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

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

#781

Post by Twisell »

jdauriemma wrote: post #748
comex wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried using your app on an iPhone (with Add to Home Screen). - If I press the settings gear, the text on the settings page is about twice as wide as the screen, requiring horizontal scrolling. - On the front page, if I open the color picker, it's partially offscreen. - On all pages, if I do a scroll gesture in the wrong direction, it scrolls the entire UI rather than just the scrollable part. Admittedly, iOS has lo…

There are some fantastic PWAs out there. Twitter is the one I use most regularly. I think one of the reasons we see a lot of less-polished PWAs is that the idea of the PWA appeals to businesses at certain stages. Larger shops can afford to ship native binaries to more than one platform, but a smaller operation can't. PWAs are presumably tempting to those types of product teams: you get multi-platform reach while trul…

Is Twitter really a PWA or just a nicely done responsive website? At this point the boundary is a unclear.

Beside Twitter rely on server side storage and pretty much only store session token in the PWA "local storage" (largely speaking).

And as a user I rather installed iOS native App to keep finer grained control on permissions. (I also use multi accounts not sure the PWA Handel that?)

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

#782

Post by millstone »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #164

I think looking at Apple as saviour of Privacy, is for lack of better term just wrong. They have always favoured closed systems even if didn't provide privacy advantages or as in this case was counter-intuitive for privacy. I feel the comparison of Apple with data companies such as Google, Facebook is by itself at fault. Apple like any computer company of 70's was not into data, just because Internet itself didn't ex…

When you use Apple Maps, Apple doesn't know who you are, where you go. There's not even a way to sign in.

It's not incompetence. When you request a route, your iPhone breaks up the request into separate, unrelated segments so Apple doesn't even know your total route. They've done work to avoid tracking you.

Call it a "marketing ploy" or "altruism" or whatever, but the fact is that Google wants to know where you go, and Apple doesn't.

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

#783

Post by sixstringtheory »

NightlyDev wrote: post #764
TheKarateKid wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Always ostensibly to protect users but always also conveniently putting webapps at a permanent disadvantage to native apps. This isn't always a bad thing though. For example, Safari has prohibited some obnoxious behavior that Chrome has allowed: Autoplaying videos, tab suspension, push notifications. These hog CPU and destroy battery life, worsening the user experience. Remember, making everything a web app is Goog…

By your logic they should just remove push notifications completely from iOS because it uses power. Wouldn't that be bad? Web push is better than native app push when it comes to power consumption as web push is stricter on what you can do.

If an app on the app store abuses push notifications though, they can get kicked. Apple can’t kick a website off the web.

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

#785

Post by kstrauser »

Silhouette wrote: post #750
kstrauser wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that by "Safari quirk" you mean "the way that all common browsers are heading". Safari is the first here. Firefox is certain to be right behind them. Google, probably not, but I bet Edge does the same thing before too long.

I hope not. Apple has had substandard support for modern web technologies in Safari for a long time, to the point where it is often referred to in the industry as the new IE. We've had enough of browsers breaking things that used to work in the name of false progress. Time for the grown-ups to take a careful look and see this for what it is.

As an end user, I love it. I regret that it's making some things harder for legitimate developers, but love that it's making it harder for the assholes who keep trying to ruin the web.

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

#786

Post by merrywhether »

Silhouette wrote: post #750
kstrauser wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that by "Safari quirk" you mean "the way that all common browsers are heading". Safari is the first here. Firefox is certain to be right behind them. Google, probably not, but I bet Edge does the same thing before too long.

I hope not. Apple has had substandard support for modern web technologies in Safari for a long time, to the point where it is often referred to in the industry as the new IE. We've had enough of browsers breaking things that used to work in the name of false progress. Time for the grown-ups to take a careful look and see this for what it is.

