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)

#131

Post by yonatan8070 » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 5:39 PM UTC

nox101 wrote: post #127

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+…

The modern web sucks, with all the tracking, etc.

But it's still a lot better than apps, which give the developer more control without (in most cases) any tangible UX benefit. Just as an example, Reddit doesn't need to have an app, all they do is display text and images, along with some interaction, and they especially don't need to lock some content behind the app (I recently got a popup when trying to view a post saying that "unreviewed content" is only available in the app, despite the post clearly loading for a split second before the popup).

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

#132

Post by noam_compsci » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 5:40 PM UTC

jampekka wrote: post #25

noam_compsci wrote: post #17

Web gaming might be a decent incremental revenue source ( But it will never be more than that. 1. Game ops is too entrenched in mobile. The entire stack (user acquisition, analytics, monetisation) is tried and tested on mobile. These are difficult problems that seem easy to port to web games, but “devils in the detail”. Eg When you’re waiting on appsflyer to ship an update to properly attribute reinstalls for 6 month…

I'm sure there are problems with web games, but some of your arguments seem stem from ignorance about the modern web tech[1]. > 2. Consumers don’t want web games. The UI just isn’t there yet. You misclick out of a tab and lose progress or get distracted / start browsing another tab. Also to do with the ephemeral nature of a browser tab. Fullscreen mode mostly solves the misclick problem. PWAs solve it entirely. Do co…

Just played around with a PWA on iOS and added it to Home Screen. Works really really nicely and so it seems pwa have come along a lot since I last looked into them! Thanks for the prompt to update my understanding.

I do disagree in the developer point though. Those who know unity really do not translate well to unreal. Totally different languages and ecosystems. Also unity web has always really really sucked for anything other than gimmick games.

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

#133

Post by scarface_74 » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 5:41 PM UTC

anderber wrote: post #102

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…

Safari has always hampered PWAs, and probably for the reason that they want you to use the appstore instead ($$$).

It came out in the Epic trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from games. Those aren’t going to be web apps anyway for monetization reasons.

If PWAs are so bad on iOS and great on Android, why do companies bother with writing Android apps, web apps for computers and iOS apps instead of just telling Android users to use the web apps?

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

#134

Post by ndileas » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 5:42 PM UTC

bdcravens wrote: post #93

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.

I look at these things as essentially aesthetic preferences. There's certainly cases where a certain medium is the objectively right one for a task, but there's many others where it really just a matter of taste.

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

#135

Post by scarface_74 » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 5:42 PM UTC

the_gipsy wrote: post #63

threeseed wrote: post #31

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.

What data can apps access without your explicit permission?

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

#136

Post by idle_zealot » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 5:43 PM UTC

apitman wrote: post #130

> 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 fro…

That ship appears to have sailed. The more realistic proposal would be the converse: a stripped down browser that acts only to retrieve and display web pages that are documents, not apps.

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

#137

Post by tanewishly » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 5:44 PM UTC

freehorse wrote: post #96

darknavi wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

I'd say that web apps became a thing because Google really wanted them to be. They first tried with their browser plugin. That worked, but adoption wasn't good enough. So they ditched Google Gears and started developing a browser with sufficient performance for web- native apps. They succeeded quite well.

So in my view, browsers became capable, but then plenty of "heavy" web apps appeared, which required more beef in the machine.

That's also the typical way it goes: current hardware being okayish but not great is one of the strongest drivers for better hardware. Whether it is gaming (PCs), camera (smartphones), the web bloating (both).

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

#138

Post by cosmic_cheese » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 5:45 PM UTC

jknoepfler wrote: post #121

rubymamis wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 R…

The old metaphor of shipping bananas by packing the entire jungle surrounding the ape that’s holding the banana does very well to illustrate the truly egregious level of inefficiency at play here, especially when one considers how there’s tens or hundreds of thousands of these jungles involved in any given product…

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

#139

Post by glitcher » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 5:46 PM UTC

jbombadil wrote: post #67

As a consumer, I understand the need of a native app for something that is performance intensive or that requires a level of OS access that the website doesn’t provide. 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 (!)…

This reminds me of aggressive technicians trying to convince me to install their bloatware on my computer in order to complete setting up internet connectivity 20+ years ago. One was completely baffled by my insistence that he was not going to be touching my computer, makes me laugh now.

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

#140

Post by furyofantares » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 5:48 PM UTC

I'm working on a little niche puzzle game in Love2D. Well, I'm done, I just need to ship it. I currently have web, iOS, and Windows builds. I strongly prefer playing the native version.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do about this. I think people will have a better experience with the native versions, but won't discover that if the web version exists. However there are also probably people who would play the web version who wouldn't install an app.

Probably most of the attention I can drive to it will come from other daily web puzzle games I run. I suppose if that weren't the case, I wouldn't bother with the web version (unless I get rejected by app stores - which looks somewhat likely at the moment.)