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Goodbye, Native Apps

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Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#131

Post by foepys »

emodendroket wrote: post #54

As much as anything else the growth of hybrid apps is a symptom of a couple of things: 1) people now expect apps to run on a million different devices and nobody has the time or resources to develop four or five native apps with feature parity between them 2) progress on UI frameworks is pretty much stalled. Just looking at .NET, because I'm familiar with it and traditionally desktop software has been a big area of c…

> Windows Forms will work for forever but hasn't been touched in a long time

WinForms very recently got HiDPI support, better accessibility features, and was ported to .NET Core where they also fixed bugs in some controls.

WPF in the meantime has been arbitrarily declared stable and Microsoft refuses to fix anything. Everybody is supposed to switch to UWP which they already deprecated or WinUI which hasn't been released yet.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#132

Post by reader_mode »

sudobash1 wrote: post #130
reader_mode wrote: post #96

How is this getting uovoted ? Is nobody reading the article ? A few paragraphs in and I can see the author has terrible writing skills and doesn't know what he's talking about >In fact, writing software with C/C++ was hard because developers had to work with different operating system API(Application Programming Interface). Seriously ? Writing C++ apps is hard because you had to use different APIs ? That's the least…

I agree the article in of itself doesn't deserve front page placement, but the discussion that it is generating does. Sometimes I upvote or favorite mainly because I found the comments engaging and informative.

I mean this is a dead horse beaten over and over weekly, but even if it wasn't I don't expect to read blog spam when I click on front page stuff on HN - if this becomes the norm the site will lose value for me.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#133

Post by russli1993 »

nicoburns wrote: post #97
jordwest wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I think the web was simply first in being a highly versatile, capable, and relatively cheap to develop with cross platform UI toolkit. I’m much more optimistic about the future of native apps, the best ideas from the web are already making their way into Rust and the recently announced .NET MAUI, and with WebAssembly I think we’ll start to see native performance on the web instead of the other way around.

> with WebAssembly I think we’ll start to see native performance on the web instead of the other way around. I wouldn't be so sure about that. WebAssembly doesn't do anything to help the rendering bottleneck. To do that you really have to replace (or innovate in some way) the DOM.

I think the approach many is taking is just put a canvas and draw on top. Internally, you may end up creating another DOM like structure to store all your objects. The worst thing about this approach is that you lose all browser's native support like accessibility. I think Flutter is using a combination of DOM, CSS and canvas.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#134

Post by bikamonki »

The browser is the new OS. For most users, a Chromebook-like PC is all they'll ever need. On mobile, most native apps should be web apps or PWAs. Native code is now unnecessary in terms of hw/os features accessibility and performance.

In order to run such stacks we need to devote a couple of GB's of RAM for the OS and browser. Not a bad deal if you compare cost to benefits.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#135

Post by berkut »

qayxc wrote: post #44
bitwize wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visual Studio -- itself a fully featured IDE, even back in the early 2000s -- used to run on machines with less than 1 GiB of RAM.

It also didn't support as many languages/features and was super slow on contemporary hardware. Even my 9 year old laptop can run VSCode just as fast as my 3 year old main machine. Back in 1998 when Visual Studio 6.0 (actually just the second publicly released version) was released, it took ages to load and used up quite some RAM. 6 years later, when I switched to VS.NET 2003, VS6 ran super fast on my PC. The differen…

I never remember Visual Studio 6 (VC++) being slow at all at the time on 1996-era hardware - quite the opposite (other than the dreaded "updating intellisense..." which would hang things for a while).

I distinctly remember subsequent versions (.NET 2002, which I think had the UI re-written) being a lot slower than 6, and me still using version 6 when I could because of this.

In fact, I can remember VS 6 opening in seconds, compared to later versions being much slower.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#136

Post by scaladev »

userbinator wrote: post #101
mikewarot wrote: post #3

I have Lazarus up and running... it's currently taking 32 Megabytes of RAM. It compiles in the blink of an eye, has one of the best possible 2 way GUI builders in the open source world, and I can reach back 30 years into the libraries I wrote in the days of Turbo Pascal 7/MS-DOS and pretty much use them intact. It amazes me how many people went with the .NET bloatware and all that follows it. Of course, 95% of progra…

It's funny to see this comment, because Delphi and such were actually considered rather bloated back in the day --- a basic windowed app with not much in it (like a "Hello World") taking up several hundred KB was not unusual, compared to tens of KB for the MFC equivalent, and a few KB for pure Win32. ...and a computer having 32MB of RAM was considered outrageously luxurious.

