271–280 of 315 posts
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I wish I could do that on macOS so I stop getting hit with pop ups in Safari asking me for my location. Homedepot.com is particularly annoying about this.
You can go to safari preferences>websites>location and set "when visiting other sites" to "deny". I don't get any popups that way.
Phone apps seem to be modelled on webapps, typically the server is run by the app maker, installs are easy and updates are automatic. Additionally, phone apps automatically go on the home screen and have notifications, which means you’ll open them more often.
When iPhone and Android hit the scene the 'rich' web experience was primarily flash, silverlight, and some java applets (taking their last breathe). Input APIs for touch, multitouch and gesture were a mess for many years in the browser. Media queries didn't become a w3c recommendation until 2012 so building a ux that looked pleasant really wasn't possible. The memory, cpu, GPU, storage and battery constraints were un…
A lot of people have forgot that YouTube were using FLV (video streaming using Flash) during a lot of time because there wasn't any better multiplatform viable alternative.
You are totally right. The web wasn't ready for new universal types of information exchanges and we needed to use 3rd parties to solve that, in form of a Flash plug-in or an installed app.
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> Even now, I still think "I'll wait and do this on a proper computer". I'm routinely in the same boat, though it's less about the computer and more about not fighting with a tiny monitor. Most things built for mobile are "light" versions, as easily exposing all the bells and whistles on a 6" monitor would be a UI nightmare.
You think it's the tiny monitor, but it's really the primitive UI designed for caveman-style point-and-grunt. I've been using a GPD Micro PC extensively over the past few months, which is equipped with a 6" screen, but also - critically - a touchpad and physical thumb keyboard. Guess what, I can do programming, CAD, image editing, the works - everything you can do on a larger machine. The Micro PC proves that we were…
It's pretty hard to use traditional responsive web apps over such an abysmal network
Native apps can offer a layer of insulation with prepulled assets and more advanced network handling (you can change pages and even close a native app with outstanding requests and it's usually fine--it'll handle changes asynchronously when the network is available)
For many people wireless connectivity is spotty at best; particularly rural USA, most of Canada, and much of the non-western world. Whereas home internet connections tend to be fairly reliable. Anecdotally, I don't rely on web apps because the terrible network reliability that I have means that they are frustratingly slow and frequently outright break. Native mobile apps work just fine.
And it's worse than just reliability. It's also performance.
TCP just does not work well over wireless networks. Its congestion control is designed to allow multiple TCP streams to coexist on a network that has steady bandwidth. It works fine if the network layer is basically stable and the problem is sharing it.
On mobile networks, the available bandwidth fluctuates wildly over a short time period. When the bandwidth drops, TCP backs off exponentially, and when the bandwidth returns, TCP does not ramp back up quickly enough. So it ends up sitting around doing almost nothing when there's bandwidth available.
So even when the network is working, native apps typically perform better because they lend themselves to separating network activity from user interaction. With the web, unless you do a single page web app, navigating to different screens and views of things tends to be a page load, which is just too slow too often.
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If most of the business logic is on a server then caching doesn't help; there's too many misses. Besides, major draws for building web apps includes control of user data and keeping business logic behind an API.
There's nothing technical that stops you from putting business logic in the web client any more than on native (except I guess working with local files, but not many mobile apps do that these days anyway). I'm just saying, if the key benefit is not having to download the app every time you open it, and instead only downloading the actual data as needed (to save on bandwidth), PWAs can serve that usecase (if they're d…
So they develop everything on wifi, and it seems OK, and they make certain design choices. Then after they launch, performance is terrible when people try to use it on cell networks. By then it's too late to fix performance because they'd have to re-architect the whole thing.
The lesson they could take away from it -- the one that would be most accurate -- is, "We should have designed our mobile web client differently." But the subtlety is lost and the message everyone learns is more like, "Last time, when we did a mobile web client approach, it was a disaster. Let's never do that again. From now on, it's native apps."
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"I am sure everyone on HN moved [from computers to smartphones] quickly" I may be wrong, but I suspect you have that backwards. My guess is that at least older HNers were slower to shift from powerful but complex creation tools (computers) to easy consumption toys (smartphones) designed for consumers who found computers with files and folders just too darned complicated to use. Until good, portable mapping and good-e…
The real irony of the smartphone situation is that if you are older HNer, you will return to flip phone, real camera and laptop and never go any further, until proven FOSS solution is available on the market. Smartphones were designed from the get go as a surveillance economy devices, catered to minimal the computing needs of the mass audience.:)
Using corporate censored devices is not making you free or enlightened in any way. We are approaching real danger in the tech community where criticism and non-conforming to the gospel trends are becoming the norm.
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Computers are kept in a fixed or limited number of locations. Phones are tracking devices that follow you throughout the day. The data they generate is far more valuable for building a consumer profile.
You're talking about desktops vs. laptops / mobile phones. That has nothing to do with mobile vs. web. A phone can run a web browser.