It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU • Hacker News Board

Re: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU

#161

Post by rubymamis » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 2:52 PM UTC

szasamasa wrote: post #154

rubymamis wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly disagree. Web apps are notoriously slow. I'm developing a Notion alternative in Qt C++ that load large text files on my 2017 MacBook Air while on my friend's 2021 M1 Pro, the fastest web based block editor (MarkText) takes around 11x longer to load the same file. So, essentialy, my 2017 MacBook Air is FASTER just due to more efficient software. Why are we allowing this degradation of software? Each time I th…

you should not generalize cherry picking examples does not mean the web MUST be slow, maybe the web apps were programmed badly... I can write even worse native apps than these web apps and it will not prove anything did you ever try compile c++ code to webassembly and check out the performance "degradation"? it still can be true that for this special task, a native app is the better choice and people would buy it fro…

> Chill! No self respecting company will publish inferior web apps if native is so much better in their special use case!

Slack, Spotify, Teams, Notion...

Why do I need to buy the top of the line M3 MacBook Pro to run these apps with a sane performance? What tells you that these same bloated apps won't be even more bloated in the future? There's something fundamentally broken with web apps. It's no wonder the Zed team (that originally created Electron for Atom) has moved completely away from it to develop their own native GUI toolkit.

Re: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU

#162

Post by caskstrength » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 2:55 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #111

anon373839 wrote: post #14

> It’s telling that this is the feature that Apple refused to share. And it makes sense: the idea that users could install safe and secure apps that Apple can’t tax, block or control is terrifying to them. I think that’s what this decision is all about. When Safari was the only browser engine on iOS, PWAs didn’t threaten the App Store because Safari delivers a degraded experience with them. With alternative browser e…

> I think Apple did not want to risk letting that happen. they've already shown a shadow of their true colors when they banned flash under the guise of security (which is also a problem, but for which apple conveniently uses as an excuse). This is their true intention. The app store and the easy revenue from those sales are just not something they'll willingly give up.

> they've already shown a shadow of their true colors when they banned flash under the guise of security

For which I'm eternally grateful to them even though I don't have any Apple devices.

Re: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU

#163

Post by szasamasa » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 2:55 PM UTC

anon373839 wrote: post #129

phartenfeller wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that native apps can offer better experiences and often do because they get more development effort. I disagree that most people hate PWAs because they are just websites. I think many mix bad websites with "PWA is a bad technology". All the cookie banners, ads and prompts to install the native app are the reason the experience is worse. What could a native app for Wikipedia, Google or a basic news pages (with…

> I think many mix bad websites with "PWA is a bad technology". Exactly. I put together a demo a few years ago that employed somewhat novel interaction design to showcase some machine learning tech. A number of people were gobsmacked by it and asked endless questions about what framework it was built with. I didn't use a framework. I dug into the deep recesses of CSS to make it do what I wanted. Really, you can accom…

actually, you can do everything with js

js web api-s have become so powerful (web animation instead of css)

of course you have to know what dom is (and there is cssom as well, modifiable via js)

but it took me some time to realize all you need is js (and understand what js-async really is)... actually I love the js async model for UI

the only problem is that js is a scripting language... some may use typescript for stronger types but what I would love to have and will never come since all web API is for js is a new language...

however, you can use webassembly for critical frontend tasks (like stockfish chess engine on lichess) or actually last time I checked V8 was so optimized that good js code was practically not inferior to webassebly or native...

Re: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU

#164

Post by rubymamis » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 2:56 PM UTC

wiseowise wrote: post #156

rubymamis wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly disagree. Web apps are notoriously slow. I'm developing a Notion alternative in Qt C++ that load large text files on my 2017 MacBook Air while on my friend's 2021 M1 Pro, the fastest web based block editor (MarkText) takes around 11x longer to load the same file. So, essentialy, my 2017 MacBook Air is FASTER just due to more efficient software. Why are we allowing this degradation of software? Each time I th…

> I'm developing a Notion alternative in Qt C++ ...which is not native to the platform, so you're in a way proving my point. Unless I become professional writer, or develop an OCD about typing latency - standard browser and Electron apps (looking at you VSCode and Logseq) are good enough for my use cases. And don't misunderstand me, there's absolutely a place for native applications - when performance matters. Millio…

> ...which is not native to the platform

"The Qt Rendering Hardware Interface (RHI) translates 3D graphics call from Qt applications to the available graphics APIs on the target platform."[1]

[1] https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/topics-graphics.html

Re: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU

#165

Post by caskstrength » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 2:58 PM UTC

bambax wrote: post #76

I made the mistake of only carrying an iPad during my most recent holidays. What a useless piece of junk this is. iPads work well enough at home to watch movies or play a couple of games, but trying to do any kind of serious work on them, either editing photos, writing something, sending files, even trying to use a sequencer is an exercise in frustration. We are sooo lucky there (still) exist alternative computing so…

> Apple is the evilest of evils. It must be fought with great determination if we are concerned with freedom.