They were using static linking by default though. You could always switch the linker to dynamic linking and get those sweet 20-something KiB binaries.

MFC with C++ was using dynamic linking by default, but you could always switch to static and see the binary bloat to several MiBs in size.

So if you do a proper comparison, there's really not much difference between them.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#137

Post by WaltPurvis »

mushufasa wrote: post #119
WaltPurvis wrote: post #117

The thesis that native apps are being supplanted by hybrid apps seems wildly overstated. I have about 500 applications on my Mac (465 in the Applications folder and at least a few dozen others scattered about), and I believe only two of them are hybrid apps (Visual Studio Code and Discord). There might be another two or three I'm forgetting about. In other words, somewhere between 99% and 99.6% of all my applications…

how do you have so many applications? Do you just accrue them over time? How many have you used in the last 6 months?

I was honestly shocked just now when I checked the number. Quite a lot of them are small utilities and menu bar apps. Many others were acquired via bundles (e.g., BundleHunt, Paddle, etc.) and a fair number of those I've probably never used.

Here's a list of about 60 apps that I've used in the last month:

Activity Monitor, Adobe Digital Editions 4.5, AppCode, Bartender 3, BBEdit, BitBar, calibre 4.23, Carbon Copy Cloner, ColorSnapper2, Console, Dash, Discord, Downie 4, EtreCheckPro, Evernote, FastScripts, Firefox, Font Book, GoLand, Google Chrome, HazeOver, Highland 2, IntelliJ IDEA, iTerm, iTunes, Keyboard Maestro, KeyCue, Launchpad, Mactracker, Magnet, Messages, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, OneDrive, Parallels Toolbox, Paste, Paw, PopChar, PopClip, Preview, Safari, Script Editor, Scrivener, shayre, SnapNDrag Pro, Snappy, SQLPro Studio, SQLPro for SQLite, Terminal, TextSoap, TG Pro, Typinator, Vienna, Visual Studio Code, VLC, WebStorm, Window Tidy, Xcode, Xojo.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#139

Post by wtallis »

Silhouette wrote: post #95
wtallis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter? Yes, of course. The desire for consistency and usability may not be strong enough to reverse the current trend away from native apps, but that doesn't remove their advantages. And I find it very telling that even your own comment continues the trend of over-emphasizing look over feel . I'd be happy with apps randomly launching in night mode, if they would just have all the right controls in the right…

The problem with that argument is that you're assuming consistency with native platform standards is the dominant consideration. I contend that, today, it often is not. Many users are spending much of their time using web sites and applications rather than native ones; this trend does not appear to be in dispute here. Moreover, the basics of how web sites (and by extension web apps) work have a longer history of esta…

> Moreover, the basics of how web sites (and by extension web apps) work have a longer history of established conventions than any of the major native platforms;

That "and by extension web apps" bit is completely wrong. The long-standing conventions of how web sites work are mostly irrelevant to fancy web apps, and to the extent that they are relevant, web apps break them left and right. Just look at how many web sites/apps hijack or break scrolling or the back button or the ability to middle-click on a link and get a new tab or the ability to highlight text. Web apps are all about breaking the usability standards for web sites and replacing them with a bastardized version of the usability conventions from various native OS toolkits. But in spite of that, nobody ever really expects drag and drop or rich copy and paste or any other data exchange mechanism to work between web apps.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#140

Post by SquareWheel »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #74
burtonator wrote: post #32

Here's the thing. Apple, Google, etc are trying to lock developers into specific platforms. This is why Apple has been so hostile towards PWAs. It's totally possible to build a PWA that behaves like a native app but Apple actively tries to destroy them. There will never be a viable hybrid app platform.

Are you suggesting Javascript has access to all hardware functionality exposed to C/ObjC/Swift?

With a proper permission system in place, sure.

Desktop apps got the permission model all wrong. You run a program and that grants them access to everything.

The web's model is closer to that of mobile apps. It asks for a permission at the time that it's needed. Not all sites get this right, but browsers are starting to crack down on requests the moment you enter a site.

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