, one-time offers," and blunt statements that (unless I paid money to them) my business would be "delisted" in "just a few days." The assholes also proceeded to sell that information to other companies, so then I started hearing from accounts receivable financing outlets, merchant processors, and the like.

Several years later, the phone calls have stopped only because I changed phone numbers, but I still get three or four "your D&B profile is incomplete, call us today!!" e-mails per month to that old address.

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#62

Post by k__ »

shinratdr wrote: post #39

From a user perspective, this is why I love iOS. * Barrier to entry. If your project is more than a hobby, you can jump through a couple hoops to reach the iOS userbase. If the difference between $99 and $25 is make-or-break, you're probably trying to publish a hobby/low quality app anyways. There is a reason the Microsoft Store and Google Play are absolutely filled with trash, and this is part of it. * Forcing you t…

All of this is wrong. btw.

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#63

Post by jbob2000 »

curun1r wrote: post #40
jbob2000 wrote: post #9

I know your pain about the D&B issue. That was a huge slap in the face when I saw that. Apple, one of the largest companies in the world, has presented some random company as the face of their Developer portal? "Couldn't be... No way... wait a sec they are that stupid... goddammit". Then, at the end of the day, all it ended up being was a phone call that verified the information I entered on the D&B webpage. Stupid w…

D&B isn't some "random" company. If you've ever been faced with a project that requires you to have a reasonably complete set of information on most businesses in the country, you quickly learn about D&B. Almost every large company is licensing D&B data in some form or another. Cataloging every business in the US isn't an easy problem to get right, even for a company as large as Apple.

They are just a "random" company. They don't sell any product a regular person would know about. Why was I able to setup a Google Play account without D&B? Amazon let me use EC2 without D&B, SendGrid let me use their mail API without any of this. It's a company that appears out of nowhere, for no reason. That's why it's "random".

It's a stupid service that does nothing. If they deny me and I have nefarious, ulterior motives, I'll just register another company. And for what it's worth, my company is Canadian and I'm pretty sure they don't have any ability to verify Canadian companies. The phone call didn't ask me anything about a GST number, business number, or any of that, they just asked if the phone number and address of the company were correct. How do they know if I'm giving them correct information? I could say my company is on the other side of the country, how would they know?

The whole process took me a week to get through. I can purchase a goddamn assault rifle and shoot up a school in less time than that, but heavens forbid I put an app on an app store! Good lord won't you think of the children!

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#64

Post by kevin_b_er »

judah wrote: post #55
rolha-capoeira wrote: post #47

> From minor things like “iOS Safari won’t let you play audio without first interacting with the page” to major, show-stopping things like, “iOS Safari won’t let you play the next song if your app is in the background or if your screen is off.” I disagree that these things are purely because Apple wants your $99/year. Maybe that's part of the story, but not all. I am glad that websites cannot play audio without the u…

Agreed that apps (web or native) shouldn't have free access to e.g. your contacts without permission. But Apple goes beyond security and actually makes it impossible to build first-class experiences for iOS without paying $99/year + 33% in-app purchases. I think that's unfortunate. The free and opened web presents a challenge to Apple's app business. They have a perverse incentive to keep web apps second-class citize…

$99/yr plus buying an apple computing device.

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#65

Post by oakesm9 »

The article mentions that the author was worried that the fast processing time for Google Play meant that it hadn't actually been check, but according to Google they do:

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2015/03/creating-b...

I believe the way it works is they run the app through an automated test suite (virus scan and monkey testing) and if it flags anything up then it goes to a human to review.

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#66

Post by yodon »

Are there any technical reasons you’re aware of why pwabuilder.com couldn’t also emit Electron wrappers for platforms like Linux and OSX where native support for PWA apps is lacking? (and yes, I do hear you, angry young man, about how much you hate Electron apps and wish they would go away)

UPDATE: it seems to be pretty lightly documented and I wasn’t able to confirm the status, but pwabuilder does appear to have options to generate electron-prebuilt “PWA” wrappers for Linux, MacOS, and win32 platforms. Pretty excited to give it a try.

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#67

Post by Someone »

millstone wrote: post #36

> Mobile platform vendors, like Apple, are totally cool with apps that use your phone to its fullest. Access your location, play background audio, get your GPS coordinates, read all your contacts, play videos or audio without app interaction, read your email, intercept your typing, play more than one thing at a time, use your microphone and camera, access your pictures, and more. Apple’s totally cool with that. Apple…

”Though the fee may be a secondary reason.”

I doubt that comes into play. App review by humans quickly becomes more expensive than that $99 per developer per year, certainly when one submits multiple applications multiple times a year.

The 30% cut on sales, on the other hand, does bring in significant money, even for a company the size of Apple.

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#68

Post by rolha-capoeira »

judah wrote: post #50
millstone wrote: post #36

> Mobile platform vendors, like Apple, are totally cool with apps that use your phone to its fullest. Access your location, play background audio, get your GPS coordinates, read all your contacts, play videos or audio without app interaction, read your email, intercept your typing, play more than one thing at a time, use your microphone and camera, access your pictures, and more. Apple’s totally cool with that. Apple…

Partially agree. I understand security concerns; we shouldn't allow random web apps to freely access privileged operations, for example. (Should we allow web apps to ask for permission? That is another question.) But stopping web apps from working? For example, breaking open standards like "you can't play more than one stream of audio", or "you're not allowed to play audio if your app isn't in the fore"? Nah, that's…

> iOS's new PWA support actually reloads your whole page - losing all context and execution - every time you bring it to the fore. It kills all execution when putting the app into the background.

There's a bigger story to this, one could assume.

I'll be the first to say that iOS and Safari (particularly on iOS) has generally lagged behind the community in adopting standards. But this seems like a feature, not a bug, to me.

What if the user has 10 PWAs open in Safari? Should they all maintain state as the user goes elsewhere in the OS?

If I put an app into the background, I want it to stop its execution, unless I've given it permission to do a limited set of things. This goes double for websites — no way do I want them to continue using the OS in the background.

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#69

Post by rolha-capoeira »

mgkimsal wrote: post #60
rolha-capoeira wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$7000? Your bias is showing. You can buy a Mac for <$1000 and it's perfectly capable of developing most apps.

<$1000 mac for even moderate development use cases? your bias is showing now.

Yes, even for moderate development use cases. I've never had any problems.

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#70

Post by waterside81 »

judah wrote: post #59
rolha-capoeira wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$7000? Your bias is showing. You can buy a Mac for <$1000 and it's perfectly capable of developing most apps.

Yes, I'm using hyperbole. :-) Even $1000 to build a free app is too much. (That said, going to Apple.com and clicking Mac shows me the base model for $4999.00 [0]) What happened to cross-platform apps? Why is it that Google and Microsoft are champions of the free and opened web, and even cross-platform dev tools for web development, while Apple is holding back progress? I think the reason is their business is jeopard…

You linked to an iMac Pro, a high-end desktop, not a MacBook. Entry level MacBook is 1299
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