Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible • Hacker News Board

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#661

Post by LocalPCGuy » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 10:21 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #335

robenkleene wrote: post #60

I’m guessing that Apple will start hindering web apps because the new mouse support in iPadOS is going to be such a boon to web apps. Because of sandboxing, web apps are the only cross-platform apps that can run in their full versions on iPadOS. I wrote a quick summary of the situation[0]. Therefore, since native apps are more of a platform differentiator than web apps, moving forward we can expect Apple to start sys…

The people who work on making websites function better on iPad are literally a 20 second walk away from the people who work in Intelligent Tracking Prevention–do you really think that they'd seek to undermine each other in this way?

Absolutely, do you have evidence they are talking and consulting with each other? Obviously lack of evidence isn't evidence either, but departments do things all the time that are at odds with each other in companies like Apple.

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#662

Post by npunt » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 10:21 PM UTC

EvanAnderson wrote: post #632

npunt wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As should you. It’s not that an app ecosystem was never planned, it’s that it was not an early priority. Remember they were literally defining everything at the beginning - OS, UX, APIs, core features, hardware, first party apps, market positioning, etc etc. Needs of third party developers weren’t nearly as important as nailing the basics and ensuring a risky project was a success. The html5 app bit was a way to test…

How do you square that against all the reported accounts (including the Isaacson biography) of Steve Jobs saying that he was opposed to third-party native applications on the platform? Yes, they changed direction in 2008. That's just it, though. They changed direction.

Jobs’ hot takes aren’t the end-all when it comes to product intent at Apple. He was basically an embodiment of strong opinions weakly held. His superpower was focusing teams on what the right set of features would be to create a product that made sense to the market, and ignoring everything else. The phone / iPod / internet communicator trifecta was example of this - nothing but nailing those three mattered at launch, and any effort elsewhere was wasteful. Without that kind of leadership, eng teams will often dither efforts over many things that don’t matter to success.

The history of Apple is filled with examples of this dynamic. iPhone was a group effort among many talented and influential people and I doubt Forstall and others driving software had same opinion on third party apps. They just didn’t pick that battle before it made sense to. Every other computing platform at the time (including Windows Mobile, Palm, and BlackBerry) supported third party apps, it’s not like the use case was novel or difficult to see, and the webs limitations were considerable. Adding apps was a default path temporarily set aside.

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#663

Post by Silhouette » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 10:23 PM UTC

notduncansmith wrote: post #644

Silhouette wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a website hasn't been used for 7 days, I'm happy for its data to disappear and save space on my device. You might be, but maybe not everyone is. I've worked on apps based around multimedia content where downloading in advance to watch or listen later was a big deal, because a typical user also travels a lot and might well be going away for longer than a week. Even if they can get the same data again next time they…

Then wouldn't it be appropriate to offer a native app to offer that functionality? A web browser in 2020 is a place to run vast swathes of untrusted code safely; it is not a digital workstation platform, that is the job of the OS. If what I am downloading from you is important enough that I want to have it even offline, then I trust you enough to install your native app.

A web browser in 2020 is a place to run vast swathes of untrusted code safely; it is not a digital workstation platform, that is the job of the OS.

I'm not sure how much that assumption really holds any more, nor why it should necessarily continue to do so even if it has so far. Technology evolves, and so does how we use it. In the case of the web, and web apps in particular, they have evolved to satisfy a need for convenience in software distribution that many traditional desktop OSes had hopelessly neglected for a very long time and where the developer experience for native mobile apps is less than ideal.

I appreciate your comment about the trust issue, but the bottom line is that these technologies do serve a useful purpose for some people -- I have the customer feedback at my own businesses to make that clear -- and the experience web developers can offer on Android with PWAs will now be significantly better than what they can offer on iOS.

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#664

Post by jfb » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 10:24 PM UTC

judah wrote: post #505

jfb wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I promise you that Apple does not give a shit about the revenue from the developer program.

It's not just about the revenues of $100/year. It's also the revenue from 30% sharing of profits. And most importantly, it's the bigger revenue generated from having apps that work only on iOS, which drives users to buy iPhones and iPads.

Yes, and they shouldn’t be taking a cut. Their services initiatives are bad for them and the users of said services. But as someone who did two tours in their services arm, it is overwhelmingly likely that the reason that WebKit is making these changes is their stated reason of making Safari more resilient to the attacks on their users vectored in by web badness.

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#665

Post by notduncansmith » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 10:25 PM UTC

LocalPCGuy wrote: post #656

notduncansmith wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then wouldn't it be appropriate to offer a native app to offer that functionality? A web browser in 2020 is a place to run vast swathes of untrusted code safely; it is not a digital workstation platform, that is the job of the OS. If what I am downloading from you is important enough that I want to have it even offline, then I trust you enough to install your native app.

