51–60 of 123 posts
This article is all over the place. The debate is over. The web won. You can see that by the way popular websites will try and force you to install their apps. That’s because their web experience is perfectly competent to scratch the users itch. They are forced to artificially cripple their mobile web experience to drive app installs. There is a strong niche left to native. I’m thinking of things like creative tools.…
This article is all over the place. The debate is over. The web won. You can see that by the way popular websites will try and force you to install their apps. That’s because their web experience is perfectly competent to scratch the users itch. They are forced to artificially cripple their mobile web experience to drive app installs. There is a strong niche left to native. I’m thinking of things like creative tools.…
Have you tried photopea? It's surprisingly good.
We’ve been hearing about web being the future of mobile apps for at least 15 years now. Yet alas, mobile users still spend the vast majority of their time in native apps. What’s going wrong here? I feel like we’re spinning our tires in the mud.
The end result is web apps on mobile still have that pervasive chug to them. You still get laggy text input when a page is first loading. You still get chunky animations. All the problems of 15 years ago still exist in the completely identical way.
This article is all over the place. The debate is over. The web won. You can see that by the way popular websites will try and force you to install their apps. That’s because their web experience is perfectly competent to scratch the users itch. They are forced to artificially cripple their mobile web experience to drive app installs. There is a strong niche left to native. I’m thinking of things like creative tools.…
The web did not win as evidenced by the fact that websites cannot deliver notifications to the most popular phone in the world, because its manufacturer wouldn’t then be able to take a 30% cut of sales as a result of those notifications. There are tons of things that are extremely popular and completely unavailable without an app companion. The majority of the most popular services cannot be used web-only.
I can recall in 2007 when even having third party apps was a debatable topic. Call me fogeyish but it's inarguable that this was not really the intention of iOS, rather, we have mitigated and papered over the problem due to insane app store popularity. Macs didn't have native notifications for decades.
In other words, our priorities have drifted significantly and it may be time to holistically reevaluate this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty soon it will support native notifications, which will be far more serious than the home screen icons. Home screen and bookmarks are for pull Notifications are for push What the OS or browser needs to do is manage those far better so it’s working on your behalf (user agent) and safeguarding your attention. Probably notifications should cost something, in fact an auction. Why don’t people earn currency for their…
> Probably notifications should cost something, in fact an auction. Why don’t people earn currency for their attention? Ah yes, genius! And then just like Brave, Apple/Google can take 30% of the revenue from selling your attention, and then continue to print money like nobodies business! I kid (even though people will try to defend that business model), the real solution is just having well-engineered notification se…
I think Web3,4,5 has a lot of promise to disrupt the gatekeepers, who currently can control our transactiosn and even influence our democracies.
This will become even more significant as the next generation will be immersed for hours a day in VR, XR, metaverse with glasses followed by neuralink. I don’t want corporations extracting rents like you described here and managing us like the Borg.
But somehow, so many people on HN believe (much like Bitcoin maxis but with Web2) that no new decentralized technology can be good enough to actually adopt or get involved with, they downvote and bury everything that even slightly innovates in this area. Even stuff like FileCoin and MaidSAFE are derided. Watch, here is totally free open source code that took us half a million dollars to produce and people can fork and build on, but if I post the link what will happen: https://intercoin.org/applications
And here is a detailed write-up of what it would be like to own your OWN server and charge people for your attention in your OWN currency: https://qbix.com/ecosystem … feel free to build upon it.
I just coined a word for people who knee-jerk downvote anything on HN that gets away from centralized gatekeepers or uses blockchain: Web2 maximalists
> 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 sand…
This article is all over the place. The debate is over. The web won. You can see that by the way popular websites will try and force you to install their apps. That’s because their web experience is perfectly competent to scratch the users itch. They are forced to artificially cripple their mobile web experience to drive app installs. There is a strong niche left to native. I’m thinking of things like creative tools.…
> The web won. I don't think so. Either way the statements are rife with soft terminology, but I'll use raw traffic as my metric for dominance in the functional space. https://www.perficient.com/insights/research-hub/mobile-vs-d... . The majority of traffic is mobile and apps still rule that platform due to both a superior experience and better interfaces. The trend is clear and ongoing, so I'm not sure why people th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The web did not win as evidenced by the fact that websites cannot deliver notifications to the most popular phone in the world, because its manufacturer wouldn’t then be able to take a 30% cut of sales as a result of those notifications. There are tons of things that are extremely popular and completely unavailable without an app companion. The majority of the most popular services cannot be used web-only.
Why are more notifications inherently desirable? My lock screen is a disaster and I honestly don't have that many apps. I can recall in 2007 when even having third party apps was a debatable topic. Call me fogeyish but it's inarguable that this was not really the intention of iOS, rather, we have mitigated and papered over the problem due to insane app store popularity. Macs didn't have native notifications for decad…
iOS 15 introduced notification filters and notification summaries
iOS 16 doesn’t even show notifications on the Lock Screen unless the user explicitly asks to view them (there’s just a small “view notifications” button at the bottom of the screen). Further, the Live Activities widgets will eliminate a lot of the notifications sent by apps like Uber.
If the trend continues, iOS 17 will further hide notifications.
Perhaps this is why Apple now feels comfortable with web push notifications.
This article is all over the place. The debate is over. The web won. You can see that by the way popular websites will try and force you to install their apps. That’s because their web experience is perfectly competent to scratch the users itch. They are forced to artificially cripple their mobile web experience to drive app installs. There is a strong niche left to native. I’m thinking of things like creative tools.…
Pretty sure companies force their app for monetization reasons and because they know it’s a better experience and want you to see that. I remember when Reddit started throwing the app in my face everyday until I eventually downloaded it. Now I always open for an app. Even for newspapers. The web experience on mobile blows.
The web experience on desktop also blows, unless you're using ad blockers; the main reason that web on mobile is worse is because people use mobile app browsers which lack decent ad blockers.
Try Firefox Android with uBlock Origin. I find it quite pleasant.
Progressive 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.
Only for iPhone, and that's because Apple wants the experience to be bad. This is just one of many reasons why it's a bad thing that users can only either use Safari or reskinned Safari on iOS.
On Android (Chrome) you install a PWA with two taps.