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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)

#211

Post by ipaddr »

adastra22 wrote: post #194
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…

> On the other hand, there is absolutely no reason that Uber or Waymo needs to have an "app". Here’s one: I don’t give websites my location or the ability to interrupt me with notifications. Ever. I’ve blocked the browser from doing this entirely. I have Uber and Lyft apps installed and granted those permissions though.

You could give only them location access then they wouldn't be able to see what apps are installed, contacts and family photos or listen on the mic.

You are afraid of a browser so you give system access?

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

#212

Post by 00deadbeef »

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…

> My favourite thing about using a website? It can't send me attention grabbing notifications. It can't harass me for perms.

But it works the same as for apps. You get prompted once on iOS at least. You either opt in for notifications or you don’t. There’s no difference.

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

#213

Post by ipaddr »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #164
FredPret wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Developing apps on it still seems really, really primitive. HTML alone is not sufficient for a decent looking UI. Tailwind directives gunk it up rapidly. Component frameworks help some but still don’t seem quite as nice as something like SwiftUI. Server side functionality still requires a lot of manual serialization/deserialization (unless you use the newer crop of frameworks that have figured out this is pure noise)…

"Tailwind directives gunk it up rapidly"

CSS classes are all of the rage these days.

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

#214

Post by leptons »

kebokyo wrote: post #171
mvladic wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Obsidian is the only Electron app I don’t despise. VSCode is close to counting… but it absolutely sucks on RAM usage, so I try to avoid it when I can.

RAM is cheap, my time is not. VSCode is the best game in town (for me), and my 32GB computer has no problem with its RAM requirements. Even 8GB would be enough for VSCode depending on what else your toolchain requires.

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

#215

Post by jkestner »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #129
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 nat…

Let’s normalize offline web apps, then. Your examples at the end go back to needing technical chops, and in the end, everything gets bitrot.

The biggest problem is with apps that show you content. Web sites give the user more control over what content to save, better exposure to scrapers and APIs, standard navigation to every other web site.

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

#216

Post by al_borland »

This was the original plan for the iPhone. The web just needed to catch up. But now that everything is app based, it's hard for companies to want to give up space on a user's home screen. Web apps can be added to the home screen, but it's not the default state, like an app is.

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

#217

Post by dickersnoodle »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #9
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. 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 apps absolutely do support deep links and URLs. Custom URL schemes are the older of the two and let iOS launch the app when someone taps on a URL that begins with its protocol (e.g. "bugmunch://orders?id=xxxxxxx"); the newer is Universal Links, which lets you set your web site up to launch your app from the web page if it's installed on your device.

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

#218

Post by marxisttemp »

nostromo wrote: post #197
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…

Yes, Google has adopted lots of dark patterns. I use YouTube via browser (Safari or Brave) on mobile and it's clear they don't care about the mobile web experience at all - to the point it seems like they are deliberately trying to force you to use the app. I assume it's because they know the browsers support adblocking and limitations on tracking and notifications.

If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, I highly recommend the Vinegar extension which replaces the awful custom player with a standard HTML5 element

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

#220

Post by jay_kyburz »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #59
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, "there's nothing wrong with calling a PWA an 'app' in most contexts, unless the person listening to you is likely to try to search for the PWA in an app store".

Ask any random person where they would go to install an app and you'll stop belittling this problem.

I don't know why you wouldn't just call them "web apps". Why the P and why the acronym.
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