Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

danq.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 571 posts

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#431

Post by wwweston »

adamwk wrote: post #402
jonahx wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We take tech literacy for granted, because it's like a dozen levels down fundamental to our entire field. But the tech illiterati exist, and they love apps. They "love apps" because apple and android have spent billions to break their mental models and convince them that "you use apps to do things on your phone". Literally. That's the extent of most people's understanding. So, sure, they "want" apps in the same sen…

This doesn’t really make sense. Apps were pretty popular immediately after decades of web usage. There are many reasons to prefer an app. Even on desktop; if I’m using a service enough throughout the day, I want a native app, not a website.

It has now been longer since apps on smartphones were introduced than it was between the web’s birth and smartphones (to say nothing of popular uptake, it’d be generous to give the web a full decade there before the rise of the smartphone). Combine that with recency bias and the marketing serving incentives of platforms and vendors to push towards “native” and the point seems pretty strong.

There’s some minority of apps where work is offline resource bound or mostly offline regardless, those certainly have always made sense on device, other than that habit and mindset probably is the main driver of preference.

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#432

Post by VladVladikoff »

Where does the legality with this lie? I’ve read cases where someone was jailed just for changing the ID in a url parameter. If you are intercepting network requests and then replaying them (with modifications?) in you own custom code, I bet under some laws this is “hacking”. Personally I would be afraid to post publicly that I’ve done this, seems like it could be used as an admission of guilt in a trial.

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#434

Post by nektro »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #312

Nobody here is talking about the fact that a significant number of users want apps, too. I'm responsible for an internal tool at the company I work for, hosted as a website, that handles a bunch of miscellaneous tasks that other employees need. Think reimbursements, documentation and reporting, gathering and presenting business data. That sort of thing. When I took it over, it was desktop only ( a lot of formatted pa…

the benefit of apps is they don't break. websites update out from under you and the web expects browsers to always be evergreen

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#435

Post by Telaneo »

murderfs wrote: post #425
Telaneo wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if business A sells a widget to reseller B who sells it to reseller C who sells it to the customer, there's multiple layers of markup. How can the original manufacturer be expected to refund the purchase price? Simple. They operate within the law and provide the customer with a refund, or they get fined. From the consumer's point of view, this is irrelevant. Business can fix this B2B issue between themselves howeve…

> Refunding is one possible remediation, see section 32 (cancellation) and section 26 (The consumer's rights in the event of defects). That option cancels the purchase contract, meaning you as the consumer give the item back, while the seller gives you the money you paid for the item. Only if the manufacturer fails to fix it per section 31: "If the defect is not rectified and no redelivery takes place pursuant to sec…

Correct. They get one shot at correction, and if the fault isn't gone by then, refund it is (or the seller can just jump straight to a refund if they want to). You'd be surprised how often this happens.

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#436

Post by c0nsumer »

brazukadev wrote: post #427
c0nsumer wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This actually handles that, at least for my use case. Specifically, on first load of the page (in a browser, or the stripped-down browser that runs the app-like PWA install) a service worker gets installed, that caches the entire site/app/map locally, and runs it from there. Then every 24 hours, or on new page load, it checks the live site for content changes and pulls down the changes if they exist. If there's no ne…

That was an amazing reading. I just implemented something similar a couple days ago. And now I'm building an android app based on this PWA (no tool for that, claude fable can code a good custom webview wrapper).

I got most of this done in Opus (dunno version, started in early spring) but yeah. Having something to do the heavy lifting was damned helpful.

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#438

Post by swishman »

da_chicken wrote: post #413
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #312

Nobody here is talking about the fact that a significant number of users want apps, too. I'm responsible for an internal tool at the company I work for, hosted as a website, that handles a bunch of miscellaneous tasks that other employees need. Think reimbursements, documentation and reporting, gathering and presenting business data. That sort of thing. When I took it over, it was desktop only ( a lot of formatted pa…

End users don't care about if it's an app or not. What they care about: - Does it do what I need it to - Can I access it easily - Is it easy to navigate - Does it work or is it buggy - Is it slow - Does it abuse notifications - Is it prompting me to log in all the time - Are there too many ads - Can I use it on any device I have - Does it complain about updating constantly I don't think any of those actually has to d…

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading these comments. Apps are clearly better for end users.

HTML and css is SUPER slow. It doesn't feel native, it doesn't feel good to use.

You also get so many weird glitches with state refreshing, sessions being cleared, log in not persisting.

Has anyone here actually used a PWA? You can feel that it's slow and clunky. Apps feel SO much better with the native UI, pre-downloaded, much faster etc.

Re: Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

#440

Post by stevage »

jcmontx wrote: post #241

Something the author doesn't mention as a pro for the web is my favorite type of tech: browser extensions. I love web because I can basically customize pretty much everything to my needs. I have published a few of them in the last few years, and I have tens of them which I haven't published. I use them for tons of different things: * allowing only text tweets on X * blocking photos and videos on all Meta products * b…

Ah, blocking all videos on Facebook is such a good idea. Can you share your script?
Post reply on HN