I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by judah » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 5:38 PM UTC

al2o3cr wrote: post #98

judah wrote: post #2

Author here. Thanks all for bringing this to the HN front page. The jist of the article is getting a PWA into the app stores is harder than it needs to be, especially on iOS. Between Google, Apple, and Microsoft, I found Google's Play Store to be the simplest and quickest store to get a PWA published in. Another interesting bit is that web technologies haven't caught up to native. My PWA isn't super complex -- it's a…

I think they will win in the long run, and will eventually (~5 years) become the dominant type of app in mobile and desktop app stores. Am I the only one who remembers people saying this EXACT thing about Java Swing apps? Not saying it's impossible, but "Write Once Run Anywhere" has been a mirage "just over the horizon" for a long time.

Author here.

Maybe Java fans, or Sun/Oracle employees and fanboys said that. That doesn't really mean much.

I did predict years ago that open web technologies will destroy native (desktop) apps, Flash, and Silverlight. In hindsight, I was correct.

I am predicting the same thing with regards to native mobile apps: they will largely disappear, and web apps will again win.

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

#112

Post by scarface74 » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 5:38 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #93

333c wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your distaste for native apps extend to the desktop computer? Many HN users (myself included) dislike Electron-type apps because they feel slow and bloated. On my computer, native apps are much nicer, and feel like they fit in much better with the desktop environment. If you agree that native apps on the desktop are a good thing, than I think you would agree that, for smartphone users, native mobile apps are a g…

> Many HN users (myself included) dislike Electron-type apps because they feel slow and bloated. How much of this is the fault of the Electron runtime and how much is fault of the developers? When one looks at the sheer amount of code that popular frameworks (or, as I call them, crapworks) like Angular require the browser to load, compile and run, plus the resources that these apps end up gulping down... it's madness…

How much of this is the fault of the Electron runtime and how much is fault of the developers?

It's completely the fault of the developer for choosing Electron when there are better tools available.

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

#113

Post by OtterCoder » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 5:38 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #83

mgkimsal wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

MacBook Air and Mini should be fine for most stuff, certainly for glorified web apps.

Exactly. I write the main code on my Linux machine, then switch to the MacMini for testing and UI finalization.

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

#114

Post by masklinn » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 5:39 PM UTC

peoplewindow wrote: post #91

Grae wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If the difference between $99 and $25 is make-or-break, you're probably trying to publish a hobby/low quality app anyways. Or maybe you live in a situation where $74 USD is a meaningful barrier to accessing a market. >The only people who like webapps and their encroachment on good, native apps are webapp developers because it allows them to use their skillset to build something they don't know how to build. You're e…

Or maybe you live in a situation where $74 USD is a meaningful barrier to accessing a market. Like what situation? To build an app at all he requires at least one computer, which is guaranteed to cost more than $99. He didn't blink at paying $25 to access MacInCloud. The $99 fee is hardly a big deal. It's quite clearly there to encourage people to report charges on stolen credit cards, i.e. to make credit cards usabl…

> Like what situation? To build an app at all he requires at least one computer, which is guaranteed to cost more than $99. He didn't blink at paying $25 to access MacInCloud.

You're from eastern europe, south america or SEA, and $99 is a serious chunk of money.

The latest Xcode requires sierra which runs on a late 2009 macbook (or even older using sierra patcher), and you can use that for other things than just publishing your application.

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

#115

Post by briandear » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 5:40 PM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #78

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…

Barrier to entry. If your project is more than a hobby, you can jump through a couple hoops to reach the iOS userbase. Sure, I can do that. But I won't. If you buy an iPhone, I'm afraid you will just get an inferior version of my service, or you won't find it at all, because you bought into a platform that is developer-hostile. In the meantime, all of my other customers, who are happy to visit my web sites directly o…

You AREN’T making things better for your users — you aren’t making things better for you.

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

#116

Post by avtar » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 5:40 PM UTC

eropple wrote: post #58

judah wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Controls: It doesn't force me to use native controls. :-) My web app today is still using the free and opened web, and all the goodness that comes with that, for UI and code. Requiring a Mac: Now you've met one. I built a halfway decent iOS app, and I don't want to spend $7000 on a Mac and its crappy dev tools and frameworks. I've poured nearly 7 years of work into user experience. I don't need to redo all that for A…

You can buy a completely dev-usable Mac for under $1000. (My CI machine is a Mac mini I bought used for $350 and dropped an SSD and an extra stick of RAM into.) Its "crappy dev tools" are free . This is some silly stuff right here.

