81–90 of 318 posts
> I'm not even sure why are we, as developers, allowing this to happen — there's usually not any good reason to develop mobile applications at all anymore. It's time to move back to open (web) standards and take control back into our own hands! In general yes, but if I look at the apps on my phone I have A mail client, K9, old UI. This clearly can't be replaced by a web app because I'm using it to look at my mail in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that things could have been done better in many ways. However, as explained, it is a legacy application, which does not see any active development nowadays and it would just not make sense to build such a robust QA. This particular app have been written long time ago by another company and there's not even simple unit tests. That's the hard truth. But still, even as complex setup as you have, there's still go…
Unfortunately, as you noted, the game is rigged and you have to play within the sandbox provided. With that, and as you also noted, your testing simply needs to be better, especially since this is a customer-facing app and not an app that's solely used internally. As for dealing with the rollout when a serious bug is now in production, if you didn't roll out your app to 100% of the user base you could halt the roll o…
I also got this email, but professionally and personally. Personally, I voluntarily built and run open source apps for 16 different cities for their transit system. This gave me two weeks to update 16 apps, for no benefit of anyone. My app is a PWA, and the Android version just uses cordova + a few plugins to add a few native options. Unfortunately, updating cordova to support the new target android api broke some of…
> I'd prefer to get rid of the app and just have users go to the website and install the PWA, but the average user still doesn't know how to do this I think you misunderstood users, it's not just ignorance. I want apps to go back in the direction of real(not cordova) apps, not some low effort web thing. Basically zero web apps match the experience of a well crafted actual app.
In theory this kind of "controlled" backwards compatibility break is good, it lets old apps work whilst encouraging developers to keep up with platform changes. In practice it has the nasty side effect of preventing the scaling of the software industry, and with it, industrial society. Therefore Google should drop this policy and allow old programs to be distributed forever. With near perfect backwards compatibility,…
> I'm not even sure why are we, as developers, allowing this to happen — there's usually not any good reason to develop mobile applications at all anymore. It's time to move back to open (web) standards and take control back into our own hands! In general yes, but if I look at the apps on my phone I have A mail client, K9, old UI. This clearly can't be replaced by a web app because I'm using it to look at my mail in…
> OSMAnd, offline maps and trop recording. Can't be web based. There's no reason this couldn't be browser based.
I also got this email, but professionally and personally. Personally, I voluntarily built and run open source apps for 16 different cities for their transit system. This gave me two weeks to update 16 apps, for no benefit of anyone. My app is a PWA, and the Android version just uses cordova + a few plugins to add a few native options. Unfortunately, updating cordova to support the new target android api broke some of…
> I'd prefer to get rid of the app and just have users go to the website and install the PWA, but the average user still doesn't know how to do this I think you misunderstood users, it's not just ignorance. I want apps to go back in the direction of real(not cordova) apps, not some low effort web thing. Basically zero web apps match the experience of a well crafted actual app.
I also got this email, but professionally and personally. Personally, I voluntarily built and run open source apps for 16 different cities for their transit system. This gave me two weeks to update 16 apps, for no benefit of anyone. My app is a PWA, and the Android version just uses cordova + a few plugins to add a few native options. Unfortunately, updating cordova to support the new target android api broke some of…
> Truthfully, I'd prefer to get rid of the app and just have users go to the website and install the PWA, but the average user still doesn't know how to do this. Let's be clear: that's not because users don't know how to do it. It's because Google and Apple haven't made it as easy as installing an app from their app store. That's a choice, and it's a deliberate one.
Also, Google has made in much easier in recent years to submit plain PWAs to the Play Store: https://youtu.be/ddbHp8tGBwQ
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that's also true, but at least this kind of problems can be handled by a roll-back or whatnot. Situation we're currently are in does not allow to do anything while we know that bad build is in production and phones are updating to it automatically. That's the worst situation to be in.
Sure, you own the servers so you can rollback. You don't own a user's device. If you want to rollback after a full rollout, all you do is build your new/rollback release from your previously working commit and update your version number.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, as you noted, the game is rigged and you have to play within the sandbox provided. With that, and as you also noted, your testing simply needs to be better, especially since this is a customer-facing app and not an app that's solely used internally. As for dealing with the rollout when a serious bug is now in production, if you didn't roll out your app to 100% of the user base you could halt the roll o…
Rigged seems a bit extreme. They had to make a few changes to keep things up to date. That they tripped over this small hurdle and went tumbling down the stairs doesnt change that it's a small hurdle.