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The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

cwilso.com

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Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

#101

Post by rchaud »

ip26 wrote: post #19
onion2k wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I strongly believe that the overwhelming majority of users don't want apps on their homescreen, whether they're PWA or native, unless they're things they use pretty much daily. They definitely don't want to install some crappy app for a business they use a few times a year.…

That’s basically what a PWA is, a boring website that continues to work properly on a terrible datalink. It’s not installed, just properly designed & cached.

> just properly designed & cached.

If only. There's no standardization, no PWA seal of approval. Most website vendors that even bother with a "Add to Home Screen" button on mobile displays aren't interested in anything besides getting a shortcut displayed on their 'desktop'. They certainly aren't doing things like configuring service workers to cache and serve the website offline.

Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

#102

Post by bobthepanda »

rchaud wrote: post #96
bobthepanda wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that a desktop icon is really considered malware. People still have tons of desktop shortcuts if they use a PC, and don't select the option to not have it even when provided it.

I'd say it's considered 'bloatware'....additional software (usually trialware) the OEM bundles with the PC to subsidize the cost. But considering that ostensibly legit trialware like Norton scare users with its threatening popups, it may as well be malware to some.

Not all desktop software with icons is bloatware?

It's been a while, but I remember Adobe software (e.g. Photoshop) doing desktop shortcuts by default, Steam & Epic Games-vended software doing desktop shortcuts by default, etc.

Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

#103

Post by randomtwiddler »

spideymans wrote: post #78
depressedpanda wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet alas, mobile users still spend the vast majority of their time in native apps. What’s going wrong here? Easy: - Apple only allows one browser -- their own -- on iOS - Apple uses this control to cripple PWAs on iOS - Apple's iPhone market share is significant enough that if Safari/iOS doesn't support something, businesses won't spend time on using it E.g.: chat/communication apps cannot be written as PWAs, since…

This doesn't explain why PWAs are still a rarity on Android though. You'd think that the ability to target both desktop (web) and Android (web/PWA) would've attracted more developer interest. I can't really comment on other companies, but my company is currently moving our product from MVP to a more mature project. When comparing various options (PWAs/web, Flutter, React, Native), PWAs/web was immediately discarded a…

> This doesn't explain why PWAs are still a rarity on Android though. You'd think that the ability to target both desktop (web) and Android (web/PWA) would've attracted more developer interest.

I can only guess, PWAs are like the hidden nugget of gold that devs poop on because it doesn't fit their preferred tools or experience or something.

The other reason that comes to mind is it is much easier to sneak in dark patterns of data collection and spying with native. Web is expected to degrade gracefully when denied permissions.

> PWAs/web was immediately discarded as an option because we didn't believe we could deliver the level of UX excellence we're targeting.

Seems odd. Web interfaces are very very good for pretty much any information display. They have their limits too. But unless you have a specific requirement that actually hits those limits this particular reason seems hollow to me.

> Nor did we believe that PWAs would be any easier to develop and maintain than two native apps.

This one is, frankly, deluded. Both app routes have significantly more upkeep than web. API churn and app store processes come first to mind. Not to mention three code bases vs one that could also be your website, which you need anyway.

> We're still considering React, but I feel like we're inevitability going to end up building a full native experience.

> Generally speaking, I feel that PWAs and the web have a long way to go in terms of tooling

Wow, I doubt you have any real experience with react native tooling, which is infinitely worse that web tooling. And even tries ( poorly) to replicate web tooling.

Seriously, a platform that comes with full debugging suite in "developer tools" in the browser has no equal in any systems I've built before. How many runtimes can you name that come bundled with full dev and inspection tools? Nicely separated out layout, code, and network. You can sit down to any dev, QA, or customer system and have the full inspection suite at your finger tips.

There seems to be a heavy pro native bias. Don't get me wrong, there are reasons to pick native, but I see very few people laying out good analysis behind their choices. Oh-well, competitive advantages for me.

Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

#104

Post by cutler »

This article, written in 2015, is so out of date. Platform apps have changed the game with native mobile outpacing web internet access. Many users in China, for example, do nearly everything through a couple of apps such as TaoBao and WeChat. Platforms such as these create a sub-web within the web gated by a native app. Game over, though I personally prefer the web model.

Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

#105

Post by mr_toad »

ryaniscool wrote: post #20

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.…

> development environments,

Depends. If your code lives on the network (e.g. under source control), and is executed on the network (servers, VMs, containers) then there’s not much of a case of having a local development environment. Web based IDEs also make it easier to move between machines and not have to worry about ‘works on my machine’ problems.

Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

#106

Post by smoldesu »

EGreg wrote: post #94
smoldesu wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, I personally am against closed centralized platforms (app stores, Big Tech platforms) and centralized monetization (patreon, deplatforming). I agree. Many people on HN are against this as well, even if the entrepreneurs and VCs of the world might not see eye-to-eye. > 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…

Lots of developers DO work with the next generation of stuff, from solidity to matrix.org to LBRY to Dat to IPFS etc. And our stuff too. I am not upset at all! In fact I know where you’re coming from because I have seen it so often on HN. It just seems very strange to me that this is happening on a site that started with promoting a “hacker ethos” and “hacking on things” — which is totally associated with rebelling A…

There's a number of ways I can prove you wrong here, and I find it pretty endearing that you "know where I'm coming from" but think that things like Matrix and the Fediverse are foreign to me. Zero-knowledge proofs, look at you! It's like Little Einsteins in here.

Here's the gist: I despise centralized services. Apple, Google and Microsoft are some of the most evil companies I can imagine, and their atrocities that they committed against the web will never see trial because nobody cares enough to hold them accountable.

There, happy? I hate the establishment as much as you do.

I would still prefer for any one of those companies to control the web over Solana or Terra.

I love IPFS, Matrix and Mastodon. All wonderful technologies, and much as you said, "truly decentralized". They're excellent examples of federation, and great pieces of software if you consider yourself an internet power-user. However, the average person will never use a single one of those technologies. There's simply no reason for them to use it. Google Drive is easier than Dropbox. Discord is simpler than Matrix. Twitter is faster than setting up Mastodon. Again, all of this incredible technology that you're speaking of has existed for years, and nobody has used it for anything significant. There is no "internet" moment, not even a BBS moment where we can see faint glimmers of light from the future. We got digital apes and a plethora of rug-pull scams, plus hundreds of millions in stolen coins that has yet to be recovered.

You have to be pragmatic about change, otherwise you turn into a Richard Stallman: maybe ideologically correct, but so far-removed from normal human society that you can't be taken seriously. There are several noble people out there working in the field of decentralization, least of which being the people who bicker with people endlessly on forums while also promoting esoteric flavor-of-the-week Blockchains. HN knows good decentralization when they see it, which is why projects like Mastodon and Tor get upvoted, and things like OpenSea and $APE_TOKEN get flagged. There's nothing novel about this technology anymore, "average joe" has spoken and said he's not switching to Mastodon because Kanye doesn't have an account there. It's cool, but has no support even among the people who hate Twitter.

It's fun to nerd-out about cool protocols, but Web3+ is DOA. I don't even know how you're arguing some of this stuff with a straight face when not a single major browser vendor even supports this junk.

PS: Don't try to claim Mastodon, IPFS and Matrix as Web3. Just because they use secure cryptography doesn't make them comparable to the half-baked dreck that is coming out of the Web3 space right now. They're decidedly Web2-based protocols, every single one of them was built on the backbone of traditional networking models.

Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

#107

Post by denimnerd42 »

MereInterest wrote: post #8
miohtama wrote: post #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.

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…

oh they removed that? I haven’t been an android user in a long time but keep wishing for something like that in iOS. If i have two tabs and an app I’m using why am I switching between them in different ways?

Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

#108

Post by easrng »

karussell wrote: post #79
ryaniscool wrote: post #20

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 wish that were true. We wrote a navigation application with GPS, turn-by-turn instructions, fullscreen-mode, always-on-screen and more. This is possible directly in the browser! (its open source) But the problem is that even if you pick Chrome as target you'll still have a lot of problems to solve. Can you disable the display to save battery for your long hiking tour and navigate just by voice? A nat…

Always on screen can be emulated using an invisible video. There are libraries for this, like https://richtr.github.io/NoSleep.js/. Which sensors are you talking about? Accelerometer and GPS are standard.

Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

#109

Post by easrng »

archagon wrote: post #98
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes a mobile website will be deliberately stripped of a long-standing feature just to pressure users to install the native app. Years ago Facebook removed the instant-messaging feature from the mobile version of their website.

Pro tip: if you go to facebook.com and request the desktop site (on iOS, at least), you’ll still be looking at a mobile-proportioned site, but Messenger will suddenly work. In other words, the mobile Messenger site already exists and has worked fine for years.

On Android request desktop site also forces the viewport to be desktop-sized. iOS doesn't.

Re: The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

#110

Post by easrng »

MereInterest wrote: post #8
miohtama wrote: post #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.

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…

PWAs still show up as apps.
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