121–130 of 143 posts
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So what type of app are you writing that has to accept in app purchases and are push notifications the only thing stopping you from having a much worse web app than a native app?
Why does a native app have to be better than a web app? Quite the assumption. The snark keeps me from even wanting to engage you...
Facebook tried the whole cross platform web app in a wrapper and decided it wasn’t good enough. Even while Google is extolling then virtues of its own cross platform tooling, it’s moving toward apps that use native frameworks.
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None of the current messaging apps require or even support in app purchases. So the argument about paying anyone 30% is moot.
None of the current messaging apps require or even support in app purchases. Apple's does. My wife paid 99¢ to send people Svengoolie stickers.
I know I'm a bit tangential, but what are some actually useful examples of push notifications for browsers? Every time I've seen them in action was with spam/clickbait, after someone accidentally subscribed and couldn't remove it.
I know I'm a bit tangential, but what are some actually useful examples of push notifications for browsers? Every time I've seen them in action was with spam/clickbait, after someone accidentally subscribed and couldn't remove it.
I think this is the reason Apple is reluctant to add it. There are very valid reasons why a user would opt to receive web-push notifications, but its mostly niche apps/usages. The vast majority of push authorization banners are from sites you visit for the first time, with hardly any engagement or interaction nor clear intention of allowing web-push ("We think you want unsolicited notifications because it is better for our business model")
While there is no fix for dark-pattern usage of web-push, browsers and OS UX must make it super easy to withdraw notification consent anytime.
I know I'm a bit tangential, but what are some actually useful examples of push notifications for browsers? Every time I've seen them in action was with spam/clickbait, after someone accidentally subscribed and couldn't remove it.
The difference for me is straightforward: Email is for messages the user might want to keep, notifications are messages that the user doesn't need to keep. (To extend this further, messaging systems aren't for notifications either, but rather for interactive dialogue.)
Wow. I missed this a few days ago, but it seems like huge news for the web. Am I missing some important caveat or can web developers get excited about this? Apple’s long resistance to allowing ‘web push’ on iOS has held back PWA adoption. And they’ve obviously never admitted it, but this policy protected the hegemony of the App Store, and therefore Apple’s control over the whole ecosystem. The absence of web push on…
A few years back we had this same discussion orbiting around Service Workers. Here's a post from 2017 where the top comment argues that what's holding back the web is the lack of Service Workers in Safari: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14489577 Apple shipped Service Workers in WebKit in 2021. Are web apps much better now than in 2017? Frankly it seems about the same. The best web apps are still exercises in mi…
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Why does a native app have to be better than a web app? Quite the assumption. The snark keeps me from even wanting to engage you...
Do they have to be? Who knows? But since 2007, Apple, Palm, Blackberry and Microsoft have all at one point or the other have said you don’t need native mobile apps and the web was good enough. It never was. Facebook tried the whole cross platform web app in a wrapper and decided it wasn’t good enough. Even while Google is extolling then virtues of its own cross platform tooling, it’s moving toward apps that use nativ…
Everyone wants web apps to help sell hardware, right up until your app store grows into a money maker. Then the incentives are different.
Regardless, today's mobile systems are much better, web browsers are much better. It is much easier to write a web app that is functionally identical to native than it used to be.
Modern reality. Conversation rates for PWAs are higher than mobile apps because there is less friction in the installation process. Load times are often lower, which can be an overall superior experience. If I'm a small shop, trying to get on someone's mobile device, these items matter a lot. Also development costs are much lower when you can share code for your mobile app and your website.
The value add of being in the mobile stores is pretty minimal. Discovery is poor, search is poor, then there is constant churn in policies, submission process, APIs, development environments/languages, fees, etc. In contrast to this, the browsers hold very very high backwards compatibility. Churn will be in the support libraries or framework you adopt and not fundamental to the platform.
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You mean not installing yet another application and having another icon on my homescreen for every freaking website I visit? And these apps almost have no need to run any native code or do anything a website can't handle in modern day. Yes. I'm all for it. Let's make browsers more capable.
Even simple apps like banking apps, AirBnB, and even Papa Johns are more responsive than their websites