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)

#221

Post by cosmic_cheese » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 9:18 PM UTC

jkestner wrote: post #215

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Offline web apps are better but still not great because unless their dev has gone out of their way to wrap it in Electron, they don’t come in nice self-contained units like native apps do… for instance, if you’re upgrading your computer and want to copy over a previously installed but now defunct offline PWA, where do you go looking? The wrapper binary built by your browser doesn’t actually contain it, all the inner workings are squirreled away in some obscure directory with an inscrutable name.

Websites can give more control but that’s hardly a rule these days and depends on how the site/webapp in question was built. Something built with a canvas-based UI (as is sometimes necessary for displaying high volumes of information without performance degradation) for example isn’t going to give the user any better control than a native app would, and in some cases less.

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

#222

Post by sgustard » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 9:27 PM UTC

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.

Uber is almost the canonical example of something that should be an app! I need to do a frequent task, I punch up the app, I'm always logged in with my location pinpointed, I get a little live-updating widget on my phone with my ride location, plus notifications and Apple Pay and so on. When my ride's over I'm done with the app. Much more useful than say the "Hilton Honors" or "Ann Arbor News" apps which are literally website wrappers that I use once a year.

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

#223

Post by hnthrowaway2376 » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 9:27 PM UTC

leptons wrote: post #214

kebokyo wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> RAM is cheap

RAM is cheap for you.

It's always silly when people bring up their top-of-the-line computer into discussions about performance. Software shouldn't be just for the top 1%.

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

#224

Post by autoexec » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 9:28 PM UTC

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #151

ndileas wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I actually think of them as more than just an aesthetic preference. It is fundamentally about proof of work. Something that will become more and more important as we move into a post AI world. Every single piece of art, music, game or any other creative piece, has three things to it. One, the actual artifact itself of the music, the art and the game. Second is who is making it. And the third is how much have they put…

What web game is as good as Stardew Valley and deserves to be just as remembered? Most web games are crap.

That's just an argument about quality though. In the end it's quality that matters more than the amount of effort expended (which isn't something you can easily quantify or confirm). Technology promises to make things easier allowing for quality that wouldn't have been practical otherwise.

Even when the quality is identical there are times when I can appreciate the effort that went into something just because the creator choose to make something in the most inefficient and painful way possible. That's kind of fun in its own way, but it's the exception, not the norm.

As games, music, and other forms of art get easier to produce and distribute thanks to technology we'll have more to choose from. Having choice will always mean you have a lot of sifting through garbage to find things you like, but technology can make that easier too. I'd rather have an overabundance of options than be forced to select from only a few options because creation/distribution is reserved for a select few due to cost/difficultly

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

#225

Post by acheron » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 9:28 PM UTC

leptons wrote: post #205

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…

Apple is currently being sued by the DOJ for a variety of abusive business practices, including forcing all web browser apps on iOS to use the Safari browser engine, which limits the usefuleness of all web browsers on iOS, so that developers are forced to develop an app which Apple can then take a 30% cut of all revenue generated by the app. It's a pure money-grab by Apple, and they deserve this legal action against…

Is the only alternative still Google? Yeah I’m good with Apple, thanks.

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

#226

Post by aeroghi » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 9:28 PM UTC

ukoki wrote: post #103

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 (!)…

I don't think it has anything to do with performance. Apps make it far easier to advertise to users. You can send the users a notification even when they aren't using the app It's much harder or impossible for users to block in-app advertising It's easier to track users via apps, and your tracking data will be richer, more accurate and therefore more valuable. Until this changes, we'll get stupid apps that should hav…

Also, the majority of users are going to search Google for the website they want, rather than enter a url directly. An app avoids exposing the user to competitor's ads.

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

#227

Post by boohoo123 » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 9:30 PM UTC

there's even a worse option that his article doesnt include. and thats apps that have limited functionality compared to the web app. My bank is one of them. Heres your account and here's your most recent bank statement. You want to see more bank statements or add/remove a auto bill or change your password, you need to go to the website for that. What the f** why do you even have an app?

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

#228

Post by debugnik » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 9:30 PM UTC

Devasta wrote: post #155

Referring to everything as "web" when they mean JavaScript has been such a feat of marketing. I'd rather not have stuff I pay for be websites, thanks. I have games from 2005 I can still play today. The flash games from back then on the other hand are gone forever.

Plenty of flash games got archived in time as .swf files! And many can still be played with either Ruffle or the last build of the standalone Flash Player Projector (which is still available on Internet Archive).

Games nowadays however have so many online-only features and content that it's getting much harder to keep them working no matter the platform.

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

#229

Post by acheron » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 9:37 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? No. Apps are guaranteed to be sandboxed and can’t access anything you don’t let them.

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

#230

Post by TeamDman » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 9:38 PM UTC

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #36

rubymamis wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any text editor that struggles to load a large text file on a modern computer is, simply put, inefficient. If 20 years ago they managed to write programs that could handle such cases and today many (web) apps fail at this task means we're going backward. My point is that it's much harder to write efficient code in the web ecosystem because you're bound to specific abstractions from the browser. Once deviating from sa…

> 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.

I've recently been summarizing entire directories into a single chunk of text for use with Gemini, the other day I overshot and ended up pasting 28 million characters into vscode. It handled it pretty well.