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Web apps are better than no apps

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Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#91

Post by jasode »

jeroenhd wrote: post #79
jasode wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why deceptively package the javascript as an app when you can just put it on a website? A desktop app based on Electron-Chromium runtime has more integration options with the operating system. E.g. file system access, taskbar/Dock icon and notifications, runs in the background, etc. If a developer were to create a 100% pure web url app running locally on https://127.0.0.1/foobarapp.html -- ... they'd quickly run int…

That's great, but I don't know any Electron app that needs file system or task bar access. Notifications are a solved problem already and installing web apps from the browser is just a click away in all browsers (except Firefox), after which they run completely offline. Chrome added a file system API for some reason, but every Electron based application I've used just used the standard prompt and it worked absolutely…

>That's great, but I don't know any Electron app that needs file system or task bar access.

I first ran Zulip chat client in a Chrome web browser tab. But I often missed replying to new messages because I always forgot to manually cycle over to the Zulip tab to check for them.

After a few days of fighting that limitation, I gave up on Zulip in the web browser tab and installed the desktop version of Zulip (Electron runtime). Now new unread messages trigger a red dot on the taskbar. The desktop version is just easier to use.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#92

Post by bikamonki »

Aren't we facing a case of: everything seems like a nail for my hammer?

What problem are you trying to solve? Game app? Go native, maybe. Utility app? Native too, maybe. Business app? Web will do, unless marketing demands it be native b/c management wants the darn icon on every darn screen out there.

What if it's neither? Chat apps seem to be the next app platform.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#93

Post by Capricorn2481 »

kamray23 wrote: post #61
matwood wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whenever I use Teams Terrible software can be coded in any language.

Sadly, Microsoft and Electron seem to be magnetic to that type of software though. I experience seconds of lag between pressing a key and a character appearing in vanilla VSCode writing plain-text files. Forget plugins, I can't even use it to write text files. This laptop seems to run Dwarf Fortress and Factorio just fine, so I have no clue why specifically Teams and VSCode conk out other than the fact that both are…

I'm sorry, but there's something wrong with your computer at that point. Seconds of lag to type is ridiculous. This is not most people's experience with VSCode. Visual Studio is way more sluggish to me (and probably most people)

Dwarf Fortress and Factorio are actually some of the least demanding games to run, by the way. I think a 2005 laptop could run Factorio. It's known for being easy to run

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#94

Post by muzani »

mft_ wrote: post #72

Did this 'article' make anyone else's antenna twitch? Firstly, there's something about the combination of saying nothing new and adding very little opinion, plus a few writing/editorial oddities, makes me wonder if this is GPT-generated? Or at best, it's just comms copy from a non-specialist, banging something out in a hurry. (Noting that the author is COO of a 'communication agency'.) Secondly, given how uninteresti…

It's typical HN fodder. It's low quality, but some don't upvote the article, they upvote the headline.

It's been 3 hours on one of the slower hours on HN. The algorithm is loosely engagement / time^2, so something that pops up at the right timing can stand out against really good news 14 hours ago.

But typically the high comment vs upvote ratio triggers the low quality filter and it's likely to fall off soon.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#95

Post by Capricorn2481 »

nsonha wrote: post #17
JimDabell wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nope, they don't look familiar because they look different on every platform. When I use an app, I don’t care what it looks like on somebody else’s phone, I care that it works the same as all the other apps on my phone. > Give me consistency. I want it to be consistent with all the other apps on my phone. I don’t care if it’s consistent with what’s running on somebody else’s phone.

They are saying if they have say an iphone and an android (tablet?), the same app should behave the same. Contrary to you, some people could not care less about "consistency" of different apps that have different UIs and do different things anyway.

Where is this magical market that has an iPhone AND Android tablet? I would wager that ihat is a pretty rare user, and even rarer to be using the same native apps on both.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#96

Post by amelius »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #95
nsonha wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are saying if they have say an iphone and an android (tablet?), the same app should behave the same. Contrary to you, some people could not care less about "consistency" of different apps that have different UIs and do different things anyway.

Where is this magical market that has an iPhone AND Android tablet? I would wager that ihat is a pretty rare user, and even rarer to be using the same native apps on both.

The family's tablet can be of a different brand than each family member's phone.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#97

Post by daltont »

The fact that the most common denominator for publishing an application to reach the maximum user base is a web application is kind of a depressing one to developers. We know that to reach a maximum user base that we need to ship using bloated tech.

If an application that emulates a calculator was just now a new idea it would likely be first developed as a web application those would be an order of magnitude larger that it needs to be. It would use much more memory and cpu than a native version. You do get some things that could be a value like screen reader capabilities. It would show up in app stores but would be implemented in Electron.

In the "olden days" of the 1990's such an concept would likely been done in VB6 and distributed as an .exe since that the user base of Windows desktop users was the most significant. That resources consumes by the executable would be "nit" on today's devices.

Even though from a business perspective shipping bloated apps makes sense, developers are aware of the bloat and it bothers us.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#98

Post by guggle »

endisneigh wrote: post #16

> There are just too many levels, and JavaScrip is an interpreted language, not a compiled one, so by default, it will be orders of magnitude slower than an app written in Swift, Rust, or C++. JavaScript isn't as fast as C++ or Rust, but it's pretty fast. Around the speed of Java and Go in some cases, which are compiled. For a web app the speed of the language is rarely the bottleneck anyway, other than some exceptio…

> I guess with newer apis such as the File System one Electron is slowly becoming unnecessary

Last time I tried, it was still a pain point. For one, the API felt... alien. Also, the performance was not good. I'm not sure why, maybe it's my Javascript-FU that's bad, but all in all I'd still use another language for this if possible.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#99

Post by daft_pink »

I think web apps are also slower, because they don’t store data locally.

If you compare Notion to Obsidian, which is also an electron app. Obsidian’s data is stored locally and it is extremely fast whereas Notion is not quick at all. It’s more complicated than the compiled vs interpreted, but also includes where your data is stored and the underlying infrastructure behind that data.

Re: Web apps are better than no apps

#100

Post by _fat_santa »

nottheengineer wrote: post #10

I hate to agree with this. Web is the best way to cram loads of features into a limited amount of dev time. But still, whenever I use Teams, something like this happens: I click a button, nothing happens. I wait 10 seconds, because teams sometimes just needs a little longer. Nothing happens. I click the button again, it finally starts doing something. 5 seconds later, the thing I wanted appears. And every time it hap…

Teams has to be the poster child of “enterprise software”. I’m currently on contract at a large healthcare company and I’m starting to understand how an app as abominable as Teams could be built.

The issue isn’t really with the tech stack, though electron is not the best, other companies like Discord have managed to build much better apps on top of it. The issue I see is organizational.

What happens is you have a top down product vision where the features all come from the top and the engineers just have to figure out the implementation, they have no say in which features get pushed.

So you get a scenario where every quarter, there are ever more features you need to cram into the app. All of this is feature work, no rework, no performance fixes. Once a team is done with this feature they don’t have time to go back and fix the tech debt because they have a new feature to implement. For any bug fixes and performance fixes the feature is shipped to another (probably offshore) team for maintenance, another quarter passes and more stuff gets thrown in to the app, a never ending cycle.

It’s a vicious cycle where the app seems to be feature filled but every feature feels half baked with no attention paid to the details. Features are only added to and seldomly removed.

Contrast this to smaller shops like Discord. I would imagine they follow a similar process but you have the same teams managing the building and maintenance of feature and more importantly, it’s not just adding new features but going back and reworking things to be more performant.

In my mind these apps are actually ugly organizational problems that rear their head in the technology that the org creates.

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