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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

#271

Post by wila »

smsm42 wrote: post #183

In this article, I read that you not only need a registered company to publish iOS app, you also need it to be registered with third party (DnB) provider? Is it true? You can't publish on Apple store without having DnB-approved company?

Not True.

As I'm not in the US getting an approved DnB profile turned out to be painful. Even once I got one, apple still did not consider my profile valid (yes, I did wait a few days)

As I was on a dead line and fed up with the whole DnB crap after a couple of weeks I ended up registering the iOS developer license on my personal name instead of my company name.

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

#272

Post by valuearb »

judah wrote: post #45
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…

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've poured nearly 7 years of work into user experience, and you don't appreciate the benefits of native UX, especially on iOS?

My company builds our app in React, with the performance and UI critical functions in Java (Android) and Swift (iOS). I've spent my career learning and applying one key rule about UX, little things can make huge differences in how enjoyable and productive the user experience is.

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

#273

Post by valuearb »

"Final thoughts: The web always wins. It defeated Flash. It killed Silverlight. It destroyed native apps on desktop. The browser is the rich client platform. The OS is merely a browser-launcher and hardware-communicator.

The web will win, too, on mobile. Developers don’t want to build 3 separate apps for the major platforms. Companies don’t want to pay for development of 3 apps.

The answer to all this is the web. We can build rich web apps – Progressive Web Apps – and package them for all the app stores.

Apple in particular has a perverse incentive to stop the progress of the web. It’s the same incentive that Microsoft had in the late ‘90s and early 2000s: it wants to be the platform for good apps. PWAs undermine that; they run everywhere.

My software wisdom is this: PWAs will eventually win and overtake native mobile apps. In 5-10 years, native iOS apps will be as common as Win32 C apps."

iOS developers made $27B last year writing apps for the App Store. It ain't going away, it's still growing.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2018/01/06/apples-ap...

Web apps are fine for quick and dirty apps where the user experience doesn't have to be great. Choosing HTML and Javascript for UX always means you're going to have a compromised user experience compared to native. Again that's fine in segments where it's not as important, but ultimately the best experiences are native and that's where the market is going.

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

#274

Post by ascorbic »

wpietri wrote: post #261
nkristoffersen wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And don't forget expo.io build process. I never have to open xcode anymore.

Well that's really cool. How is React Native coming along? I see it's still pre-1.0, but given that they've been going 3 years, I assume there's been a lot of progress.

Just a few billion users. I think they're doing ok.

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

#275

Post by ascorbic »

evv wrote: post #192
scarface74 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want a native app, use native tools for each platform to create the best user experience.

This is effectively asking to double the size of the engineering team, or slow it down dramatically. If I were a startup or small business, I'd rather ship a slightly slow-feeling app with my existing team of web developers who already know their tools, than to hire a bunch of native developers and somehow get them all on the same page.

And asking to drop Linux support.

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

#276

Post by Silhouette »

saagarjha wrote: post #205
Silhouette wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 good thing as well, for the same reason. That doesn't necessarily follow. The average mobile app is so simple in terms of both the data it's working with and the complexity of its UI that reasonably efficient code is unlikely to challenge a modern mobile device, whether it's…

> The average mobile app is so simple in terms of both the data it's working with and the complexity of its UI that reasonably efficient code is unlikely to challenge a modern mobile device, whether it's native or running within a browser. Unfortunately, it has been shown time and time again that this isn't the case. Somehow, it seems that web apps just never get the performance that native apps do.

Unfortunately, it has been shown time and time again that this isn't the case.

Has it? Web apps might be positively correlated with poor performance, but I don't see any causal relationship there for the kind of apps we're talking about here.

From direct personal experience, some of the UIs I've worked on have been relatively complicated by web app standards, yet typically there's been no perceptible lag in any rendering or interactions. We could achieve that kind of responsiveness at least a decade ago, on much less powerful hardware than sits in your pocket today. Obviously there is an inherent delay in any communication required with the server, which is one of the main areas where PWAs and some of the other modern APIs can help to minimise the effect. Other than that, modern JS runtime environments running on just about any smartphone, tablet or laptop from the past few years are plenty fast enough for the kinds of software most of us are trying to run within them.

Of course, that's not to say there aren't many poorly performing web apps out there. It's just that I've yet to see one where the poor performance was demonstrably attributable to the fundamental web technologies involved, as opposed to simpler explanations like developers who had no idea what they were doing and relied on inefficient designs, bloated frameworks, and so on. You get that with native desktop software as well, but no-one's saying a modern PC can't do things quickly just because someone managed to write yet another text editor that had a noticeable delay just opening a file with a few thousand lines in it.

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

#277

Post by wiseleo »

I just love this part about D&B.

Problem: "I go to D&B to update my business profile. Surprise! They have a JavaScript bug in their validation logic that prevents me from updating my profile."

Solution: "Thankfully, I’m a proficient developer. I click put a breakpoint in their JavaScript, click submit, change the isValid flag to true, and voila! I’ve updated my D&B profile."

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

#278

Post by Silhouette »

saagarjha wrote: post #231
Silhouette wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren't willing to offer it, I'm sure someone will. Given that some of the services my businesses offer are in various niche markets, and as far as we know they are totally unique and have no direct competition after several years on the market, apparently you are mistaken.

> as far as we know they are totally unique and have no direct competition after several years on the market That's what every company says right before they get their lunch eaten by a startup that comes out of nowhere ;)

No doubt, but I've done this a few times now with a few different businesses that are still going several years later, so I'll take my chances. :-)

But seriously, there seems to be this almost universal assumption that if a market is worth serving in business, there will always be competition. That makes little sense to me, because if the modern online world has taught us anything, surely it is that our societies are incomprehensibly diverse and have countless niche interests and small communities within them.

Those in turn create countless business opportunities, as long as you admit the possibility of smaller businesses that serve such markets in some useful and commercially viable way yet have no hope or ambition to become the next unicorn. The most profitable things I've worked on typically weren't in that category, but most of the best-received things I've ever worked on were.

But sometimes that sort of market is only big enough for one player to really do well, or maybe there's only one player willing and able to invest in setting something up to cater to that particular market anyway.

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

#279

Post by trumped »

saagarjha wrote: post #213
earenndil wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not going to happen

maybe they'll change their mind when their market share goes back to what it was 20 years ago (that's me being hopeful, it probably will never happen)

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

#280

Post by mankash666 »

mft_ wrote: post #248
mankash666 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gosh darn the cognitive dissonance!! The free market and users are completely capable of choosing quality apps, iOS/Apple needn't babysit, nay play brainwashing big-brother-evil-megacorp strangling competition/dissent, them in the process. "If your project is more than a hobby, you ...." Yes yes - if you're serious about your project, you'll willfully submit yourself to anal-probes by monopolistic mega-corporation th…

> When was the last time you let your refrigerator manufacturer tell you what items are allowed in your OWN FUCKING refrigerator? Why is different for iOS/Apple? Well, if the things I put in my refrigerator started acting like malware, I think manufacturers might start taking a different approach...

But 99.9999% of app store rejections aren't malware related. It's a scapegoat reason of convenience, but not the real reason, v.i.z. Apple's insatiable monopolistic ambition of totalitarianism, of cock-blocking freedom on their devices.
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