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Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile?
311–315 of 315 posts
Re: Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile?
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
The web isn’t a first class citizen on desktop as you can’t run new AAA games in one. The real difference is the web is a more limited UI that breaks down when your also forced to use the more limited interface of mobile. For example on desktop the top 10% or so of the screen is taken up by the browsers UI and tabs which is normally fine. On a tablet in keyboard mode your left with ~40% of the screen being useable. N…
AAA games are a weird example. It's one of the few app categories that really needs full native performance, although a lot of them can also scale nicely to run on older hardware. WebGPU and WebAssembly are getting close to matching the speed and capabilities of older hardware. Tab UI is possible to hide, and has been for some time. You can "app-ify" a web site into a dedicated window with no browser UI. ISTR apps th…
For me, the big thing I can't do with a web app is work around the keyboard. If I try to write a chat app, the keyboard will often cover the text box, and there's often no way to prevent this. There's no APIs for "tell me where the on-screen keyboard is so I can move the app UI out of the way" or even "automatically resize the window to exclude the keyboard".
The options for showing a numpad are also very limited. exists, but it doesn't work for things that aren't numbers, like codes starting with 0.
Re: Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile?
#313Native phone apps are more invasive and can therefore be used for more extensive tracking and spying, which is good for ad revenue. Remember how all the largest spying products like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter, etc aggressively push you to install their phone apps even though they are (or were) perfectly usable through their mobile websites.
Reddit is a really weird one to me. Their mobile site is very nice - so nice that I don't feel any desire to install the app - aside from the fact that they desperately want me to stop using it and push the app at every opportunity. (Recently they even decided to block NSFW-flagged content from the mobile site unless you're logged in - you get a box telling you to install the app to see it.) What I don't get is why t…
The more users who download the app, the higher their rankings are. The higher the rankings, the more users see and download your app. It's very obvious why they're doing this
Re: Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile?
#314When 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…
> The real question is how did the web remain relevant while being so far behind this tectonic platform shift? Because CSS +HTML + JS is 20x easier to learn than any mobile code language. Anyone in a few hours can create a website, that has never been the case for mobile apps. You can even create a basic website by copy pasting some html template and modifying the content with notepad. As a result - as long as Google…
Expo.dev makes mobile app development pretty easy.
Re: Why did the web take over desktop and not mobile?
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
People say this a lot, but really, what can a native app track that a web app can't? To track location, you need to give the app permission, just like the web. To receive push notifications, you need to give the app permission, just like the web. I think this claim is unfounded.
To give you an idea, web apps can't track location while running in the background no matter what permissions you give them. Native apps can track you while running in the background
And they only do it with specific permissions.