You realize that custom, new, cutting-edge APIs (can you imagine the web without xhr?) was what made IE into the IE we talk about. Some they got right, some they got wrong, some were way too tied into IE’s parent’s ecosystem (sound familiar, AMP?). It’s once it stopped getting updated that it became a problem, as no one else had or planned to have some of its stuff, resulting in it being an oddball. Chrome fits the first half of that profile far more than any other browser these days, it’s just that WHATWG being a “living standard” has enabled it to “standardize” any new idea that comes along (other browsers do this too, but not nearly as much as Chrome).

The point is that slowness to adopt new standards wasn’t exactly what made IE into the the IE we all hated; it was going off on tangents without consulting anybody too often that left it out on an island with custom versions of so many things. Fortunately it doesn’t seem like Google is going to lose interest on Chrome anytime soon.

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

#787

Post by tomnipotent »

tssva wrote: post #77
lonelappde wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't use Safari you can patch webkit to change the policy, right? Change 7 to 10000000

Apple only allows apps to use their webkit implementation.

Even for other browsers. Chrome, Edge, Opera etc. on iOS all use webkit under the hood.

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

#788

Post by Grimm1 »

cmsj wrote: post #428
Grimm1 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This impacts an app I've built for reading academic papers but I imagine the work around here is to write to a file periodically and then load the file in if you don't detect indexedDB having the data you think it should. Obviously this has error cases all its own and makes it more difficult to manage but it doesn't seem like Apple is killing it to me, just making us jump through hoops and add extra complexity. Don't…

I apologise for being rude, but IMO you didn't build an app, you built a web page. Web pages are things people look at one time or maybe many times, but they are just web pages that exist in a web browser for the lifetime of the tab they're in, and then they're gone. They shouldn't expect to have any persistent storage from the browser, and if the browser does make small affordances for storage, it's not reasonable t…

I expect the browsers to expand to an OS level. I hope so in fact. I don't find you rude I just find your thinking to be in the minority, maybe not on this site, but certainly in the broader market. The web is one of the best distribution platforms for applications we've seen as far as widespread adoption is concerned and in terms of resource expenditure to develop and maintain it's much better than native applications. And no offense but I'm not going to spend the resources to cater to a tiny percentage of the market who care about using native apps vs going to a site / adding to the homescreen if I can iterate, build, release and maintain features much quicker without the general costs of native applications and the arduous publication process current walled gardens have. I also simply don't support what Apple and Google stand for with respect to their app marketplaces.

Beyond that the distinctions you make usually come from no true scotsman developers. I've built everything from OS emulator extensions to 3d graphics engines to web apps and as far as building things people actually use and benefit from outside of my own interests the web takes the cake. The low-level or native vs web issue seems overly self masturbatory to me. I build things to get used by people quickly and effectively, not show off my mastery of software development. I take pride in my craft but the only value in shipped software is the utility it provides to other people as evidenced by the number of horribly designed pieces of software that are pretty much ubiquitous in our daily lives now. I pride myself on pragmatism, good fundementals, and getting things done expidiently and native applications seem no where close to being the pragmatic choice from any of those standpoints.

Some of my favorite projects however are from people who have tried to merge the performance and memory characteristics + respect for end user systems of native applications with the speed of development and ability to quickly iterate of web applications. If they reach the threshold I believe won't unnecessarily delay the work I want to do from native development minutae, then I'll make your native apps.

But I think you should get used to web apps being here to stay.

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

#789

Post by kevsim »

Silhouette wrote: post #769
philistine wrote: post #763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s my take on what it is: the most battery-efficient browser. I’ll take 30 more minutes on my laptop before some nebulous modern web standard.

How does something like allowing data to be stored by a web app that isn't even being used for more than a week cause your laptop to lose 30 minutes of battery life?

It doesn't as the two have no connections whatsoever. The point was that Safari is the most battery efficient browser overall on MacOS, so they're willing to put up with sub-standard support for web standards if their battery lasts longer.

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

#790

Post by Grimm1 »

edmundsauto wrote: post #738
jamiesonbecker wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to prevent an explosion of garbage and malware that could happen if PWAs really took off? You mean, like the Internet. The App Store is a nice, safe walled garden, like AOL.

This is one of the primary value props of the platform.

And is anti-competitive and gives Apple and Google too much power over a device I own.
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