Your car dashboard is broken. Instead of fixing it, you write an app that provides a lousy workaround. Is this meant to be a bad example?
Sounds like a hack if I ever heard of one.
Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them
111–120 of 178 posts
Re: Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't think it worked like that, but I could be super wrong. Last I saw things launched from the home screen or in a webview from another app use the "Android System Webview" as it's rendering engine. IIRC there was some work done to make that runtime swappable, but I'm not sure how far that went.
It's possible. E.g., PWAs installed via Firefox on Android use Gecko, not the system WebView.
Oh wow that's awesome I had no idea, thanks!
Re: Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. If more people's reaction, instead of searching an app store for a privacy respecting screen light, was to sit down and write: let on true; and were able to easily upload it somewhere on a phone and run it locally from a shortcut on the screen. We'd have hacker culture encouraged right there.
Upload? Come on, just load it as dataURI, bookmark it and you have offline "application" at your disposal. And as a bonus, here, have this "distributed app store" you can even print on paper [1]. [1] http://zxing.org/w/chart?cht=qr&chs=350x350&chld=L&choe=UTF-... i.e. QR-coded dataURI document data:text/html;charset=utf-8, Screen light
My iPhone 6s doesn’t like this QR code, it just says “No usable data found”.
Re: Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them
#114Not sure if there is anything progressive about this but it's small, has a manifest so it will supposedly get cached, and is installable I think. Wrote it for similar reasons, sick of ads.
Re: Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them
#115I'm amazed there's a jurisdiction in a developed nation where driving a car with dead dashboard is legal.
I'm pretty sure it isn't legal
Re: Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them
#116There 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…
I am very happy that the web has no more APIs. I'm already tired enough of telling my browser that I don't want any website to send me notifications, to access my location, to access my camera, my microphone. And God knows what goes behind my back. Enough is enough!
Re: Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Indeed!
While such access is still hard on Android (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057673) or impossible on iOS, you on the other hand can easily call all the WinRT APIs from JavaScript if you distribute a PWA on the Microsoft Store.
See https://docs.microsoft.com/microsoft-edge/windows-runtime. There are examples of what these APIs allow you to do on https://www.pwabuilder.com/windows.
BTW, you can use https://pwa2uwp.fragara.com/ to publish a PWA to the Microsoft Store, without needing Visual Studio or even a Windows machine.
Re: Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them
#118> “surely there is a app for that!” A quick look leads to speedometer apps with ads and 30MB download weight, and simple screen light that also have ads that weight in at 5MB. I’m finally groking what rms has been banging on about for so long. It is completely unacceptable that we are running software that does this to the user. Users need to be empowered and able to run code that they can control.
I agree the loss of control is unacceptable. I agree that only being able to get commercial apps like this that monetize through advertisements and selling opaquely-gathered tracking data is unacceptable. But I'm curious how much download weight matters, outside of as a proxy for "how much bloated ad bullshit is hiding inside the app bundle"? I'd wager the difference between a 2KB PWA and a 5MB or 30MB native app dow…
I'm not sure of that. Plenty of my friends and family in the UK are using phones that are a few years old and only come with 8gb or 16gb of storage, such that they are regularly running out of storage space.
Re: Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
The other, largely unspoken, downside to PWAs are that the user cannot block the tracking and ads in them when launched natively. Even though they might run on your android where you have firefox mobile with all the adblocking extensions enabled, and run that PWA in the browser. I'm sure this might be another reason why PWAs are being supported by the advertising industry platform suppliers.
Speaking of Firefox, there was Firefox OS which appeared to be a stillborn child. It's app distribution model likely was close to PWA's. There's also Chrome OS which has lived longer than its foxy twin, and is going to be incorporated into Android according to wiki. I think PWA is about tooling, like Google's chrome dev tools or Workbox, and frameworks. The good side of it is sharing the codebase/API between app and…
I was completely distracted from your point when you mentioned the "foxy twin" of the "stillborn child". I know foxy had a double entendre here, but...uh...disturbing choice of words.
Re: Tiny PWAs and why I keep building them
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Upload? Come on, just load it as dataURI, bookmark it and you have offline "application" at your disposal. And as a bonus, here, have this "distributed app store" you can even print on paper [1]. [1] http://zxing.org/w/chart?cht=qr&chs=350x350&chld=L&choe=UTF-... i.e. QR-coded dataURI document data:text/html;charset=utf-8, Screen light
My iPhone 6s doesn’t like this QR code, it just says “No usable data found”.
is there a "don't try to use the data" setting, so it'll just present the plain text?