61–70 of 384 posts
Please stop making web apps, the web is for documents, not to be hijacked by Google in their attempt to wrestle personal computing from Microsoft. This issue becomes even worse if you try to make software that can both be used with keyboard & mouse and on a small touchscreen. With very few exceptions, you end up with something that works poorly with both interfaces, instead of working great on one of them. Trying to…
Please stop making web apps, the web is for documents, not to be hijacked by Google in their attempt to wrestle personal computing from Microsoft. This issue becomes even worse if you try to make software that can both be used with keyboard & mouse and on a small touchscreen. With very few exceptions, you end up with something that works poorly with both interfaces, instead of working great on one of them. Trying to…
Websites are at least supposedly sandboxed so they are not as much of a risk as running native binaries. But this is getting worse and worse as browsers expose more and more of their host operating system's functionality. The benefits of using a website instead of a native app are quickly disappearing while the drawbacks have only been somewhat mitigated. We're getting to the point where browsers are worthy of the decades old criticism Emacs has received. They have eventually become an OS with many fine features - simply lacking a good web browser.
The browser, and the web, has been destroyed by the insane security model of modern OS-Browsers: running every executable they're sent from anyone with not a care in the world as if it is normal. This one thing has made it so browsers cannot be in control of the user, made it so that CA TLS is pretty much required and so that browser devs write entirely for the security use cases of the insane corporate web applications instead of writing for human people looking at website documents.
And this same security model makes it so that web apps basically cannot communicate with each other at all, unlike real applications where piping between small applications is the entire idea.
> But fast-forward to today, and browsers can do all that. Browsers can't access all the APIs in iOS. > Developers pay hefty app store fees You pay 99$ per year and 15% for each sale. Apple handles VAT, refunds, distribution and so on. > They’re faster, more flexible, and work seamlessly across devices. Native apps? Not so much. Enabling iCloud sync for your app is just a single click on Xcode. > Why Web Apps Are the…
> Browsers can't access all the APIs in iOS And nor should they. Every single API that gets added to a browser increases the likelihood that you will be accurately fingerprinted and tracked across the web. This data is then packaged and sold to third parties whom you will never know about. Every time I hear the PWA argument it's always what is in the best interest of developers not users.
I disagree. The problem is more nuanced. A well implemented (native) app is always better than a well implemented web site. The problem is poorly implemented apps which are just UI wrappers hitting dumb APIs or embedding entire web stacks which hit dumb APIs. A well implemented web app isn't much better than that. They don't work offline, they use way more resources than anything native and they leak data like a siev…
> A well implemented (native) app is always better than a well implemented web site. Dunno, native app doesn't have URLs nor deep links. I can't link you to a page in my native app that you can click on. In my iOS HN app I'd have to click "Copy website link" to share a submission. If there were no website, I couldn't share it at all. Same with Reddit. For most apps, that's a lot to give up when you app is basically j…
Please stop making web apps, the web is for documents, not to be hijacked by Google in their attempt to wrestle personal computing from Microsoft. This issue becomes even worse if you try to make software that can both be used with keyboard & mouse and on a small touchscreen. With very few exceptions, you end up with something that works poorly with both interfaces, instead of working great on one of them. Trying to…
> Please stop making web apps
No.
> the web is for documents
No it isn’t.
As the solo founder of a couple of 'popular' websites I get asked regularly if I want to create an app. When I ask them what they want the app to do what a website can't, they can't name a single USP, especially now notifications work on all devices. And really, who has the time to maintain a website and two apps? Or rebuild a decade old platform in a janky cross compiling solution like Flutter that is always on the…
I'm a solo dev for a startup and this is something I always hammer home to my non-technical co-founder. I tell him that spinning up an app that would have parity with our current app will not only take close to a year for a single person to develop, but from there on out every feature will come out slower since we need to have mobile parity as well. Out current plan is to slowly make all the pages on our website mobile friendly and even that is a big lift for a complex business app
OTOH, in tired of everyone pushing apps that could easily be a website.
I had an xfinity technician aggressively pushing me to install their xfi app when they came to install the service. They told me it was the only good way to configure the WiFi (!) and that they had to check a task in their technician to do list that they “walked the consumer through installing the app”.
Horrible consumer experience. Between the borderline lies and the nefarious push for the app, if I had had any other choice I would have rejected the installation on the spot. But alas xfinity was literally the only provider that could offer service with any decent speed.
While the web platform is catching up due to the continuous supply of abstractions by modern browsers, once you must deviate from those abstractions, you quickly find yourself needing to implement something yourself that is much less efficient than a native implementation. I wrote about developing my own block editor from scratch[1] using C++ and QML after finding that Notion (and so many other web apps) are extremel…
So while you think web apps are going "backwards", they've likely helped contributed to modern computing hardware speeding up your native programs!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Browsers can't access all the APIs in iOS And nor should they. Every single API that gets added to a browser increases the likelihood that you will be accurately fingerprinted and tracked across the web. This data is then packaged and sold to third parties whom you will never know about. Every time I hear the PWA argument it's always what is in the best interest of developers not users.
Apps fingerprint you much, much better, and can access more data (despite what apple marketing says), your argument is moot.