The web is not poor man’s native (2015)
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The web is not poor man’s native (2015)
1–10 of 123 posts
Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)
#2Progressive web apps suffer from an ergonomic issue where people have to read 2-3 tutorials to figure out how to put a site on their homescreen. If that hurdle vanished and was more intuitive and didn't require reading tutorials, PWAs would gain more traction.
This is why people who are developing PWAs need to evangelize for better, more intuitive deployment of PWAs on popular mobile OSes like iOS and Android.
Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)
#3> Of course, the web development model also has its own set of challenges. In particular, there is a huge over-indulgence in trackers today, and this can wildly impact responsiveness.
I do not think this can be used as an argument. Mobile apps track more heavily than websites. Think location. Also mobile app tracking and ad SDKs create considerable share of the app binary weight.
Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)
#4I tried the Add to Homescreen functionality on my OnePlus. Next update wiped them all away on me
Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)
#5The mobile web does need a rethink. Imo, 'responsive' designs can be a mess that dont fit well to either desktop or mobile. There are really 2 use cases: mobile portrait mode and everything else - screens are big enough now that it doesnt make sense to have a tablet version. Second, we need to start using built-in browser inputs instead of downloading megabytes of JS to render something like a datepicker . There are now input fields for everything, but i rarely see them used (and the less they are used, the less willing will browser vendors be to fix them). The most outstanding issue are notifications and it just feels wrong to me that they all go through apple and google. E-mail could be a better mechanism for the kind of asynchronous, sporadic notifications that most websites need. If only there was a definite way to unsubscribe from a list and to have notification emails that auto-expire.
Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)
#6This is such a bizarre article.
"Apps are a hassle, everyone needs to be on the home screen, and it's bad for re-engagement because user isn't ready to sign up yet"... "web is hassle free so we need to make sure we have better ways of installing web apps on the home screen where developers can then engage user with notifications and sign ups".
Then the author confuses trackers and over-reliance on frameworks.
And then "Re-thinking the web" starts with... "re-engagement features like push notifications being added daily" which is definitely not what a re-thought web should be about.
Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)
#7The mobile web does need a rethink. Imo, 'responsive' designs can be a mess that dont fit well to either desktop or mobile. There are really 2 use cases: mobile portrait mode and everything else - screens are big enough now that it doesnt make sense to have a tablet version. Second, we need to start using built-in browser inputs instead of downloading megabytes of JS to render something like a datepicker . There are…
> There are really 2 use cases: mobile portrait mode and everything else
I mostly agree. I am currently tasked with building a brand new mobile/desktop web app from scratch, and this is the path I have chosen as well.
The breakpoint I am working with right now is 980px. Seems to be a goldilocks setting in 2022.
Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)
#8> Of course, the web development model also has its own set of challenges. In particular, there is a huge over-indulgence in trackers today, and this can wildly impact responsiveness. I do not think this can be used as an argument. Mobile apps track more heavily than websites. Think location. Also mobile app tracking and ad SDKs create considerable share of the app binary weight.
This is a large reason why I was really annoyed when Google removed the "Merge Tabs and Apps" option back around 2016. With that feature, a bookmark to a URL could open up a new tab, appear in the list of active applications, and be closed just through that list. Effectively, there was no difference in usability between a bookmarked URL and an app that loaded the webpage in a captive browser, but you got all the sandboxing benefits of the browser.
To this day, I cannot fathom why it was removed. Every thread I've looked up boils down to "We removed it as the default setting, and now there's very few users of it, so we're justified in removing the feature altogether.", which is a non-answer with multiple steps.
Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)
#9This is such a bizarre article. "Apps are a hassle, everyone needs to be on the home screen, and it's bad for re-engagement because user isn't ready to sign up yet"... "web is hassle free so we need to make sure we have better ways of installing web apps on the home screen where developers can then engage user with notifications and sign ups". Then the author confuses trackers and over-reliance on frameworks. And the…
Mobile Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, Facebook, pretty much any poor man's digital crackeine, have it figured out.
Yeah, it's a wonderful new Web that makes you apply forehead to brick wall.
Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)
#10Progressive web apps suffer from an ergonomic issue where people have to read 2-3 tutorials to figure out how to put a site on their homescreen. If that hurdle vanished and was more intuitive and didn't require reading tutorials, PWAs would gain more traction. This is why people who are developing PWAs need to evangelize for better, more intuitive deployment of PWAs on popular mobile OSes like iOS and Android.
PWA also suffers in the enterprise space.
It took me a solid week to figure out how to publish a PWA home screen icon using Azure InTune MDM for iOS devices. Being required to build custom apple XML documents to get this to work seems a bit ridiculous.
That said, if you do have a need for this, it does work pretty well - assuming you can figure it out.