Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them • Hacker News Board

Re: Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them

#81

Post by leeoniya » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 4:19 PM UTC

thosakwe wrote: post #53

There are only two real things limiting PWAs in my opinion: 1. Lack of support on iOS. I presume it’ll stay this way for a while (years!). Mobile Safari finally has service workers, but really, that’s about it. No support for “Add to Home Screen” (technically it’s there, but doesn’t work the way it does in other browsers), and a lot of other APIs. 2. The Web is missing some APIs that would really let it compete with…

> 2. The Web is missing some APIs that would really let it compete with native apps.

absolutely this. i have no idea why the Contact api [1] work has been discontinued. my current conspiracy theory is that it would have allowed many communication apps to no longer require native apps and cloud-stored address books.

like selecting a file to upload, i dont see why i can't select a contact to use/upload from a locally available address book. So many web apps could use this.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/contacts-api/

Re: Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them

#82

Post by pjmlp » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 4:20 PM UTC

rthomas6 wrote: post #16

fggdgvcdderr wrote: post #6

What is a PWA?

It's a website built to a standard that Google created, and when a site is built that way Google and iOS treat it like an app. It can be "installed" on your phone and used like a normal app.

And if distributed via the store, also get access to native APIs.

Re: Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them

#83

Post by RodgerTheGreat » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 4:21 PM UTC

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #7

wffurr wrote: post #3

What happens to your PWA page weight when you add tracking and ads to it? How do I find your ad-free hobby project in the sea of search results for "speedometer" PWAs on the open web? What makes sure you will keep paying the, admittedly modest, hosting costs for the app? I think it's great you can make "tiny PWAs" but I think the article is glossing over the incentives and discovery problem that leads to 30MB ad-infe…

He describes it as an app essentially for his own use - there IS no business model. He’s not going to need to add tracking or ads.

Viewing the source of the reading light and speedometer reveals that both include google analytics tracking code.

Re: Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them

#84

Post by BenoitEssiambre » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 4:22 PM UTC

This made me think about building your own services vs integrating others and I can't help to think rolling your own makes more and more sense.

I always come back to a paper some Netflix guys mentioned in a presentation I saw at a conference to make us appreciate how extremely hard integrating separate systems is : "Hundred Impossibility Proofs for Distributed Computing" (https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/podc89.pdf). The paper basically says there are at least a hundred walls that are mathematically proven to be insurmountable that you are going to potentially hit when trying to keep your data corruption free across systems.

This makes systems that keep data within the bounds of a non distributed, transactionally sound database like Postgresql comparably much more agile and powerful as you don't hit these hundred plus walls.

After some high profile failures of integration like Oracle/IBM's "Phoenix Pay" here in Canada, after people tried to counteract the problems with sophisticated and costly CQRS layers to manage the connections, they are now noticing what was mathematically proven in that paper, that you can't make a maintainable and reliable system when data is spread across too many different companies' servers. I think, at least for tech companies that know how to build stuff, that the trend is now to minimize holding data in a web of connected SAAS services, regrouping key data to their own transactional databases.

This trend has been helped by the fact that, it is now incredibly easy to build frontend and backend services tied to your own database. This "Tiny PWAs" article is a good example. This guy quickly built apps so that he didn't have to deal with ad laden ones in the app stores. As a testament to their simplicity, these apps ended up being only 1.7KB and 800B. This would have been impossible just a few years ago.

Re: Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them

#85

Post by maroonblazer » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 4:23 PM UTC

Twirrim wrote: post #71

Holy crap it's scary that he's building his own speedometer like that. GPS based speedos aren't all that accurate. Ballpark, sure, but not accurate. There are also many circumstances under which GPS won't work. In many countries a car without a functional speedometer is not allowed on the road, for safety reasons.

How inaccurate is GPS? It seems like for his purposes a variance of even +/- 5 mph could be tolerated given one can generally sense approximately what speed they're traveling and can also compare themselves to other cars on the road.

Re: Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them

#86

Post by tw1010 » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 4:24 PM UTC

hartjer wrote: post #57

Introduce acronyms before you use them. I'll say it again for the people in the back. Introduce acronyms before you use them.

You wouldn't introduce the acronym "omg" since what it stands for is so well known. I'd argue the same is true in this scenario.

Re: Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them

#87

Post by oneeyedpigeon » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 4:27 PM UTC

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #83

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He describes it as an app essentially for his own use - there IS no business model. He’s not going to need to add tracking or ads.

Viewing the source of the reading light and speedometer reveals that both include google analytics tracking code.

Where do you see the google analytics code in the speedometer? It's true that the site his example is running on includes GA, but I can't see anything in the source other than a reference to an analytics build which uses a file that only exists if you choose to create it.

Re: Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them

#88

Post by myfonj » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 4:30 PM UTC

System on my old laptop had somewhat broken battery indicator in systray, so I ended up using simple HTML page polling / listening to navigator.battery changes [0] and displayed it, even in a "graph" form (in fact, just didn't redraw old values, so it was a side efffect). That worked pretty well, but then whole API became obsolete because of fingerprinting abuse. Ah, days of yore.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/b...

Re: Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them

#89

Post by dreamache » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 4:40 PM UTC

Twirrim wrote: post #71

Holy crap it's scary that he's building his own speedometer like that. GPS based speedos aren't all that accurate. Ballpark, sure, but not accurate. There are also many circumstances under which GPS won't work. In many countries a car without a functional speedometer is not allowed on the road, for safety reasons.

And many countries are authoritarian shitholes who care more about revenue generation than protecting people. People don't need a speedometer to drive safely.

Re: Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them

#90

Post by pnw_hazor » Sun, Feb 03, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

tw1010 wrote: post #86

hartjer wrote: post #57

Introduce acronyms before you use them. I'll say it again for the people in the back. Introduce acronyms before you use them.

You wouldn't introduce the acronym "omg" since what it stands for is so well known. I'd argue the same is true in this scenario.

What does PWA mean? After reading some comments I guess personal web apps but I not sure.