Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Who has had a successful PWA product?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 163 posts

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

#141

Post by djhn »

codazoda wrote: post #79
the_florist wrote: post #65

https://flowery.app is exclusively a PWA. It was designed from the ground up to prioritize the “Add to Home Screen” experience on iOS. The web is the ideal platform given the app’s emphasis on text and typography, and a native replica would be reinventing the wheel for no tangible benefit to the user. WebKit and Safari have come a long way. Flowery puts browser engines through their paces with its UI animation, which…

Thanks for sharing. The app functions really well and is beautiful. It took me quite a while to figure out what it does and I'm still not 100% sure I understand completely. Is the app profitable? How do people find out about it?

I find your experience rather relatable.

I did figure out there is some sort of spaced repetition component to it, but that’s probably because I’m already an Anki user and aware of the concept.

I quite like the eccentricity of it, although I’m sure it could be toned down a notch for wider appeal.

Feature-wise, having thesaurus definitions immediately accessible is very useful.

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

#143

Post by lynx23 »

throwaway9143 wrote: post #41
lynx23 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's interesting. In what way is a PWA worse than a website wrt accessibility? I understand that you are comparing PWAs to native apps, but presumably you have a fine time with normal websites? PWAs shouldn't be any different.

Haha, nice suggestive questioning, but I am not falling for it. Your base assumtion is wrong, websites are not nice and dandy, its more like throwing dice to see if you're happy or not. In fact, the more "progressive" a website is, the less likely it is accessible.. If it is nominally accessible, its often not comfortable to use.

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

#144

Post by postalrat »

akmittal wrote: post #116

Twitter was an excellent PWA untill someone ruined it so that everyone would use native app. Flipkart.com and housing.com and few good examples

Apps don't have ad blocking, have more tracking options, etc. Of course they want to push you to an app.

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

#145

Post by egorfine »

nathancoleman wrote: post #122

As someone who started investing in PWAs earlier this year after jumping through Apple and Google’s hoops for years, I’d highly recommend progressier.com for making a PWA with an install experience that makes sense to less technical users. This was far and away the biggest hurdle for me. Haven’t had a single person confused since integrating Progressier.

Thanks for the link! Looks promising.

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

#146

Post by palsecam »

ttymck wrote: post #126
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…

Your buy a coffee link was not clickable on Firefox Android

Oh thank you for that! Could reproduce that bug.

It’s because of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1813213

I just spent a couple hours trying to find a clean workaround, without success… Will investigate more ASAP.

Thanks again!

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

#147

Post by the_florist »

codazoda wrote: post #79
the_florist wrote: post #65

https://flowery.app is exclusively a PWA. It was designed from the ground up to prioritize the “Add to Home Screen” experience on iOS. The web is the ideal platform given the app’s emphasis on text and typography, and a native replica would be reinventing the wheel for no tangible benefit to the user. WebKit and Safari have come a long way. Flowery puts browser engines through their paces with its UI animation, which…

Thanks for sharing. The app functions really well and is beautiful. It took me quite a while to figure out what it does and I'm still not 100% sure I understand completely. Is the app profitable? How do people find out about it?

I appreciate the kind words. A lot of painstaking work went into aesthetics.

The Stripe integration launched a few days ago, so the app is very much in the red. Paid advertising since the initial release six months ago has shown promising signs from prospective customers though.

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

#148

Post by the_florist »

djhn wrote: post #141
codazoda wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing. The app functions really well and is beautiful. It took me quite a while to figure out what it does and I'm still not 100% sure I understand completely. Is the app profitable? How do people find out about it?

I find your experience rather relatable. I did figure out there is some sort of spaced repetition component to it, but that’s probably because I’m already an Anki user and aware of the concept. I quite like the eccentricity of it, although I’m sure it could be toned down a notch for wider appeal. Feature-wise, having thesaurus definitions immediately accessible is very useful.

Thanks! I take the “eccentric” label as a compliment.

I may have gone overboard with the minimalism. Users had been all the more baffled before I added the tooltips hinting to tap the hearts, so I should probably double down on some sort of tutorial.

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

#149

Post by knallfrosch »

goosejuice wrote: post #85
knallfrosch wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Releases should be automated anyway. Once you set up the necessary pipelines, there is not that much work involved. I think our only pain point (team of ~7 devs) is keeping a Macbook around for iPad builds and debugging. But I guess you will need Macbook to debug any Safari issues too.

Are you referring to builds of a PWA wrapper shipped to the App store? If you don't mind sharing, how did your approval process go? Any hangups?

Sorry for the confusion. We ship minimal Electron (Windows) / Cordova (iOS) wrappers to interface with our website. They're a pain to set up but don't require all that much code themselves.

This allows us to publish to the respective stores. Would be hard to convince non-technical users to click "Install as PWA" because noone knows what that is.

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

#150

Post by Bjartr »

mvdtnz wrote: post #127
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.

Just refuse to service Apple customers. They can lie in the bed they've made.

The unfortunate truth is that for too many businesses this is equivalent to "stop running your business"
Post reply on HN