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Do not download the app, use the website

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Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#181

Post by sltkr »

wonger_ wrote: post #67
rickcarlino wrote: post #25

I dream of developing mobile sites that can play audio with the screen off and use the same media controls as apps (think: music player apps while driving). A lot of the things that make mobile sites second class is the lack of screen-off functionality.

You should! The browser APIs are straightforward: navigator.mediaSession.metadata = new MediaMetadata({ title: song.name, album: song.category, artwork: [{src: song.imagePath, type: 'image/jpg'}] }) navigator.mediaSession.setActionHandler('play', player.play) navigator.mediaSession.setActionHandler('pause', player.pause) navigator.mediaSession.setActionHandler('nexttrack', player.nextTrack) navigator.mediaSession.set…

Does it work on iOS too?

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#182

Post by frollogaston »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #171
dbtc wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chase Mobile for iOS is 350MB; far from 500, but still baffling why an app would need to be that large just to show me some numbers. Capital One is 435MB... Garmin Connect is 518MB for some stupid reason, while Strava is half that and Gaia GPS (great app), is under 100.

Almost certainly has to do with how the app is built. Most thoughtfully built native SDK (UIKit, etc) apps clock in well under the 100MB mark, often under half or a quarter that. Bloat like that is usually due to unnecessarily convoluted tech stacks pulling in a list of dependencies that goes out to Mars and back, or for globally targeted apps sometimes it’s translations for everything in the app for hundreds of diff…

Yeah but the native SDK sucks and isn't cross-platform, I don't blame anyone for not using it

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#183

Post by charcircuit »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #119
charcircuit wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies still have to provide value for them to attract users. It's cynical to only look at the value the company gets and ignoring the value users and advertisers get.

I argue that this decade shows you do not have to provide value. You capture the market yester-decade and then you can hold the users hostage as you do any and everything to appeal to shareholders and advertisers. This is indeed a short term strategy, but tech companies right now are thinking very short term.

How do you hold users hostage without providing them value?

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#184

Post by scarface_74 »

bitpush wrote: post #27
VoidWarranty wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason I believe the web experience is inferior is because companies put more resources into apps at the expense of the web. Apps break often. They need a lot of support. Everything must be constantly updated. You never know when Samsung or Apple will push an update that breaks things because of some esoteric policy shift or setting change. But the web? If you do it right, maintenence is much easier. If things do…

> The reason I believe the web experience is inferior is because companies put more resources into apps at the expense of the web. The main reason is just a single company - Apple. They have been hell bent on nerfing Safari so that they can continue their rent seeking behavior on App Store. If Spotify has a functional mobile website, they cant take 30% cut from their app. The way Apple does is 2 fold. 1) deliberating…

Yes that’s why there are so many great PWAs on Android and companies don’t make apps for Android and instead tell their users to use the web app…

And Spotify hasn’t had in app purchasing of subscriptions on iOS for over a decade. Apple has never once said you would get malware by using Safari.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#185

Post by frollogaston »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #177
frollogaston wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Apple wanted to make PWAs look like apps, users wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Except that's not what Apple wants at all.

I don’t think that’d be possible without a considerably different web engine than currently exists. Even on desktop with Chrome which is the best case scenario currently, web apps are visibly different from their native counterparts due to differences in things like click handling, latency, etc.

Most apps nowadays are already websites inside a thin wrapper, and that part is just so it can go on the App Store and have certain OS integrations, not for the UI. Like yeah React Native implements a button with UIButton, but Safari also implements a button with native code.

Good example is Discord. Complex app, only really difference for native is something about push-to-talk.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#186

Post by charcircuit »

II2II wrote: post #167
charcircuit wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies still have to provide value for them to attract users. It's cynical to only look at the value the company gets and ignoring the value users and advertisers get.

