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What PWA Can Do Today

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Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#231

Post by moffkalast »

mdhb wrote: post #210
alternatex wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple spent a huge amount of time and money getting Safari in line with PWA standards in the past few years. Your comment would make sense 3 years ago when it was completely unclear whether Apple will flinch.

It just happened to coincide with the moment the EU started looking quite seriously at what they were doing. They have tried to hobble the web as a platform for fairly obvious reasons for as long as they could. They don’t deserve any credit for whatever progress they made, it was done unwillingly at gunpoint.

"You mean to tell me there's this thing called the world wide web, where anyone can just host anything and all people need to access it is a few words typed into a program that runs on anything? They don't need to buy our proprietary iDevices?! They don't even need to pay us a yearly ransom to put their stuff onto our store?! But what if it's something we don't approve of? This is preposterous and I want it dead."

- Tim Apple, probably

I wonder what kind of preachy "we are so brave" excuse it will be this time now that they're finally forced to allow app sideloading by the EU and Japan.

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#232

Post by exabrial »

sccxy wrote: post #112
exabrial wrote: post #60

My estimate is there are 5,000-10,000 really poor PWA/SPA/etc for every actual good PWA/SPA. Going to a website and it loads some massive chunk of overengineered javascript when all I need to do is display one piece of text is infuriating.

Gatekeeping is strong here. Most apps do not need to be made by 10x developers who code in assembly.

Then just serve a text file, literally 99% of PWA/SPAs could be static sites

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#233

Post by amadeuspagel »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #123
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Progressive enhancement, API detection, and polyfilling are all common strategies that can be used to mitigate almost all device differences. Keyword being "almost", and that in some cases if the platform doesn't support your feature, you're shit outta luck. By far the thing that prevented PWAs from bigger uptake earlier was Apple dragging their feet on push notifications support on iOS. There was simply no workaro…

> By far the thing that prevented PWAs from bigger uptake earlier was Apple dragging their feet on push notifications For me, it was developers trying to push Android design language via PWAs. In others, it was what should have been a website being packaged as a PWA, which is just clunky. That combination made PWAs feel cheap compared to native apps or sites.

What website uses the Android design language? Every website wants to look different, to stand out. A design language can only exist if it's enforced by an app store.

What does a website packaged as a PWA mean? A PWA is a website.

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#234

Post by palata »

jampekka wrote: post #228
palata wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you not saying that because you know webtech and not native? I find native easier, webtech with new frameworks and bundlers and fashion every two days is much more annoying to me.

Probably not. I've coded more for webtech, but have done native for Android (and Linux and Windows. And J2ME and Symbian FFS). Luckily very little iOS and MacOS apart from some reverse engineering. You don't need frameworks or bundlers for simple cases. For many you need just one .html file. For e.g. Android you need quite a bunch of files and directory structures to do even get a Hello world [1]. You need to compile…

In my experience, Android-Studio creates the app for me. There are many files indeed, but that's nicely solved by the IDE. Then Kotlin is great, and I really like Jetpack Compose.

You can distribute your APK manually, but if you want it on the Play Store you have to jump through loops indeed. Though I don't think it's worse than running a webserver.

> And figure out which API was deprecated yesterday and what's today's one that will be deprecated tomorrow.

That's a bit exaggerated. I have been developing for Android for 10 years, and deprecations take years. There are deprecations, but I find that they are made in a controlled fashion.

> E.g. have to buy a Mac and use MacOS. And Xcode.

Yes, I am not a big fan of that. But many people are, so...

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#235

Post by amadeuspagel »

wbharding wrote: post #173

Sure would be nice if Firefox desktop would join the browsers that support PWAs. We build an app that has been PWA-first, but it is unfortunate that this generally requires users to have a Chrome instance running. Would much rather point people to Firefox, and it seems like it would be to their advantage to give apps a reason to recommend FF, if they built a smoother PWA integration than Chrome.

