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

#171

Post by andai » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:37 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #109

judah wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. As a non-profit, there is no way I'm building separate codebases for each platform. I simply don't have the time or money to do that. In this sense, the web has already won here: I'm able to take a single codebase (HTML, JS, CSS) and generate apps for 3 major app stores.

Why are you generating apps? Sounds like you need a website. Do your apps use the camera, accelerometer, AR, ML GPS or any other parts of a device? Or is it just a website with the cachet of being “an app.” Most people releasing apps shouldn’t.

You are technically correct.

However:

> You might wonder, “Why even put your app in the app stores? Just live on the opened web!”

> The answer, in a nutshell, is because that’s where the users are. We’ve trained a generation of users to find apps in proprietary app stores, not on the free and open web.

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

#172

Post by diego_moita » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:38 PM UTC

> Don’t make me pay you to make my app available to your users. My app enriches your platform.

In the 90's Microsoft won market over Apple by, among other things, being a more developer-friendly company. It seems Apple didn't learn any lesson from it: crappy tools (XCode), disregard for standards (Safari), creating barriers...

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

#173

Post by vt100 » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:39 PM UTC

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…

Exactly. If you are a Consumer, or want to sell to Consumers, then Apple is where it's at.

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

#174

Post by george_perez » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:42 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #114

peoplewindow wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 publ…

Latest Xcode needs High Sierra, not Sierra.

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

#175

Post by JimDabell » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:43 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #53

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…

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…

> I absolutely loathe native apps (because I don't have nor want a smartphone)

Why does not having a smartphone make you loathe native apps?

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

#176

Post by zghst » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:44 PM UTC

WA wrote: post #106

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…

> Forcing you to use native controls. This is wrong. Cordova has been around for years. Furthermore, it’s detached from reality. I released an app made with Ionic. It’s an app for average joe, not for devs or designers. Out of 20,000 downloads, I received exactly 0 complaints about performance or UI. Most users don’t care and don’t notice anyways. And it’s pretty much the only way how I can maintain an app for both p…

How accessible is your app? Have you tried it with VoiceOver? How does it do with battery and memory vs another comparable native app? When there's an OS upgrade, does your app automatically adjust to new resolutions and device classes?

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

#177

Post by notriddle » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:50 PM UTC

curun1r wrote: post #71

squeral wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the great advantage of web apps is that you build a single code base for that can run on any platform (browser). That make it so much easier to maintain so you can focus more on features. If you build a native app for iOS you'll have to build another for Android and so it could be harder to maintain.

I think you've discovered his point. The advantage that you describe makes the developer's job easier, not the user's. If you're an iOS user, where the monetary incentive is there for developers to invest the time to build you a native app, you don't care whether that imposes a greater hardship on the developer, because you're not the one affected. You've become accustomed to developers building something specificall…

As a user, I appreciate web apps because:

1. Web apps typically work everywhere, including on my Android phone, on my Windows machine, on my mom's Mac, and on Linux when I used to use it as my primary desktop platform. I know this without having to look up a compatibility table because I opened it in my browser, and other than mobile-version/desktop-version, web apps work the same way everywhere. Native apps are often platform exclusives, and even if they do work on multiple platforms, they work differently on different ones. Try asking someone who owns a Mac how to use MS Office when you're on Windows.

2. I know how to share web apps with my mom by texting her a link. Even if your native app has a share button, it's in a different place in different apps instead of just "click the address bar and hit Ctrl-C".

3. Web apps almost always work with my browser's password manager, ad blocker, and stuff. Native apps are more of a crapshoot there.

4. Web apps are limited by the browser's sandbox (this is not applicable to native apps on Android or iOS, since they're sandboxed pretty much the same way as web apps, but Windows and Mac are both still playing catch-up).

5. If Linux users didn't have web apps, they'd have no apps at all.

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

#178

Post by logfromblammo » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:52 PM UTC

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.

I worked at a trademark search and brand-protection company for a few years, and we never used D&B.

We scraped from every secretary of state in the US and the federal patent and trademark office, and got some info from LexisNexis. We had a mess of regular expressions that had to be updated any time a secretary of state changed their website. But in the end, we had a reasonably complete set of information on all registered corporations and DBA registrations in the country, which was updated at least monthly. We certainly had a record for every company that had a registered trademark.

Apple could certainly do that work itself, at a fraction of the cost of whatever it pays D&B. Any Joe Schmoe in the country can look at a business name, go to the secretary of state of the state they claim to be registered in, and verify the detail, which always includes the name and address of the registered agent, and most of the time also includes the principals of the corporation.

D&B is almost completely pointless in 2018.

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

#179

Post by judah » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:52 PM UTC

zghst wrote: post #167

judah wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that wasn't my conclusion. If you read the article, I offer a summary at the end, where I give a winner. (Winner, meaning best/easiest/simplest/fewest barriers to entry from a developer perspective.) The winner is Google. One of the main reasons for that is, Google tries to make everything in the OS available from standard JavaScript. Their platform is web friendly. For example, want to display the currently play…

Really this is all about your aversion to paying the fee and to learning how to develop for the respective platforms. JavaScript does not offer performance or optimization near the same levels of native code, etc. On top of that, there are guidelines, accessibility features, and carefully crafted UI components for a respective OS (that have thousands of hours of user research). The amount of standard APIs developed i…

No, I wrote the post to document how an existing web app can be moved into the app store, the reasons for that, and the hurdles in doing so.

APIs: Yes, Google is improving the situation -- making more and more common OS APIs exposed to standard web interfaces. Meanwhile, Cordova is letting web devs access native functionality that the platform vendors don't expose. The story isn't perfect, but it's actually quite impressive even now.

Web apps: they offer all kinds of things native apps can't. Native apps require install. Native apps must go through approval process for every update. Native apps are restricted in what they can publish on the app store. Native apps are subject to the censorial whims of a single corporation (or government forcing that single corporation). Native apps only work on a single platform; the web works everywhere.

There are lots of wins for web apps. And I think PWAs only increase those wins.

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

#180

Post by smsm42 » Mon, Apr 16, 2018, 6:58 PM UTC

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…

> This is similar to the "barrier to entry" one above, but seriously. I've never met a developer who complained about needing a Mac to develop for iOS that has put forth an even halfway decent iOS app.

That quote could be in Wikipedia article about survivor bias as an illustration. Of course you haven't heard it - anybody for whom it is a problem is not developing iOS apps and probably doesn't talk to you about it. I am in software industry for decades now, and I have developed software for dozens of systems, but I wouldn't waste my time at trying my hand at iOS development anytime soon - one reason being because there are too many hoops to jump over. And I already own a Mac. Imagine same position where you may need to buy one.