Earlier quoted context omitted.
After years of experience: 0) Native means you get notifications: APNS, GCM. 1) If you don't go native, you go SEO. SEO is hard.
Web has had notifications for years too.
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Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App
301–310 of 587 posts
Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App
#302Most of my mobile users(64 %) has the page added to the home screen, and it's awesome. There is however one problem in all things web: Apple. The amount of bugs in Safari on iOS is incredible and the developers should be ashamed of their work. Safari is literally worse than IE6 was. But sure, users can just switch to Chrome.. Oh, wait, we're talking iOS here, so there is only one engine, and that engine is broken. So…
Apple has a financial incentive for making the browser as bad as possible for anything complicated. After all, they don’t get a 30% cut from browser apps.
Actually, they do get a cut from "browser apps" in the sense that they are paid by a big search/surveillance-based ad company to make their search engine default in the browser.
And again, they have a huge financial incentive to make the browser as good as possible because it makes the hardware as useful and wonderful as possible, which are currently the two most important factors for the most successful product that our planet has seen yet.
I'm kind of surprised by these 'browser is so bad' comments. Anyone here tried to make a browser before? Anyone make one less buggy than Safari?
Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
> With a progressive web app if they like your app they can add it to their device home screen Does anyone even know they can do that? I've never seen anyone do it "in the wild". Would love to see any stats around usage of pwa's added to home screen.
I run a website where I get asked quite often to make it into a mobile app, and I reply by showing how to add it to the device's homescreen and not need an app. Never ever ever in the few dozen times I've had this conversation has anyone ever actually done it. In fact most responses to that suggestion have been overwhelmingly negative. They want an app, even though it'd just be a wrapper around the site with no added…
well i had a different experience. we dong have a native app, but some of our b2b customers wanted an "app" to use on mobile. The app is responsive so we show them how to add it to homescreen and that's it.
Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meh... I'd lean towards web app first, wrapping in cordova for ios/android and electron for desktop at first... adding in more native features as time moves forward, probably react native for {platform} as a second stage.
What I am aiming for is an application that never locks up and never makes you wait without clear indication if it is making progress or not. I could care less about many "Native Features" but latency is king. I am sick and tired of looking at spinning beach balls and such.
If your data backend is over the internet, it doesn't matter if it's a "native app" or "pwa". You can handle appropriate state in most cases. If you're good at it, you can do it at the most atomic level, and should be relatively quick. If you can shard your api/data systems by locality, even better.
Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App
#305Given the fact that most people are already maxed out on apps on their device with just things like facebook and youtube, you're going to be hard pressed to get people to install your app just to try it out. With a progressive web app if they like your app they can add it to their device home screen without installing via the app store and without using up space on their device. Also don't need to pay Apple $100 a ye…
I've never added a PWA to my device. How do you find them? I suppose they don't get added to the store so no way to search for them there. Do they show some popup when you visit their site?
Is there some directory of PWAs?
Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App
#306I don't even bother installing apps anymore, I don't have time to research whether or not they are going to abuse my privacy or have some horrendous TOS. I got my core 10 apps and haven't bought a new one in a year.
> I don't even bother installing apps anymore, I don't have time to research whether or not they are going to abuse my privacy or have some horrendous TOS. I'm going out on a limb but I'd wager you're not exactly representative of the general userbase for which apps are developed.
HN users represent < 1% of the userbase. But people often ask their opinions on tech products, so it is hard to claim whether they matter or not.
Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
I run a website where I get asked quite often to make it into a mobile app, and I reply by showing how to add it to the device's homescreen and not need an app. Never ever ever in the few dozen times I've had this conversation has anyone ever actually done it. In fact most responses to that suggestion have been overwhelmingly negative. They want an app, even though it'd just be a wrapper around the site with no added…
Why not just add the ability to list a PWA in the app store? At that point the installation is intentional and the overhead on Apple/Google is minimal... and Apple still gets their $99/year to allow making it easy to put your app's icon on a user's home screen.
On one hand I can see rational reasons for them not allowing it; Apple doesn't control when you push updates to your PWA, so they don't want to give their seal of approval by listing it in the app store.
But on the other hand, it's pretty depressing to give up the dream of instant app updates, by wrapping your shiny PWA in Cordova and promising to never execute external JavaScript.
Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple has a financial incentive for making the browser as bad as possible for anything complicated. After all, they don’t get a 30% cut from browser apps.
Actually, they do get a cut from "browser apps" in the sense that they are paid by a big search/surveillance-based ad company to make their search engine default in the browser. And again, they have a huge financial incentive to make the browser as good as possible because it makes the hardware as useful and wonderful as possible, which are currently the two most important factors for the most successful product that…
>I'm kind of surprised by these 'browser is so bad' comments. Anyone here tried to make a browser before? Anyone make one less buggy than Safari?
So? By that argument almost nothing can be compared or criticized or discussed. Also, people aren't saying that making a browser is easy or that they can do it better or that Safari didn't do it well. They're saying that Safari did it badly compared to other existing mobile browsers. You don't need to build something to be able to compare it against something else.
Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
For one, you have a chance of actually finding quality native apps. Web apps are not completely optimal no matter how you try to sell it. I have nothing specifically against hybrid or web apps (they have their place), but speaking from personal experience I've had most luck with apps that were (1) native (2) cost a few pennies. I say this wearing the consumer or end-user hat. As a developer, I also prefer writing nat…
So you've found a quality apps by only finding it via the app store? It just sounds odd to me because I literally never have. The only way I've found them is by researching it on the web beforehand.
I've find apps through the App Store app and the web, or magazines etc. Even word of mouth. That's pretty common. You're taken through the App Store at some point to download the app though.
Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Think of it like this: If Hacker News required a fat client to function on your desktop, would you actually be here at all? HN essentially is a service that provides only a couple of text views to list and read submittions and their discussions, and requires zero processing or interaction. That's hardly a challenging problem that requires a fat client. If however we were discussing an application that required sign…
Instagram is perfectly usable as a website, at least on an iPhone. I guess some features might be missing, but the core stuff is there: browsing, adding photo, filters, stories.
How do you post a photo on instagram in a web browser? I thought that was reserved for the app.