App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too) • Hacker News Board

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#91

Post by mamcx » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 4:45 PM UTC

mertbio wrote: post #16

> 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…

> Developers pay hefty app store fees

So, hosting doesn't cost?

Too many app-but-websites should be local, but because are web requires hosting and likely a database (that must be 'web-scale' so it survives bots).

My web app cost far more than my older native one. And is far harder to maintain...

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#92

Post by fidotron » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 4:46 PM UTC

ctippett wrote: post #4

I sympathise, but talking to my sister I've come to appreciate a different point of view. I have an "app", a PWA, that she says she cannot find because it's not in the App Store. Despite telling her it's available as a website, this seems too much... she just doesn't use — or is comfortable using — Safari.

This was because every ad agency on the planet wanted to be in apps when the App Store took off, so they rebranded websites to apps to confuse people.

Chrome, being a division of a huge ad company that makes money from these agencies, not merely played along but took a leading role in sowing the confusion.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#93

Post by bdcravens » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 4:46 PM UTC

Meetings should be emails

Youtube content should be a blog

React websites should be static with sprinkles of vanilla JS

etc

These are all ideas that in many cases are true, though sometimes they aren't, but if you ask the right questions, usually those holding the line have a financial incentive.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#94

Post by duxup » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 4:48 PM UTC

Do individual consumer web apps get many sales when compared to smartphone apps in a store?

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#95

Post by fidotron » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 4:51 PM UTC

The problem with web games is monetization. If you look at Poki, for example, the most popular games are those that simply drag the user into a sort of low level loop where they are not ever going to actually fail but also never really succeed, as the aim is just to keep them there long enough to show more and more ads.

This makes casino games look almost virtuous because in those the possibility that you win and walk away actually exists.

On reflection, since I also experimented and contributed to this mess, the whole Facebook game era of web games was the peak, because at least those games enabled strengthening connections between real people.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#96

Post by freehorse » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 4:52 PM UTC

darknavi wrote: post #68

rubymamis wrote: post #22

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…

It's funny that part of the reason computer hardware has gotten faster and more efficient is because heavy usage work flows, even things like web apps. So while you think web apps are going "backwards", they've likely helped contributed to modern computing hardware speeding up your native programs!

Is that true, or the reverse? That web apps became a feasible thing only after consumer hardware, esp phones, became performant enough to handle loads like that (which lead to less and less offloading to servers)?

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#97

Post by hahahacorn » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 4:53 PM UTC

Agreed but on mobile, the native app still has a marginally nicer UX. For apps I use heavily, I appreciate that. (Funnily enough, I use the inverse as a means of controlling my screen time. Too much YouTube? Delete the app and suffer through using it on Safari.)

This is exactly why I’m such a huge fan of Strada. I’m not married to Strada as the “best” solution, but it was early on trending towards the (seemingly) obvious solution.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#98

Post by perons » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 4:53 PM UTC

One comment that I haven't seen yet and that puts PWA for Games in jeopardy: the maximum caching allowed for Safari PWA's (thus the whole iOS ecossystem) is only 50mb. Most mid-core / hardcore mobile games are bigger than that after downloading remote assets when the app loads for the first time, and this means a player of a mid-core PWA game would have to redownload a good chunk of the assets everytime the game loads.

I could be mistaken though, but I tried looking for how PWA's work with caching and it is a whole layer of uncertainties that depends on which browser/OS/ecosystem you are in, and if the user clears it's browser cache. In the end, it seems like PWA will only work reliably when the PWA is super light, and doesn't need a lot of caching, so for gaming that would mean only lightweight, casual and hypercasual games.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#99

Post by fidotron » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 4:56 PM UTC

guzik wrote: post #83

I'd give anything to move our apps to the web. We're in the medical field (our apps connect to medical devices over Bluetooth), so publishing on Google Play is like a Kafkaesque fever dream. Two days ago they tell us our app fits into categories like: Activity and Fitness Nutrition and Weight Management Sleep Management Medical Device Apps So we gotta update our policies, but today they said something like: "Actually…

The Google Play update emails kill me with the level of irrelevant noise.

“This is an important tax update for [country you didn’t think existed anymore].” etc.

Re: App Should Have Been a Website (and Probably Your Game Too)

#100

Post by streptomycin » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 4:56 PM UTC

perons wrote: post #98

One comment that I haven't seen yet and that puts PWA for Games in jeopardy: the maximum caching allowed for Safari PWA's (thus the whole iOS ecossystem) is only 50mb. Most mid-core / hardcore mobile games are bigger than that after downloading remote assets when the app loads for the first time, and this means a player of a mid-core PWA game would have to redownload a good chunk of the assets everytime the game load…

The 50mb limit no longer exists, it's much higher now https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198133#c15

Safari will delete your cached data if your app goes unused for a little while though. Native apps may do the same thing though... at least on Android I get notifications about it deleting cached data for native apps I haven't used recently.