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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?

#31

Post by nefarious_ends »

palsecam wrote: post #24

https://FreeSolitaire.win is a successful PWA of mine. It’s a Klondike Solitaire game. It used to bring ~$500/mo of advertising revenue, but that’s significantly down these days: I refuse to have a cookie/consent banner, so I refuse customized ads (in the UE, in some US states now, &c.) Players do add it to homescreen. There is a non-intrusive button prompting them to do so, at the end of a game. People like to be ab…

Hey great app! I really like the “undo until unstuck” feature, I haven’t seen that before. Is there an algorithm for that or did you come up with something yourself?

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

#32

Post by gnfedhjmm2 »

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.

I’m not saying this isn’t true. Genuinely! but when I make up random unsubstantiated slander about other companies it gets removed instantly. What makes Apple different? You could never say this about substack or Tesla.

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

#34

Post by lostfocus »

joshstrange wrote: post #26

Whenever this argument comes up it reminds me of how detached from reality HN is on this subject. Customers want apps. Companies want apps. No one except us nerds want PWAs. We can talk about how PWAs are second class citizens and how unfair that is or we can remember that end-users _do not care_ about the underlying technology. We constantly make this mistake, customer don’t care what language you are using, they do…

That's why there are efforts to get platform companies to allow putting PWAs into their app stores. I think on Android it's already possible with a thin wrapper and with regulatory pressure it might be necessary for other platforms to enable that as well.

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

#35

Post by throwaway9143 »

joshstrange wrote: post #26

Whenever this argument comes up it reminds me of how detached from reality HN is on this subject. Customers want apps. Companies want apps. No one except us nerds want PWAs. We can talk about how PWAs are second class citizens and how unfair that is or we can remember that end-users _do not care_ about the underlying technology. We constantly make this mistake, customer don’t care what language you are using, they do…

"customer don't care what language/framework you are using" is a strange way to support a claim they do care about having a native app over a PWA. The first statement highlights that the user just wants something that works as advertised, and doesn't care about the framework. But the second statement highlights that, despite their disinterest in the technology, they care deeply about the app's delivery tech (PWAs vs native). I think this juxtaposition reveals a lot about why things are the way they are, and why users are forced to care about native apps over PWAs.

Just like language is a vehicle for logic, the app delivery tech is just a vehicle for a UI. PWA tech sucks because platforms are incentivized to make it suck. People prefer native apps because they're being funnelled down that path by anti-competitive interests. You don't seem to make that connection.

I get it, you were burned by PWAs and now you just want to build something that works for everyone relatively painlessly and makes money. Nothing wrong with that. But some of us also want support tech that fulfills the goals of the open web. You don't seem to care about that, but others do. Telling everyone its basically a lost cause is a silly and pointless endeavor, because PWAs are the long game, and you're playing the short game.

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

#36

Post by hollowturtle »

terhechte wrote: post #16
throwaway9143 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

You’re wrong, this has nothing to do with bugs. We’re speaking of Safari not implenting features for years and pushing back many of them because of “security”. All bs.

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

#38

Post by franciscop »

I have made 2 PWAs that I use daily myself, so I consider them a success! Also one Electron (which I later migrated to Tauri) desktop app and I'm wrapping up another (which took ~2 days).

Nothing big/fancy as you probably want, but for me they are definitely successes for me!

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

#39

Post by lynx23 »

throwaway9143 wrote: post #35
joshstrange wrote: post #26

Whenever this argument comes up it reminds me of how detached from reality HN is on this subject. Customers want apps. Companies want apps. No one except us nerds want PWAs. We can talk about how PWAs are second class citizens and how unfair that is or we can remember that end-users _do not care_ about the underlying technology. We constantly make this mistake, customer don’t care what language you are using, they do…

"customer don't care what language/framework you are using" is a strange way to support a claim they do care about having a native app over a PWA. The first statement highlights that the user just wants something that works as advertised, and doesn't care about the framework. But the second statement highlights that, despite their disinterest in the technology, they care deeply about the app's delivery tech (PWAs vs…

I have a different take. As a person reliant on accessibility, PWAs almost always deliver a worse experience for me. So after a while, I learnt to prefer native apps, simply because PWAs typically deliver a worse UX for me.

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

#40

Post by raybb »

palsecam wrote: post #24

https://FreeSolitaire.win is a successful PWA of mine. It’s a Klondike Solitaire game. It used to bring ~$500/mo of advertising revenue, but that’s significantly down these days: I refuse to have a cookie/consent banner, so I refuse customized ads (in the UE, in some US states now, &c.) Players do add it to homescreen. There is a non-intrusive button prompting them to do so, at the end of a game. People like to be ab…

What ad network are you using?
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