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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)

#141

Post by apitman »

idle_zealot wrote: post #136
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.

I actually agree. I think that's the best way to achieve what I'm talking about. Compatibility with current browsers must be maintained for many years. But we split the web into two much simpler platforms. One for documents that includes HTML and a tiny subset of CSS, and the other that's basically WebAssembly + WebGPU and other APIs for networking etc.

90% of the web can be documents. If you're actually building an app use the app platform. People using legacy browsers don't need to know the difference, but over time they'll want to switch because of the benefits.

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

#142

Post by Dig1t »

fidotron wrote: post #99
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.

Good lord this is so true.

I somehow got my personal email associated with the classroom Google Play account from back when I was at university, so every app uploaded by all students for each new semester I get emails for still. Every few months I get a batch of 30+ emails telling my that my app is not in compliance and it's at risk of being removed.

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

#143

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

watermelon0 wrote: post #86
superkuh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. And it gets worse. 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 brows…

Mobile operating systems have really good security models, and native apps are even more isolated compared to the websites. I really wish that we would have similar isolation options on desktop/laptop OSes.

It would be horrible if we lost desktop computing to a scenario where we need permission from one of the tech giants before running code.

Those who sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither.

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

#144

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#145

Post by FredPret »

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 web is just a beautiful publishing platform.

- no permission needed (mostly)

- built-in discoverability

- you get to figure out whatever payment processing you want

- works on every device

- update code in seconds

- no copy protection needed

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

#146

Post by CyberDildonics »

alexpotato wrote: post #124
CyberDildonics wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is about apps being easily simple enough to make into a web page.

No one is saying a table with javascript can't be done in a web page, people have been doing it for 30 years.

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

#147

Post by cosmic_cheese »

DrBenCarson wrote: post #105
anderber wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is Android dramatically better for PWAs?

It’s a bit better but I’ve still not found any PWAs that I’d want to use over a native Android app, if only because they’re near-universally rough, quirky, and generally unpleasant in ways that modern Jetpack Compose apps aren’t.

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

#148

Post by jcotton42 »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #64
hombre_fatal wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

ios and mac got url schemes. Sure not all developers implement it correctly. But not all sites implement a good url structure either (keeping state etc in url for sharing)

Android and Windows do too.

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

#149

Post by mwest217 »

fidotron wrote: post #95

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 wal…

Strongly disagree that Facebook games were the peak. To me that was classic flash games like nitrome.com

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

#150

Post by maratc »

mvladic wrote: post #43
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…

Obsidian is an Electron app (I don't know if it belongs to the Block editor category). It loads just as fast as your app. I tried copying and pasting the text file War and Peace (66035 lines) from Notepad into both apps and, interestingly, Obsidian is slightly faster. Also, scrolling through this large chunk of text is slightly faster on Obsidian, too. Obsidian memory consumption (4 processes) is 172 MB and Daino Not…

> pasting the text file War and Peace (66035 lines)

Funny, but how about a log of one Jenkins run weighting at - checking... - 630 MB? Or two of them so someone can compare them?

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