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Ask HN: Who has had a successful PWA product?

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Re: Ask HN: Who has had a successful PWA product?

#11

Post by roywashere »

thepra wrote: post #7
throwaway9143 wrote: post #3

I'll give you a hard-earned tip: expect to fight Apple every step of the way. They will randomly erase all local data (cookies, localstorage, push subscription tokens, etc) in your PWA without warning. They say they don't do this, but I have the receipts. They want PWAs to suffer, and you will go insane trying to make workarounds on iPhone.

Even IndexedDb? Having a PWA based on webassembly(Blazor) that I test on an updated iPhone 6 I have to say that I didn't ever run in such issues, the experience is good even though the device is old.

They definitely clear localstorage. But they also are honest about doing this under disk pressure — can’t find the link right now though. My old company had a Cordova app and we stored the client token in localstorage and we found some 16G phones losing their tokens and it turned out to be this. We changed to store tokens in the keyring. From a real web app you can’t but I guess if you would use a cookie this might just work.

Re: Ask HN: Who has had a successful PWA product?

#13

Post by throwaway9143 »

thepra wrote: post #7
throwaway9143 wrote: post #3

I'll give you a hard-earned tip: expect to fight Apple every step of the way. They will randomly erase all local data (cookies, localstorage, push subscription tokens, etc) in your PWA without warning. They say they don't do this, but I have the receipts. They want PWAs to suffer, and you will go insane trying to make workarounds on iPhone.

Even IndexedDb? Having a PWA based on webassembly(Blazor) that I test on an updated iPhone 6 I have to say that I didn't ever run in such issues, the experience is good even though the device is old.

Yes, a full local reset. Its an issue that plagued us for almost a year sporadically across several thousand customers. After instrumenting our app with very detailed remote logging, we were fortunate enough to catch it on one of our in-house local test iPhones. The logging showed an app with rich local state, the app close, then several minutes later the app open with no local state. Everything was wiped. This lined up with the feedback we had been receiving. Specifically for us, the push notification subscription tokens were being erased/revoked from the browser, meaning the customer couldn't receive notifications anymore. But the logging showed all local state was reset, including IndexedDb. If you dig through the Apple developer forums and StackOverflow, you will see many others complaining about this. You will also see links to resources claiming that Apple ITP does not do this for PWAs, specifically:

https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/#intelligent-tracking... "Home Screen Web Application Domain Exempt From ITP". This is 100% bullshit though.

My personal belief is that Apple is purposefully nuking PWAs from orbit in a non-deterministic and "buggy" way because they are a threat to the app store business model, and I suspect if they frustrate enough developers, people will stay away from PWAs.

Re: Ask HN: Who has had a successful PWA product?

#14

Post by ec109685 »

throwaway9143 wrote: post #3

I'll give you a hard-earned tip: expect to fight Apple every step of the way. They will randomly erase all local data (cookies, localstorage, push subscription tokens, etc) in your PWA without warning. They say they don't do this, but I have the receipts. They want PWAs to suffer, and you will go insane trying to make workarounds on iPhone.

Great point. The fact that they don’t backup to the cloud PWA data makes it a non-starter for any app that wants a local only experience. It’s trash.

Re: Ask HN: Who has had a successful PWA product?

#15

Post by keyle »

vjeux wrote: post #12

excalidraw.com is a PWA, but not unsure how helpful it’s going to be as comparison. As mentioned in the comments, success is likely more due to the usefulness of the app rather than the tech used. vjeuxx@gmail.com if you wanna chat.

Unrelated, but this is just a joy to use. Well done.

Re: Ask HN: Who has had a successful PWA product?

#16

Post by terhechte »

throwaway9143 wrote: post #13
thepra wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even IndexedDb? Having a PWA based on webassembly(Blazor) that I test on an updated iPhone 6 I have to say that I didn't ever run in such issues, the experience is good even though the device is old.

Yes, a full local reset. Its an issue that plagued us for almost a year sporadically across several thousand customers. After instrumenting our app with very detailed remote logging, we were fortunate enough to catch it on one of our in-house local test iPhones. The logging showed an app with rich local state, the app close, then several minutes later the app open with no local state. Everything was wiped. This lined…

Nah. I used to be a iOS developer. The official native frameworks are buggy as hell. Everything is broken all the time. Occam's razor is on this behaviour being just another bug that receives little attention because everything else is also buggy. I can't even blame them, the iOS api surface is huge, and every year there's new frameworks and every couple of years new devices. Android has the advantage of being open source, which allows external contributions to fix bugs, which oftentimes fixes the small-percentage bugs because one developer ran into it and decided to fix it. On iOS this is impossible, and there's no corporate incentive to fix small-percentage bugs.

Re: Ask HN: Who has had a successful PWA product?

#17

Post by DANmode »

throwaway9143 wrote: post #13
thepra wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even IndexedDb? Having a PWA based on webassembly(Blazor) that I test on an updated iPhone 6 I have to say that I didn't ever run in such issues, the experience is good even though the device is old.

Yes, a full local reset. Its an issue that plagued us for almost a year sporadically across several thousand customers. After instrumenting our app with very detailed remote logging, we were fortunate enough to catch it on one of our in-house local test iPhones. The logging showed an app with rich local state, the app close, then several minutes later the app open with no local state. Everything was wiped. This lined…

Hoping everyone reading this understands what's being kept from us.

Cross-platform webapps should be table stakes for adopting any platform.

Re: Ask HN: Who has had a successful PWA product?

#18

Post by pflenker »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #9

What do you want to do with a PWA that you can't do with a webpage? If at all possible, try to use a webpage instead, to avoid the myriad problems and quirks that arise with PWAs. Only resort to a PWA if you need capabilities that you can't get as a webpage.

Push notifications, for starters. But the more compelling argument is that from the user’s point of view, an app is something else than a web page. Even the most basic feature - being represented at the Home Screen on the device - makes a huge difference.

Re: Ask HN: Who has had a successful PWA product?

#20

Post by dualogy »

> had some success ($500 MRR) with shareware, 20 years ago

Don't trigger my nostalgia! Fun times, been there done that 2005-2008 https://web.archive.org/web/20080118184913/http://www.sudoku... — then sold it on to another "micro-ISV" (the popular term for indie software maker back then)

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