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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)

#181

Post by xeromal »

tshaddox wrote: post #172
thot_experiment wrote: post #159

I man don't get me wrong, I love the idea of PWAs but this dude is out to lunch. It's so painful making anything complex work cross browser/cross platform. On iOS iirc they don't even support adding PWAs to the homescreen? You definitely can't Bluetooth outside of Chrome (probably only on Android and Windows too because nothing fun is ever allowed on Macs). Multiplayer games you kind of need UDP. You cannot UDP in th…

> On iOS iirc they don't even support adding PWAs to the homescreen? You've been able to add websites to the home screen going back at least to the iPhone 5 in 2012. Is it the "PWA" part you're questioning? iOS definitely does have PWA support, although with a few notable limitations that may be deal-breakers for certain apps. Oh, and apparently Apple recently disabled PWAs entirely in the EU.

One big missing piece is the inability for me to put an "Install" button like I can on android. I don't want to have to teach old people how to add to desktop

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

#182

Post by Anechoic »

tshaddox wrote: post #172
thot_experiment wrote: post #159

I man don't get me wrong, I love the idea of PWAs but this dude is out to lunch. It's so painful making anything complex work cross browser/cross platform. On iOS iirc they don't even support adding PWAs to the homescreen? You definitely can't Bluetooth outside of Chrome (probably only on Android and Windows too because nothing fun is ever allowed on Macs). Multiplayer games you kind of need UDP. You cannot UDP in th…

> On iOS iirc they don't even support adding PWAs to the homescreen? You've been able to add websites to the home screen going back at least to the iPhone 5 in 2012. Is it the "PWA" part you're questioning? iOS definitely does have PWA support, although with a few notable limitations that may be deal-breakers for certain apps. Oh, and apparently Apple recently disabled PWAs entirely in the EU.

Oh, and apparently Apple recently disabled PWAs entirely in the EU

Apple reversed that decision back in March [0] (expand "Why don't users in the EU have access to Home Screen web apps?")

[0] https://developer.apple.com/support/dma-and-apps-in-the-eu

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

#183

Post by la_fayette »

There are definitely apps, which could be websites, e.g., using the coinmarkecap app doesn't make any sense in comparison to the website.

But there are many things which cannot be done sufficiently on the web, e.g., augmented reality, tracking gps in the background, accessing a users calendar or phonebook, Bluetooth, scheduled notifications, etc...

In general there is something called app fatigue. Convincing somebody to install an app is difficult these days, even if it's free... Let's see what the future brings for app development.

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

#184

Post by rpdillon »

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…

Apps also:

Require devs pay a tithe to the app store owner

Are less able to be customized, reverse-engineered, and controlled by the user

Are subject to arbitrary, vague, constantly shifting, opaque app store approval rules

Require constant updates just to continue existing, since the platforms they target don't care for backwards compatibility, and are constantly releasing updates

Are hostile to open source projects that have limited resources, as those represent a drain on the system, since they generate no revenue

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

#185

Post by rpdillon »

Ntrails wrote: post #41
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.

I dislike apps and avoid installing them in general terms. They're bloated and frankly I have better things to store on my phone (mostly music, but also photos, conversation histories etc). I do not need an "app" for submitting a form. Looking at a website. etc etc My favourite thing about using a website? It can't send me attention grabbing notifications. It can't harass me for perms. I'm 100% an outlier. My friends…

I'm right there with you. There are probably dozens of us!

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

#186

Post by Animats »

> Thanks to HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly, browser games are catching up to native ones in ways we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. Meta’s Oculus browser already delivers web games that rival native apps in performance. And once WebGPU becomes standard, the differences will be practically invisible.

If only. Have you tried Google Earth on Firefox lately? You can't even zoom in and out any more without waiting many seconds. It's CPU bound, not I/O or graphics bound. Anyone know what went wrong in there? Is it a deliberate attempt by Google to force people to Chrome?

As for games, the browser environment is still rather limited. WebGPU is (mostly) single thread. (You can share memory between processes, which is something else.) It's a subset of Vulkan - one command queue, and no bindless mode. Google proposes to fix that around December 2026.

On the other hand, there is absolutely no reason that Uber or Waymo needs to have an "app".

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

#187

Post by thot_experiment »

voxic11 wrote: post #179
thot_experiment wrote: post #159

I man don't get me wrong, I love the idea of PWAs but this dude is out to lunch. It's so painful making anything complex work cross browser/cross platform. On iOS iirc they don't even support adding PWAs to the homescreen? You definitely can't Bluetooth outside of Chrome (probably only on Android and Windows too because nothing fun is ever allowed on Macs). Multiplayer games you kind of need UDP. You cannot UDP in th…

WebTransport is now supported in most common browsers (just missing safari support) and provides a nice API for sending/receiving messages via UDP. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebTranspor...

Thanks for pointing this out! I wasn't aware this had more or less landed. (though I think my broader point about cross platform support unfortunately still stands, I personally don't care about supporting iOS on my side projects and I'm excited to mess with this)

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

#188

Post by pjmlp »

Animats wrote: post #186

> Thanks to HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly, browser games are catching up to native ones in ways we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. Meta’s Oculus browser already delivers web games that rival native apps in performance. And once WebGPU becomes standard, the differences will be practically invisible. If only. Have you tried Google Earth on Firefox lately? You can't even zoom in and out any more without wai…

Also, after a decade, browser vendors still don't provide any usable 3D developer tooling better than SpectorJS.

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

#189

Post by debugnik »

Animats wrote: post #186

> Thanks to HTML5, WebGL, and WebAssembly, browser games are catching up to native ones in ways we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. Meta’s Oculus browser already delivers web games that rival native apps in performance. And once WebGPU becomes standard, the differences will be practically invisible. If only. Have you tried Google Earth on Firefox lately? You can't even zoom in and out any more without wai…

> Is it a deliberate attempt by Google to force people to Chrome?

For the last several months, the YouTube player takes me several seconds to load on Firefox and freezes on me for a couple of seconds every other time I press play/pause...

And changing the user agent fixed it! So I say yes. But I found the extensions to do so quite clunky so I gave up.

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

#190

Post by pjmlp »

thot_experiment wrote: post #159

I man don't get me wrong, I love the idea of PWAs but this dude is out to lunch. It's so painful making anything complex work cross browser/cross platform. On iOS iirc they don't even support adding PWAs to the homescreen? You definitely can't Bluetooth outside of Chrome (probably only on Android and Windows too because nothing fun is ever allowed on Macs). Multiplayer games you kind of need UDP. You cannot UDP in th…

Most of the time a PWA isn't needed at all, a mobile Web friendly website suffices.
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