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

rogueengine.io

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

#121

Post by jknoepfler »

rubymamis wrote: post #53
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any text editor that struggles to load a large text file... Define "large". If it's bigger than the biggest text file I'll ever open, then I don't care. My point is that "efficient" code isn't absolutely necessary in many, many cases.

The problem with that mentality is that you start seeing inefficiencies spring everywhere (why loading Discord takes so long? Slack? etc, etc).

Inefficiency also compounds. If you're sending too much data over an unreliable connection using a bloated protocol (say), you have three multipliers. Now start daisy-chaining these things together, host them on bloated images on pods in underpacked nodes in k8s (not a potshot at k8s, which I like quite a bit, just... another plausible source of inefficiency). Write all the servers in Python (or worse, some Ruby on Rails backed by MySQL or something comically underperformant).

We could keep going, but it maths out to mind-blowing amounts of waste just copying bytes around between buffers with no value add.

(Old man editorializing at clouds: "and all so we can employ people who don't know how computers work to satisfy corporate product pipelines by shoveling digital shit onto people that they neither want nor need")

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

#123

Post by neilalexander »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #32
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the "A" stands for "app"! Is there anything you could call it that would be less confusing (because "PWA" or "Progressive Web App" sure ain't it)?

Until some massive marketing campaign explains to all users of the internet what PWA's are (which is never going to happen), there's nothing wrong with calling your PWA a website if it prevents a lot of confusion.

Further to that, there are plenty of people who can't really articulate what a web browser actually is or how a website differs from an app. It's not clear to me whether these users would be more accepting of a PWA or if they would be even further confused by them, particularly if they have to be left to find the app on the web first in order to "install" it, even more so if they've never bothered to look at what all those buttons in their web browser actually do.

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

#124

Post by alexpotato »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #116
alexpotato wrote: post #101

One of my kids recently started playing travel basketball and being a nerdy, into stats tech dad I wanted to take stats on the game. Instead of downloading an existing app, I decided to see if I could write my own web app with the following constraints: - no frameworks - just basic javascript - track multiple stats - be able to enter stats via phone and only using one hand - while also holding a 4 year old in my othe…

I don't understand what this has to do with the topic.

The general topic was web apps vs phone apps.

I was pointing out that this applies to apps that you can build yourself.

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

#125

Post by snakeyjake »

bdcravens wrote: post #85
not_the_fda wrote: post #82

I'll take a native app over a web app every time. HTTP was not designed for apps, it was designed for serving HTML. We had a decent solution in Java applets and the tech giants could play nice so we couldn't have nice things. The work around has been a huge kludge of crap frameworks of the day trying to reinvent the OS and associated API in the browser. It sucks all the way down. Apps are: More powerful More efficien…

When HTTP was designed, there also weren't any images, CSS, or Javascript.

There was no support for images in the two pre-1.0 versions of HTTP.

The two versions written by one man as experiments and used by (by reasonable interpretation) absolutely nobody.

HTTP 1.0, the first "real" HTTP did indeed include support for images at some point prior to being finalized as RFC 1945.

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

#126

Post by mjmsmith »

amelius wrote: post #73
gazchop wrote: post #2

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. No, because it fails to support the feature of running virtually anywhere. For many people this is the #1 feature. Everything else is just icing on the cake. Who cares about an app that is 2x faster but doesn't run?

> For many people this is the #1 feature. Everything else is just icing on the cake.

I hear this sentiment from developers much more than non-developers. I wonder what percentage of developers do all their work within a browser.

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

#127

Post by nox101 »

I'm also curious about apps vs native. Here on HN it seems people often hate on the web "you're the product, not the customer" vs native. But, half the websites I visit say "download the app!!!!". If all the spying on the web is so great for them but they're pushing you to an app, that to me suggests they get more spying on the app. Even if the app is just a webview, they get to set the policy so no blocking the 950+ companies they're letting spy on you. And, even better, the app will require you to login in so they can magically get even better data.

It feels like we (the HN crowd?) should be pushing for more web (the one place where you can inject more control like ad blockers, etc), than native apps (where you have no control)

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

#129

Post by cosmic_cheese »

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…

Native apps also give users a type of control that web apps can’t, by way of existing as fully independent executables on storage in possession of the user.

Web apps can just up and disappear, spontaneously grow paywalls, or slowly enshittify over time, and unless both the user is technically savvy and the web app is fully open source, there’s nothing the user can do about it.

In contrast, when a new release of a native app is worse or its company goes under, the user retains a useful product (old binary) that can be run bordeline indefinitely one way or another (hacks, emulation, etc).

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

#130

Post by apitman »

> it’s time to get back to what the web was always meant to be: a universal platform for everyone

That is not what the web was always meant to be. The web is a document distribution platform. In its purest form, that should mean no bloat, no tracking, no JavaScript period. Browsers should be tiny, extremely secure programs.

There's nothing wrong with having a universal app platform that embraces important lessons from the web like URIs, the security model, WebAssembly, etc, but it should be a separate program.

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