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

debuggerdotbreak.judahgabriel.com

141–150 of 415 posts

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

#141

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…

>requiring a Mac No kidding. If you hope to develop apps for iOS, you better have a machine with the corresponding build tools. I make a number of Cordova plugins. Many devs without a Mac often use PhoneGap Build as their dev build service. The turn-around to make a code-change and see the result must be about 60s.

But apple could provide an ios sdk for linux or windows.

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

#142
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Imagine if you install Pandora as a PWA. It's now on your homescreen. You launch it. You start playing some music. Now you switch over to Twitter. Woops! The audio stopped playing. You bring Pandora back to the fore. It reloads and starts playing a different song. Worse, there's no way to fix that. That's how it's supposed to work. This is the state of PWAs on iOS.

Imagine you install $ANYTHING as a PWA. It's now on your homescreen, you launch it. You do $THING. now you switch to twitter. Now the PWA -- in the background -- loads some ad with an autoplaying video and now theres ad audio coming from ... well, you're not sure where, but it doesn't seem like it's coming from twitter. now you have to go find it and stop it. Meanwhile bitcoinminer.js is burning through your battery in the background because those video ads just weren't quite enough revenue.

I'm not sure which one sounds worse.

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

#143
Apple decided many years ago that they were going to make it rich by controlling as much of their product/software as they could. In the past, when I guess they put out unique and well crafted products it worked. Today, not so much. Their stuff is garbage. Apple has continuous problems with production and have used strong-arm tactics to control what people can find out and fix on their own.

You hit the nail on the head with "In 5-10 years, native iOS apps will be as common as Win32 C apps. Apple will go kicking and screaming, keeping iOS Safari behind the curve, blocking PWA progress where they can. " Personally, I don't think (hope?) that it will take 5-10 years. Right now they have less than 80% of the market. As more and more people figure out that their products are not what they used to be that market share will become less and less. At some point it will no longer matter.

To the argument that the "sales are there" all I can say is look at the statistics. I believe it's less than 1% of all app store products (regardless of which one) make money. And, the average user goes to five apps on their phones all the time. The chances you're going to write an app that actually makes anything is between slim and none. If the user can't install your app for free you're never even going to get it installed on their phone/tablet at all.

Further, the vast number of apps in the future will be PWAs and many of those will be business oriented. As you said, programmers don't want to have to write three different sets of code (realistically only two: JS and Apple - whatever they're pushing recently). And, most of those apps will be "installed" from the web page for that SaaS or your own enterprise.

Apple is done. Stick it with a fork and take it out of the oven. Obviously, with all the dumb money they've collected over the last 10+ years they could do well without ever shipping another product. And, without a doubt, they will continue to get people to buy their products for sometime in the future. But, they will either come to the realization that they have no choice but work with MS and Google in allowing PWAs or they will become irrelevant. It will take them some time to understand that since they no longer have forward thinking management and just surround themselves with "protect our business" types. Eventually, those turkeys will be replaced (hopefully sooner rather than later - we still need competition) or Apple will become the next Oracle. No longer a player in today's world.

And for those doubters out there, don't forget, Apple was going down when they brought Jobs back the last time. Unfortunately, they have no one to go back to this time. It can, and will, happen again.

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

#144
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…

> To build an app at all he requires at least one computer, which is guaranteed to cost more than $99.

Well, the question is who does it cost? The original purchaser, or the person that was gifted it or got it for free because it didn't work and put the time in to fix it?

Plenty of people get computing hardware for free or close to it.

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

#145
post #84

So by this author’s estimation, the Apple App Store is the worst and the Microsoft App Store is the best. I can tell him that from the user’s perspective, it’s the exact opposite, and I have exactly one app from Microsoft and hundreds from Apple.

That wasn't the author's conclusion.

Obviously, you're an Apple fan boi. The author was the person who responded to you!

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

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What would you use? (honest question)

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

#147

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.

We're talking about a Cordova-wrapped SPA. You can develop those on Raspberry Pis if you had to. A 9 year old $250 MBP off ebay will absolutely suffice.

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

#148
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…

Those who are skeptical should try out Twitter Lite, the PWA version of Twitter. Developer blog here:

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-sourc...

I've been using it on Android for a while. It's not perfect, but it's definitely good enough. There are still plenty of apps where I'd tell a CEO, "No, we really need three sets of client developers," but the number is certainly dropping over time.

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

#149
> Don’t make me pay you to make my app available to your users. My app enriches your platform. Without good apps, your platform will be abandoned.

I don't know much about the guy or his app but this sounds supremely entitled. I don't think Apple is in want of developers to make apps for iOS.

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

#150
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care about the $99, I absolutely loathe native apps (because I don't have nor want a smartphone) and there is no way I'll ever buy a Mac to do iOS development. I do have some Apple hardware here but it runs Linux. Developers should be free to make their choices without being forced into some kind of eco-system, especially not with Apple itself focusing more on their gadgets and fashion items revenue streams t…

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…

VSCode, as far as I'm aware, uses Electron and is great.

Twitter's React web application was so good on performance and hitting all of the marks I used the mobile native application for that I was able to delete the native application saving space, and "adding to homescreen" for like, what, a few bytes of storage?

Facebook I just use the mobile web app inside of Safari proper instead of installing the native app. It's a pain that I have to wait until I'm on my iPad or PC to use messages (I don't install Messenger because I don't want a separate application just for a small feature of Facebook proper), but it's serviceable enough. Would be nice if Facebook would follow Twitter's lead and build a native-like web experience, but I guess they don't feel it adds the value and that's their right.

I'm completely game for people using these things and doing it right and if done so, yeah, I think it is better than or at least equivalent to native (PWAs != Electron apps, but can be served in them). It is also crazy to compare a 32GB-128GB device vs my PC with storage measured in TBs. I can afford bloat on my PC that I would prefer to keep away from my phone.

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