I believe this entire statement is wrong in 2020. There are literally OSes now that are just browsers.

The fact that that is possible does not change the role of the web browser in the modern computing experience. If you want to build an entire VM that runs in Electron, be my guest, but that's orthogonal to the issue of how Safari should handle storage by default.

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#666

Post by txcwpalpha » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 10:25 PM UTC

mulmen wrote: post #449

beering wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the article, that's the issue the author was talking about: it's basically impossible to make an app that can store its data locally, instead of on some web server. All apps that you download from App Store can live offline, where they're usable without Internet or trusting some faraway web server. You can't make a web app that can do that, and to some people it smells like Apple trying to force developer…

I don't really understand this. If you want to make something local, make an app and distribute through the app store, that's what it is for. A web app on the other hand is connected by definition, no? Apple forcing local apps to distribute through the app store is a feature .

At one point, Apple was denying some app store reviews because they said they should be distributed through PWAs instead. If this is supposed to be a "feature", it seems like some product manager has their head up their ass.

Also, the entire point of PWAs is that they are supposed to have feature parity with local apps, but delivered via the browser. This change is obviously counter to that goal.

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#667

Post by wtallis » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 10:26 PM UTC

LocalPCGuy wrote: post #656

notduncansmith wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then wouldn't it be appropriate to offer a native app to offer that functionality? A web browser in 2020 is a place to run vast swathes of untrusted code safely; it is not a digital workstation platform, that is the job of the OS. If what I am downloading from you is important enough that I want to have it even offline, then I trust you enough to install your native app.

I believe this entire statement is wrong in 2020. There are literally OSes now that are just browsers.

That's been true for years, and yet the operating systems that aren't just browsers seem to be getting along just fine.

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#668

Post by iameli » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 10:26 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #612

kyralis wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither. The counter is per days of application use, so (2) is false. Not using the app does not affect the counter. The counter is also per domain, and so while the first party domain for the PWA (which is likely to, of course, be loaded on each PWA launch) is effectively meaningless, if you visit other domains from within the PWA they will be subject to the counter independently.

So let's say I launch the zombocom app, then click a link inside the app for "zombo updates" that goes to their twitter. Then the next few times I switch to the app, I don't launch it from scratch, I just look at the twitter. Then I've gone seven days inside the zombocom app without touching their actual domain. Does everything except the twitter cookies get deleted?

I believe the first-party primary domain of the app will never have its data wiped — though the article could certainly be clearer on the point. What would be cleared in that case would be any other domains — if there's also a "Visit Zombo Facebook" link in there, and you only looked at Twitter for a week, the Facebook cookies would be wiped.

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#669

Post by lstamour » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 10:31 PM UTC

gridlockd wrote: post #307

lstamour wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cookies can be used for storage for up to a year, but it’s commonly accepted that browsers vary in implementation of this based on user settings. So why wouldn’t user settings exist for other kinds of permanent or session storage? Google Chrome is so dominant in both browser-making and standards-making that we’ve forgotten the browser — and user — is always king when it comes to the web. If users want permanent stora…

> Google Chrome is so dominant in both browser-making and standards-making that we’ve forgotten the browser — and user — is always king when it comes to the web. If users want permanent storage they will use alternative browsers for those particular sites. No, they generally won't. There also aren't really any "alternative browsers" on iOS, they're all Webkit-based. > So why wouldn’t user settings exist for other kin…

I disagree that there’s no way to implement an alternative to Safari, besides Chrome there’s also iCab and other browsers that show not only a completely different UI but also innovative new features. Even if WebKit makes it impossible to remove this restriction, a third-party browser could find a way to intercept calls and keep its own local storage, read and backup native local storage, or provide other means to local storage via proprietary JS APIs, and if that browser is Chrome, it will gain traction. Especially if Apple changes iOS to allow users to change default apps.

Re: Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible

#670

Post by kitsunesoba » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 10:33 PM UTC

zimpenfish wrote: post #241

Spivak wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some irony that Apple forcing the use of Safari on iOS is creating a monoculture when, were the restriction lifted, everyone would be using Chrome.

> everyone would be using Chrome. I'd be amazed if there were more than a tiny fraction of iOS/iPadOS users (of which there are hundreds of millions) who weren't perfectly ok with Mobile Safari for their everyday usage. [I'm probably the "target market" for Chrome (backend, occasionally frontend developer) and there's no way I'd have it on my phone. I only suffer the GMail app because they've made IMAP usage of gmail…

It doesn’t matter what users choose, devs would badger users into using Chrome for their own convenience. It’d be the return of the “viewed best in” badges from the late 90s and early 00s.