Continuing using Apple products while periodically expressing your frustration on Reddit/HN is not a good way to "fight" Apple. Consider using PC with Linux or something.

Re: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU

#166

Post by bbkane » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 2:58 PM UTC

throwaway49849 wrote: post #37

threeseed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Steve Job's scathing criticisms of it, based on everything I know about him Vision Pro patent from 2007 when Steve Jobs was still CEO: https://twitter.com/ianzelbo/status/1753076050643575230

Collecting patents is not proof of a great idea. Exhibit A: Google's patent on a "sticky car" that is covered with adhesive, to stick to pedestrians when you hit them https://patents.google.com/patent/US9340178B1/en

This is amazing, thanks for the link!

Re: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU

#167

Post by xyst » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 2:59 PM UTC

gizmo wrote: post #142

pretext-1 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re working on cars for sure

No money in cars. (That's why Tesla insists it's a robotics/AI company.)

I agree. Money is not in the cars. Money is in the data collected from the users - 360 degree camera footage, offloading AI training risk to users, and of course collecting all of that sweet user data [1]. In some cases, the car manufacturer will somehow collect your sexual history.

[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-...

Re: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU

#168

Post by firtoz » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 3:00 PM UTC

szasamasa wrote: post #145

szasamasa wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

apparently my former title was too much for this site: "iPissed: Apple is after web capabilities to protect close-to-100B App Store Tax" which was relating to the article (and you can read the title of the original article after clicking) but I did not like "kills web apps" because it is not true in my opinion, tries to kill web apps or fights against them or cripples them in the next iOS release... it sounded too et…

I found guidelines not rules: "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." For me, "kill web apps" is misleading since we have to wait and see how the EU reacts. The original title is more of a clickbait. I am not a power user of hacker news. I found a title to fill in and did my best. Had I seen there a link to the guidelines or a text like: please use original…

It's alright, you know now for your next submission.

Regarding the dupe removal: I am slightly inclined towards your side, because it's not really a dupe, but, still I understand where the mods are coming from, especially if a good amount of discussion already happened around the same topic recently.

Re: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU

#169

Post by deergomoo » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 3:01 PM UTC

neximo64 wrote: post #47

anon373839 wrote: post #14

> It’s telling that this is the feature that Apple refused to share. And it makes sense: the idea that users could install safe and secure apps that Apple can’t tax, block or control is terrifying to them. I think that’s what this decision is all about. When Safari was the only browser engine on iOS, PWAs didn’t threaten the App Store because Safari delivers a degraded experience with them. With alternative browser e…

This is quite often where people make the greatest mistake. It's all about distribution and customer usage. Most people hate and don't use PWAs. What stands in the way are Native iPhone apps are better. It also goes for android too. That's why PWAs fail. If they were successful Apple would find a way to monetise the hell out of them.

I almost universally prefer native apps, and I'm also an iPhone user, but it's hard to claim PWAs are unpopular on their own merits when Apple has seemingly deliberately stifled them.

On Android you can go to a mobile webpage and see a fairly unintrusive, one-time banner which will let you install it to the homescreen. Sure it's only two taps on iOS (Share -> Add to homescreen), but for a start your users need to know that functionality even exists, which alone is a massive roadblock to adoption.

As a user, if I want to get notifications and an "app-ish" experience, and the developer is unable or unwilling to create decent platform-specific apps, I would happily take a PWA over a "native" app that is actually just an embedded web view or something trying to recreate the world like Flutter. If I'm not gonna get the benefits of my chosen platform, I'd at least like to not also have to deal with the downsides of App Store apps, like large install sizes and stuff getting held up or nerfed by app review.

I recognise that giving PWAs unimpeded access to the core capabilities that native apps have might result in a worse offering of native apps—as more developers choose to just not bother—but then I'd say it's on Apple (and Google!) to step up and make native a more compelling option. Any veteran iOS developer will agree there's an enormous list of stuff dying for improvement in the development and submission process.

Re: It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU

#170

Post by antasvara » Sat, Feb 17, 2024, 3:02 PM UTC

meyum33 wrote: post #105

bambax wrote: post #76

I made the mistake of only carrying an iPad during my most recent holidays. What a useless piece of junk this is. iPads work well enough at home to watch movies or play a couple of games, but trying to do any kind of serious work on them, either editing photos, writing something, sending files, even trying to use a sequencer is an exercise in frustration. We are sooo lucky there (still) exist alternative computing so…

It weird so many young people do most of their work on iPhone, including producing videos, photos, and text. Yet when it comes to iPads most people don't want to touch it for work.

For a lot of use cases, iPads are worse at those things. For video and photos, the iPhone camera is night and day better. It's also easier to hold for taking those photos, while also being portable (so you don't have to carry an iPad around).

For a generation that has been texting on touchscreen for years, the muscle memory for typing on a phone is pretty well defined. In my experience, typing on a tablet requires different muscle memory and is slower.

If you add a keyboard and stylus, the iPad could be more useful than a phone. But at that point, you're spending a lot of money to improve a device that still has all of the limitations of iOS.