I don't understand the point of PWAs on desktop.

I find it much easier to open a website from the addressbar then to open an "app" using spotlight.

I always have a browser window open anyway.

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#236

Post by amadeuspagel »

donmcronald wrote: post #225
wbharding wrote: post #173

Sure would be nice if Firefox desktop would join the browsers that support PWAs. We build an app that has been PWA-first, but it is unfortunate that this generally requires users to have a Chrome instance running. Would much rather point people to Firefox, and it seems like it would be to their advantage to give apps a reason to recommend FF, if they built a smoother PWA integration than Chrome.

Firefox on Android is worse experience than Chrome too, at least for this app. The app is harder to install (no prompt), the icon looks worse, and the icon has a Firefox badge on it. I wonder if that's down to config for the PWA or a Firefox shortcoming. Anyone know?

> and the icon has a Firefox badge on it

This is something enforced by android. If every app was able to pin apps to the homescreen without such a badge, phishing would be too easy ... add something that looks like a bank app to the homescreen, get people to type in their password ...

It's not fair, since that's not true for chrome, but there's no obvious solution, other then I guess having some sort of "super trustworthy" status for a few other browsers like firefox.

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#237

Post by MBCook »

mdhb wrote: post #216
MBCook wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to any webpage/PWA, hit the share button, hit “add to home screen“. That’s it. It’s not complicated or restricted in any way.

Absolutely nobody expects to find installation options under layers of indirection in a share menu. It’s an intentional choice by Apple that’s hostile to users but very aligned with their strategy to lock users into their own proprietary platform as much as possible.

What do you think the process should be? There are only five buttons on screen, should one of them be permanently dedicated to adding a webpage/PWA to your home screen?

For the record they are the back, forward, share, history/bookmarks, and tabs buttons.

As I explained in another reply, I don’t think Apple is being malicious here. I think they just shove everything that’s not a very common use in there.

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#238

Post by amadeuspagel »

asystole wrote: post #127
bodantogat wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Not for non-tech savvy users. Try it on an iPhone. First you'll have to find the share button on the browser bar, then scroll down and find the option 'Add to home screen'. I don't think its very obvious. Most users don't know about it, and need a how-to guide - similar to what the posted link does.

The "share" button is massively overloaded on iOS and has been for ages. It does a bunch of stuff that isn't really related to sharing in any reasonable sense of the word. It's really IMO one of the worst UI elements in what overall is a pretty nice and consistent system

I like this website. I tap on the share button. That lets me do a bunch of things I can do with websites I like, like sharing them or bookmarking them or pinning them to the homescreen.

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#239

Post by dannymoerkerke »

sevenf0ur wrote: post #74
martinald wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume the built in one that OP has? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Barcode_Det...

Safari doesn't support that API whatsoever so a third party JS library is really your only option. The landscape of open source barcode detection libraries is bleak at the moment.

It does since iOS 17. For now you’ll have to enable it manually through Settings > Safari > Advanced > Feature Flags > Shape Detection API but I expect it to be enabled by default soon.

Re: What PWA Can Do Today

#240

Post by Kuraj »

oaiey wrote: post #161
bob1029 wrote: post #38

We push PWAs to iPads & Surface Go devices via Microsoft InTune for some of our clients today. This path started out very nightmarish (circa 2020) but it's going much smoother today. One of our customers actually came back to us with a slightly improved process based upon the one we gave them. They switched from iPad to Surface Go and used some extra endpoint management to make the PWA experience into a sort of kiosk…

As a Microsoft shop: Any experience with Blazor and PWA? I find Blazor very awesome for developing an App using WebAssembly. When using it as a PWA and caching the .NET runtime locally etc, the combination of productivity and ease of deployment could be theoretically really awesome.

Personally I am in love with Avalonia UI for client-side because it just feels like WPF/Silverlight done right. I can use all my WPF knowledge to develop cross-platform PWA apps. It's the shit.
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