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Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

atrium.co

441–450 of 587 posts

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I would take that even further and venture a guess that 99% of HN readers are not representative of the intended general userbase of 99% of the apps for ios/android.

> 99% of HN readers are not representative of the intended general userbase of 99% of the apps for ios/android.

Not that I agreed with the website vs. app debate, but with all respect, that "userbase of 99% of the apps" was likely made up by those people who would also begs for bigger keyboard on their phones so they can send SMS a bit faster back in 2006.

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (paraphrasing) No PWA competes with a native experience even development wise I'm personally too spoiled by the React debugging experience, and I'm saying this as a developer who mainly does C#. On the other hand, I know many developers who can't stand a line of JavaScript. The answer is here a huge "it depends, really".

For those who can't stand javascript, typescript was made for you

Or Scala.js. Huge stdlib (the entire jvm PLUS js) ecosystem) and no language warts.

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#443

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Unless I absolutely have to have the app (work or something), I avoid it. Webpage any day. It wont bug me in the middle of the night. 3AM. Sleeping Phone: BING!!! Me: *groggy* shit, hope everything is ok... Me: *picks up phone* Phone: Rayman Adventures has updated! Me: *uninstalls Rayman Adventures, angrily goes back to sleep*

Not to sound condescending but why would you have your notifications on at night? 10pm-7:30am do not disturb has been a godsend.

Work. Slack, texts, calls (could be anyone in my department whose number I don't know), PagerDuty, the random number PagerDuty call from. More of a pain to whitelist than to just avoid random apps with notification.

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. It's frustrating. One benefit of switching to mail on my own domain (powered by FastMail at the moment) is that instead of username@mydomain, I can also use antispamlabel@username.mydomain. Which is hopefully less common and too dangerous to automatically filter out in "data cleaning".

Man I so want to do that, but the pricing just seems outrageous at minimum $3/user/month, standard $5/user/month. I've been wanting to hack together some scripts to use a serverless cloud provider like SES. Since I rarely check my email and almost never send any, it's crazy to pay such a high monthly fee.

I use mailgun to forward mails incoming on my domain to my usual web mail accounts. Free tier is more than enough, since i don't expect hundreds of mails per day.

Sending is a bit painful, though. Also sometimes mails fail to be forwarded and get stuck for a while... annoying when you're waiting for some kind of link / code.

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#445
post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man I so want to do that, but the pricing just seems outrageous at minimum $3/user/month, standard $5/user/month. I've been wanting to hack together some scripts to use a serverless cloud provider like SES. Since I rarely check my email and almost never send any, it's crazy to pay such a high monthly fee.

I use mailgun to forward mails incoming on my domain to my usual web mail accounts. Free tier is more than enough, since i don't expect hundreds of mails per day. Sending is a bit painful, though. Also sometimes mails fail to be forwarded and get stuck for a while... annoying when you're waiting for some kind of link / code.

Interesting, thanks for the tip!

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and for those who want even more improvement over JS than just TS, there's Dart in the Flutter world.

Why Dart instead of Typescript? How well does it integrate with npm modules? i.e. do I have to reinvent a lot of wheels compared to using Typescript?

Bigger difference than that. Flutter has you writing in high-level components that become native draw calls using Skia. There's an in-progress back-end that outputs to HTML, Canvas, and CSS paint instead of Skia. You aren't going to be using npm much at all.

https://medium.com/flutter-io/hummingbird-building-flutter-f...

If you are using Dart without flutter (eg, overReact), then you're going to use npm a bit more (though dart has better builtin libs which helps a bit on that front). There is a generator that uses typescript definition files to generate dart interopt files.

https://github.com/dart-lang/js_facade_gen

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Lurking around the app store of your device and installing random apps is a behavior for first-time users of the platform. Back during 2010 to 2015, almost everyone was a first-time user of the platform. From now on, downloading random apps is a job for ever younger audiences.

I just bought a new iPad and one of the first things I looked for was apps that utilize the AR frameworks etc. if you are just gonna stick to the web it’s hard to take advantage the full power of your new device.

Yes because it's new and awesome and I'll probably do the same when I get an AR compatible device but it's not the reason we get the device. We get the device to install the apps we already like because we have stuff to do that we already started. Mostly. But especially for older audiences.

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to sound condescending but why would you have your notifications on at night? 10pm-7:30am do not disturb has been a godsend.

Work. Slack, texts, calls (could be anyone in my department whose number I don't know), PagerDuty, the random number PagerDuty call from. More of a pain to whitelist than to just avoid random apps with notification.

You have to specifically allow notifications after you install and launch the app. Just say “no” when it asks you for permission to send you push notifications.

Re: Start with a Website, Not a Mobile App

#450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been hearing the same pitch for literally years. Heck, I've made some of them myself: "This is it, people! Native apps have been rendered unnecessary!" No PWA competes with a native experience. Not performance wise, not usability wise, and ultimately for the developer not even development wise. It may still make a lot of sense, and there are a lot of arguments for web apps, but the enthusiasm in this discussion…

I've been hearing the constant whining about non-native apps for years. Pack in it, you've lost. Everyone is writing Electron and PWAs at this point. Nobody wants to train C++ developers for a minor speed boost consumers don't seem to care about. They have a full build pipeline and dozens of trained webdev engineers ready to go, why invest in a whole new product? A LOT of people have looked at the cost/benefit of ele…

There has been a ton of whining over the years about native vs some JS framework and I'm tired of the shit too. Now I can't speak for your QT but I can for IOS. Do you know how much easier it is to learn swift + xcode vs learning html / css / js in a framework that compiles to native code? The answer is very much.
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