Take Reddit, which is one of the few sites mentioned here that I use. At least initially, the value provided is getting rid of the constant prompts to load the site in the Reddit app. Even though I use old.reddit.com, which doesn't have those prompts, there are times when it redirects me to the new website automatically. Does it offer value beyond getting rid of those messages? Perhaps, but I doubt that it is the typ…

How about the value of being able to talk to people who share the same hobby you do. Or the value of being able to see a community made wiki about some topic you are trying to learn about. Even being able to see cat pictures is valuable to people.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#187

Post by cosmic_cheese »

frollogaston wrote: post #182
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost certainly has to do with how the app is built. Most thoughtfully built native SDK (UIKit, etc) apps clock in well under the 100MB mark, often under half or a quarter that. Bloat like that is usually due to unnecessarily convoluted tech stacks pulling in a list of dependencies that goes out to Mars and back, or for globally targeted apps sometimes it’s translations for everything in the app for hundreds of diff…

Yeah but the native SDK sucks and isn't cross-platform, I don't blame anyone for not using it

UIKit is fine, good even, SwiftUI isn’t fully baked yet, Android Framework definitely sucks, and Jetpack Compose is decent but needs work. Both platforms have at least one SDK that’s good to use, and personally I’d take them over fighting the extra layer of issues something like RN adds on top of the native issues that devs will encounter regardless of the SDK used.

Cross platform frameworks really aren’t the magic wand they’re sold as.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#188

Post by cosmic_cheese »

frollogaston wrote: post #185
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that’d be possible without a considerably different web engine than currently exists. Even on desktop with Chrome which is the best case scenario currently, web apps are visibly different from their native counterparts due to differences in things like click handling, latency, etc.

Most apps nowadays are already websites inside a thin wrapper, and that part is just so it can go on the App Store and have certain OS integrations, not for the UI. Like yeah React Native implements a button with UIButton, but Safari also implements a button with native code. Good example is Discord. Complex app, only really difference for native is something about push-to-talk.

Not quite, at least on iOS. React Native is the dominant non-native framework there. I run into web shells on occasion but they’re unusual relative to desktop.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#189

Post by Zak »

markbao wrote: post #7

Don’t agree, but to each their own. The native app experience for every app noted in the article is better and smoother than the mobile web version, in my opinion. Lots of people hate Electron apps, which suggests to me that my preference for native apps isn’t unique. Web apps can ask for your location or microphone the same way native apps can. Just reject it, there’s nothing that says you have to accept on either p…

People who know what Electron is and profess hatred for it are usually mostly annoyed by the fact that it bundles all of Chrome, giving the app an absurd memory and storage footprint relative to its functionality. People don't complain the same way when apps are made with Tauri.

Re: Do not download the app, use the website

#190

Post by frollogaston »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #187
frollogaston wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but the native SDK sucks and isn't cross-platform, I don't blame anyone for not using it

UIKit is fine, good even, SwiftUI isn’t fully baked yet, Android Framework definitely sucks, and Jetpack Compose is decent but needs work. Both platforms have at least one SDK that’s good to use, and personally I’d take them over fighting the extra layer of issues something like RN adds on top of the native issues that devs will encounter regardless of the SDK used. Cross platform frameworks really aren’t the magic w…

Cross-platform is very much not a magic wand, but it's still often easier than building the same thing in two different native SDKs, and I can see why people do it.

Disagree about UIKit, mainly cause of Autolayout, unless it's gotten reworked in the past 8 years. When I started using RN, I had zero web experience, and still it was way quicker to set up a basic UI than in the UIKit stuff I'd been doing for years. And for all that setup, Autolayout doesn't even seem to future-proof your stuff that well. An abandoned ObjC iPhone app I wrote in high school using C-style macros for layout worked perfectly fine on the newer screen sizes that broke most other apps.

I thought maybe I was stupid, but the other iPhone devs I worked with constantly had problems with Autolayout. Maybe a real expert iPhone dev won't, but it shouldn't take that.

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