How reliable is your CI machine? I don't have the log entries anymore but in the past I've seen Mac Minis that were set up as Jenkins nodes throttle hard, leading to variable job results. The Minis were running VirtualBox VMs which would arbitrarily report long running test failures. I remember thinking perhaps it was VirtualBox specific behaviour until I search for "mac mini cpu throttle" and found similar results.

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

#117

Post by scarface74 » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 5:40 PM UTC

judah wrote: post #85

eropple wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Clicking Macbook shows me an iMac Pro" Yeah, no, it actually literally doesn't. There's no "Macbook" button on Apple's site. There's a Mac button. The Mac page then shows you a range of Macs, from the Macbook to the Mac mini, at the top of the screen. they are showing you the iMac Pro--their halo-effect product and newest release--on the Mac landing page ; that's not the same thing and it is dishonest to assert that…

Mac button, not Macbook, but you already knew that. Open standards are good. And we should want them to win, because it provides a safe haven from the abuses of big corporations. And I think right now, Apple is stepping into those waters: they are holding back web standards in order to keep promoting their business, which is reliant on native apps.

Open standards aren't "good" if they provide an inferior user experience.

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

#118

Post by millstone » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 5:41 PM UTC

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…

> 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"?

What standard requires these things? And even if one does, it's not clear that users would be well-served by that standard.

Apple has a rich native API for background audio playing, which covers things like whether the output stream should mix with other apps, what should happen on route changes, etc. AFAIK the web audio specs are much weaker, so Apple is going to make the most conservative choices here.

> 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. This is beyond security; it is actually hostile to users and developers.

"Hostile" is much too strong. We don't know what's a deliberate decision, and what's just a limitation of the first iteration of this stuff. And as a user, unrestricted background JavaScript execution sounds horrible to me: I definitely do not want that on my iPhone.

Apps on iOS are only allowed to execute in the background in controlled ways, and there's no web APIs providing similar coverage, outside of Service Workers. So what do you think Apple should do here?

Two points I guess:

1. Native APIs will always be more capable, and have better platform integration, than cross-platform layers built on top of them, including web APIs. It's specious to build on a non-native API and then complain that its capabilities and platform integration are inferior to native.

2. Every tiny piece of web capabilities gets used in a user-hostile way, that is hard to anticipate. For example, AudioContext's authors did not anticipate its browser fingerprinting uses. PWAs invite more of this stuff into my devices. Apple is right to be very conservative with what it allows these apps to do, at least initially.

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

#119

Post by scarface74 » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 5:45 PM UTC

shkkmo wrote: post #108

al2o3cr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemme get this straight: you're mad that a company you don't want to pay $99/yr to won't build APIs so you can make money on their platform. So sad, lemme find my tiny violin.

I'm not mad at them. However their lack of support for industry standards is why I won't buy their product.

And again that's the free market at work. There are enough people who have a different set of priorities to make Apple a very successful company.

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

#120

Post by masklinn » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 5:45 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #110

Grae wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If the difference between $99 and $25 is make-or-break, you're probably trying to publish a hobby/low quality app anyways. Or maybe you live in a situation where $74 USD is a meaningful barrier to accessing a market. >The only people who like webapps and their encroachment on good, native apps are webapp developers because it allows them to use their skillset to build something they don't know how to build. You're e…

Or maybe you live in a situation where $74 USD is a meaningful barrier to accessing a market. So they could afford a Mac and internet access, but they couldn't afford the extra $74? As far as excluding people and organizations that want to use a single codebase - good. If they didn't want to take the time to customize their apps enough to make it work on my platform of choice, it's not an app I wanted anyway. My take…

> So they could afford a Mac and internet access, but they couldn't afford the extra $74?

An old mac should be pretty cheap (the latest xcode runs on pre-2010 macs, even more so as they can be upgraded by hand — to a point) and if you're in SEA or eastern europe your internet connection is not $150/mo comcast. For instance in Romania high-speed internet is $15, but the average net income is $650~700 and minimum wage is ~200.