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Instagram and snapchat have ways to launch interactive experiences from a code and I’ve always thought Apple are missing a trick there.
One of the biggest hurdles getting clients to make apps now is “no one downloads apps anymore” so this could make a huge difference and make more frivolous interactive experience work in apps again.
I hope this happens soon.
> this new API, we can say that it allows developers to offer interactive and dynamic content from their apps even if you haven’t installed them Also formerly known as Web Applications but now made by Apple with the added features of less control from the developers, a 30% mandatory fee if you accept any payments of any kind and locked to just one platform.
Given that this is an additional option for developers, this is pretty tenuous logic. You seem to be arguing against developers having this option by claiming that it restricts their options.
"and locked to just one platform"
I'm fairly sure making one of these apps doesn't suddenly restrict every other option. You can make Android and Web Apps and J2EE (if it still exists) to your hearts content!
This is actually a convenient conversation because I just spent thirty minutes thinking about how much of an absolute piece of shit the Steam app is, courtesy of all of the elements that are a thin wrapper around a web app. And this has pretty much always been the experience: we're all just waiting for the magic web app that's going to prove everyone wrong and light the path.
Still hasn't come.
But until then, I'd rather developers actually have options, including high performance, native, platform-suitable solutions. My only knee-jerk opposition to these Instant App style solutions (the Android version, not sure what the Apple one will be called) is the thought of a big, fat binary coming down just to view what you think is a web page...and then I remember how absolutely monstrous the overwhelming majority of web apps are now. Full native apps are absolute svelte in comparison.
It seems very similar to Android feature called Google Play instant: https://developer.android.com/topic/google-play-instant .
These shenanigans make me wonder why they don't just focus on making HTML5 apps a better experience. If they provided better widgets (e.g. including swipe gestures, which Angular/Polymer/MDL don't) and access to native hardware we'd be set. HTML5 is just 100X easier and nicer to program with than that abomination of Android Studio followed by aligning, keysigning, and other steps. The HTML5 hello world is Hello World…
> this new API, we can say that it allows developers to offer interactive and dynamic content from their apps even if you haven’t installed them Also formerly known as Web Applications but now made by Apple with the added features of less control from the developers, a 30% mandatory fee if you accept any payments of any kind and locked to just one platform.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with your assessment. Web Applications involve running JS downloaded from a remote source. If this is closer to slices, as the article says (did you read it? assuming yes, as this is HN and not reddit), then it is very different. Web applications are not native UI, and often have far worse experience and clunky usage of things like cameras, peripherals, system audio, etc. Slices would ostensibly be native…
> Web Applications involve running JS downloaded from a remote source Any "instant apps" like this is gonna involve running code from remote sources. Then if the code is JS or Swift doesn't really matter. > Web applications are not native UI That's true. But that's up to the company deciding over the operating system and the browser in the end. Apple could have easily expose ways for web developers to write native UI…
So you want mediocre, resource hog, lowest-commmon-denominator apps? Because that's how you get mediocre, resource hog, lowest-commmon-denominator apps.
I guess not to be confused with Apple's Clips app which is for making short selfie videos. https://www.apple.com/clips/
For anyone with an iPhone who has never given this app a try, I recommend it-- it's surprisingly powerful and fun to use
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These shenanigans make me wonder why they don't just focus on making HTML5 apps a better experience. If they provided better widgets (e.g. including swipe gestures, which Angular/Polymer/MDL don't) and access to native hardware we'd be set. HTML5 is just 100X easier and nicer to program with than that abomination of Android Studio followed by aligning, keysigning, and other steps. The HTML5 hello world is Hello World…
Most apps are not hello world apps. So the next facebook might only be 100 files, mostly useful. Also, your html5 app needs several icons for different screen sizes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Web Applications involve running JS downloaded from a remote source Any "instant apps" like this is gonna involve running code from remote sources. Then if the code is JS or Swift doesn't really matter. > Web applications are not native UI That's true. But that's up to the company deciding over the operating system and the browser in the end. Apple could have easily expose ways for web developers to write native UI…
> That's true. But that's up to the company deciding over the operating system and the browser in the end. The OS is far more powerful, and allows for deeper integration and writing in far faster languages. The browser abstracts away the machine. Most JS writers today have no idea or understanding of the actual computer they are writing against. It's a sandbox for them, and it's the reason apps today bloat to hundred…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice snark, however web apps are still possible, and Android has a very similar feature (Instant - enabled by slices). Did you provide similar feedback when that was announced?
> Did you provide similar feedback when that was announced? I did not, as I'm a lot more bored at this point in time and also have a lot of more free time. But I do feel the same about both of the platforms movement towards "instant apps" that could have been equally solved by making web apps work better on respective platforms, instead of trying to solve the same problem again.
The web ecosystem has been trying to solve this for almost a decade now and has made relatively little progress. There's no reason to believe Apple could suddenly solve it in a few months if they just cared a little harder.
Web components & shadow dom are approaching 10 years old and still have issues with framework & browser support. asm.js is 7 years old, yet the ideas birthed from it are still struggling. Effective parallelism is still largely nonexistent. RAM & CPU/GPU efficiency remain a bad joke, made worse by the entire world now running on battery power.
A huge number of people are working on making web apps more viable, including people at Apple. It's not from a lack of trying at this point. The foundations are just all terrible & wrong for being an app platform. That's never what it was built or designed to be, and retrofitting that without breaking compatibility is really really difficult. If it turns out the incremental delivery benefits of the web can be retrofitted to an existing app platform more easily than the web can be retrofitted to be an app platform then... well, why not? The cross-platform-ish nature of the web was (and is) a great dream, but why can't that dream be realized by SwiftUI instead? Or Flutter? Or whatever? Why must it be web alone that gets to be that thing?