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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

#391

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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…

> The free market and users are completely capable of choosing quality apps You should get your ideology out of the way. Apple's customers generally expect Apple to curate its App Store and expect Apple to not allow malware in its App Store. This is true for Google Play and the MS Store, except that they are in a poorer position to demand greater scrutiny for its developers, and are lousier app stores for it. TL;DR:…

"You should get your ideology out of the way."

I suggest you get your ideology of rinsing and taking deep enemas in Apple's P.R. out of the way.

There's ample evidence against your fictitious arguments - if indeed Apple users LOVED the app store, the Mac app-store would drastically eclipse the traction of non-app-store-ed apps. Which clearly isn't the case. Q.E.D

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

#392
post #184

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That is the theory. Hold a iPhone and and android and run the same web-browser apps and look for yourself. I have tested several demos by ionic, framework7, etc... is amazing how slow are androids...

My guess is that the difference in speed is mostly due to hardware, not the browser. Apple hardware benchmarks well beats Android hardware: http://browser.geekbench.com/mobile-benchmarks Given Safari can optimise for a single GPU target (which is also probably faster), it is likely the speed differences are not due to the browsers per se.

And that is the reality for a large section of users.

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

#393
post #368

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This could be as easy as: 1. Open control center. 2. Control music from there. 3. There is no step 3.

You hit pause, 5 minutes later the webpage starts playing again. So now we need to add a "block webpage" button to control center?

Android w/ Chrome will keep playing audio for a website when I lock my phone (I use it here: http://listentothe.cloud/), and the pause / play / skip controls are available on the lock screen. One touch required to pause it, same as any native music apps.

It's super convenient and I'm surprised iOS doesn't offer the same? Seems like a no-brainer no-risk feature to me.

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

#394

As a user I am glad Apple is the "loser" in this article and it's the reason I love iOS and hope Apple doesn't change anything in their attitude towards the "free and open" web. I do not trust the web, at all. Access the camera? Nope. The microphone? Are you kidding me. Notifications, GPS, background processing? Fuck no. I am very happy to have Apple as a quality, security and privacy gatekeeper, because I do not hav…

Sorry, that's security by delusion if you trust apps more.

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

#395

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Sure, using only jQuery requires lots of thinking about your code structure and it will undoubtedly be more complex. But also: orders of magnitude faster. It’s really, really not. You might be able to pull together some specific targeted DOM manipulation that is faster in jQuery than in React, for example, but the difference is going to be minimal and the development impact substantial.

> You might be able to pull together some specific targeted DOM manipulation that is faster in jQuery than in React, for example, but the difference is going to be minimal and the development impact substantial. The usage difference in RAM and CPU usage will always be massive, because with jQuery (or if you're in for really high performance code, plain JS) you cut all the framework cruft and black magic away. In addi…

I just don’t agree with this from any perspective.

First, the impact is minimal. React or a similar framework is not that big. In fact, React + ReactDOM is roughly the same code size as jQuery - 100k vs 85k minified.

Second, your custom DOM manipulation code is probably going to be a bit less optimised than a widely used library.

Third, you are overstating the difficulty. I would expect any competent front-end engineer to be able to pick up whichever of these frameworks is required. The different skills are a matter of a little on boarding and studying. Of course, there are many unskilled JS developers out there, but I don’t think that’s an excuse.

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

#396
post #25

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In the article: "Aside: I guess Apple won’t let you submit an app unless you have a registered, legal company?" Although it does seem to be this way, you can submit an app to the store without being a registered, legal company. The most common route is to just mark yourself as a sole proprietorship using your own name. No need for an LLC or anything. However, this may vary from country to country.

Can confirm: in the US, you don't need to get a DUNS number at all, if you're selling individually.

This is correct, but you must list your full legal name as the store listing, which isnt very ideal in my opinion. In order to list it as a business name you need an LLC or more. No Sol Proprietors allowed.

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

#397

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It’s a lot to do with what you’re used to. As an Apple user bought into their ecosystem and tools, I find developing for their platforms dramatically easier and more straightforward than for other targets. I can basically do Android development with some pain and confusion, but on Windows I’m totally stumped/useless.

I was trying to learn native iOS and Android app design been a mainly reactnative developer. Android was very easy to start. I learnt kotlin as I was writing the code. Java I remembered some from college days decade ago. The UI builder was very easy to use. I even went far as using the dagger Di. iOS I was kind of frustrated. I had gone over swift Lang some time back. But I found its syntax estoric. UI builder had it…

Android isn't just Kotlin and Java. It also bundles Gradle with its Apache Groovy DSL, whose syntax is just as esoteric as Swift. Although Groovy is pitched as having Java's syntax, the DSL portion of it (as used in Gradle) looks nothing like Java.

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

#398

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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,…

:) Browser permissions are also ahead of mobile on this one. What they're starting to do is force some permission prompts to be behind user actions - so, you can request a permission as a response to a user clicking on a specific type of button, but you can't just request it anywhere. A big reason notifications are spammy is because they don't have those restrictions, I suspect because Google was heavily involved in…

> With native apps on Android

Which is not the same as native apps on iOS where apps can't spam you without explicit opt-in.

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

#399
post #398

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:) Browser permissions are also ahead of mobile on this one. What they're starting to do is force some permission prompts to be behind user actions - so, you can request a permission as a response to a user clicking on a specific type of button, but you can't just request it anywhere. A big reason notifications are spammy is because they don't have those restrictions, I suspect because Google was heavily involved in…

> With native apps on Android Which is not the same as native apps on iOS where apps can't spam you without explicit opt-in.

iOS's permission model is the web model. Your app requests notifications and a user prompt pops up.

It's even advised by a lot of devs on iOS to copy the web's dark pattern of putting up a dummy permission request before requesting so that if the user says no you can re-request in the future.

True enough, Apple's ahead of Android, because there is at least a permission, but they're still behind the web, because there's no setting to universally block all apps from requesting notifications (at least none that I can find, correct me if I'm wrong).

I've yet to see a permission scheme on a mobile OS where I felt like it was ahead of the web. The point I was making was (at best) native permissions are keeping pace with the web, but they certainly aren't surpassing it and the dominant platform in the space is significantly behind.

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

#400

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You might be applying your anti-Electron arguments a bit too broadly. PWA is not that easy, but the UX friction involved with downloading and installing native mobile apps is abysmal. Electron is (arguably) a shortcut for desktop apps, putting webdev convenience above UX. Whereas PWA is all about improving UX, and is also typically (in practice) more relevant to mobile than desktop.

> PWA is not that easy, but the UX friction involved with downloading and installing native mobile apps is abysmal. Searching on the app store and hitting "install" is an abysmal amount of friction?

Yes.

Compared to links, anyway.

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