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

#341

Post by Angostura » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 11:05 AM UTC

addicted wrote: post #302

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…

> as a user, I would find it too "buried" behind Safari How is this any different than music playing on say Google Play Music on my iPhone? I listen to music from YouTube, iTunes, iHeartRadio, Google Play Music, Pandora, and other apps occasionally. Why don't I feel it's buried in those situations? Because of the simple reason that Apple allows only one source of audio on iOS at any point of time (including Safari),…

I can have 30 tabs open in Safari on iOS. It would drive me absolutely potty trying to find the one that had decided to start playing advert audio.

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

#342

Post by Angostura » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 11:09 AM UTC

jakobegger wrote: post #325

rimliu wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing web apps undermine is user experience. And if it is PWA, why would you want app store anyway?

He doesn't want app store. The whole article is about how the author is forced to submit an app to the store just to allow playing audio in the background. The author would prefer to just have a web app / website that plays audio, but it is not possible. On iOS, apparently you need to use Cordova and submit an app to the store if you want to play the next song while the app is in the background. And it is not possibl…

as an iPhone user, I'm extraordinarily glad that the author cannot play audio at me from a website in the background.

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

#343

Post by gkya » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 11:11 AM UTC

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…

> The free and opened web presents a challenge to Apple's app business.

The free and opened [sic] web is BS. The "web" was always free and open, if you had worthy and user-respecting stuff to publish. Autoplaying video and other similar features are just plain evil. And if web apps are second class citizens on iOS, that's really a nice thing to hear, IMnsHO, because they are second class citizens on the WWW itself. They are either castrated versions of the native applications they are pretending to be, or overtly bloated thin clients (i.e. glorified s) anyways. There has been one web app that I've used and liked: the old Gmail app.

The requirements of the platform are quite clear, and the service in return is quite desirable (apps being reviewed before publishing, user-centric permissions scheme, etc.) and even though I don't own an iOS device ATM, it sounds quite desirable to me, at least over Android where there is a hundred million billion versions of the OS out there and nobody bothers sending update my way so that I can has some granular control over what I allow the apps do. If you don't like it, don't take it. And it's nothing like IE because nobody has to use iPhones whereas Microsoft had put its OS and its browser on almost every computer out there, and I bet older IE browsers still have more market share than the sum of devices online with Safari installed. They are just a little island of the technosphere that want to get what they paid for, and enjoy the web like it was meant to be, possibly; and I'm just like them with my Qutebrowser where I have to disable JS and maintain a whitelist because the free and open web. Gosh.

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

#344

Post by fnordsensei » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 11:23 AM UTC

strangegecko wrote: post #330

imron wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Developers still request too much .. > it's gotten a bit better .. > It's a very small improvement, but it helps .. > These are all small steps Thereby illustrating the parent's point that developers will still ask for too much and that the power balance is in favour of the developer. Apple on the other hand heavily restricts what developers can do. It's developer-hostile, but user-friendly.

You can be just as user-friendly by giving the user a button "never let web pages ask me again for this / all permissions (you can undo this in settings)" when the first page asks for permissions.

I disagree that this is usable enough.

Every webpage and their dog has now started to ask for permissions to popup notifications. I find this really annoying. Sure, I can disable it for one site, but then the next one I visit pops up the same question if it's OK to spam me.

I've turned it off browser-wide as a result.

If asking for permissions is to be an option in the future, I hope it is a completely manual opt-in, available in some kind of site-specific settings thingie (that makes no effort to distract the user by noises, popups or red badges by itself).

I think this is reasonable given the ratio of sites a user should be willing to grant any permissions to, vs the amount they should want as sandboxed as humanly possible.

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

#345

Post by _pfxa » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 11:28 AM 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…

Like anybody was forced to write iOS apps... I'm an undergrad from Turkey and buying Apple hardware is impossible for me (and not really desirable ATM, but that's not the topic). But I don't feel I'm barred entry to the app-making business, I can start with a desktop app, a web business, or a even a Flutter app on Android and later port to iOS when it's financially feasible. iOS crowd is a bunch that wants quality software and is willing to pay for it, and that the entry to the market is not free is completely understandable. Otherwise it's like wanting to run a caf but not wanting to pay rent or resources. They don't owe you nothing.

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

#346

Post by fnordsensei » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 11:31 AM UTC

myguysi wrote: post #329

judah wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stepping back a moment, it's worth noting that this was Steve Jobs' original vision for the iPhone: “The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, they can send an email, they can look up a location on Google Maps.” Here we a…

That vision was abandoned while Jobs was still around. It was a way to bootstrap the first wave of apps but Apple’s principles of quality and security mean it’s not feasible. I’ll be really disappointed if they give in to the PWA movement and sacrifice those principles. I don’t quite understand what the issue with native apps is in all honesty?

Yes, this is not a betrayal of Steve Jobs' legacy. It's just that it is an ideal that came into contact with the reality.

The phishing industry is doing well for itself, and there's no sign of the scamming factories shutting down anytime soon.

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

#347

Post by gkya » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 11:36 AM UTC

rhacker wrote: post #18

We're definitely at the point in history where we have to get out of these app stores . I get it if you're doing a game or something that's fine, stay in the app store. But I don't know how many times I've been extremely frustrated with a website telling me to get their app. * They break my in-browser password store * They introduce extremely complicated "app-only" device links for Oauth * Updating your UI for most a…

> Updating your UI

This is what I hate with the current software development culture. It's not your UI once it's on my things, its MINE. You shouldn't be able to touch it once I have it.

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

#348

Post by gkya » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 11:38 AM UTC

So we call links PWAs now?

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

#349

Post by scarface74 » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 11:55 AM UTC

realusername wrote: post #336

scarface74 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They only provide inferior user experience because Safari mobile is crap.

Right, because computing is full of cross platform frameworks that you can write once and run anywhere and have as great of an experience as native apps - look how great Java and Swing were.

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

#350

Post by mceoin » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 12:15 PM UTC

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…

> These are higher-level permissions and should not be free for the taking.

But there has to be a balance though, right?

Steve Jobs called the computer a bicycle for the mind, but actually deploying simple apps can feel like a mousetrap for the soul - it crushes your will to create.