501–510 of 571 posts
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But take parents example. What is it you want the app version to do that a decent website can’t do?
Not the op, proper graphics. Web 3D will never compete with native APIs in developer tooling, and hardware capabilities. Now outside gaming, all CRUD apps could easily be mobile Web.
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But take parents example. What is it you want the app version to do that a decent website can’t do?
To me the major distinctions are near full functionality even if I'm offline and the app hasn't been used in a long time and offline-first design with all major assets being available for download ahead of time and/or transferable between devices without re-downloading
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Everyone can tell the difference immediately due to the lack of performance
You'd be surprised. Obsidian, slack, Spotify, figma etc don't usually get panned for lack of performance, and those aren't even very light weight. As wasm apps mature, it will only get harder to justify maintaining 5 different native apps instead of a single cross platform one
I'd switch over to the 16-bit VB4 form version as soon as available.
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> 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.
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Not sure what you are talking about (is this sarcasm?), but on iOS, Safari allows you to add any website as an item to your home screen. I am pretty sure Android has a similar feature.
Is that front and center in the UI? How many users know about this feature? Do they promote it as much as they promote other features they want to promote? Location and marketing matter. Otherwise we're in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the aliens put Earth's demolition notice on the bottom of a cupboard in a cellar on a planet light years away from Earth.
Most people like apps because they're often better to use, unless you have accessibility requirements (and even then an app that makes sure accessibility is good might still be better than a website that makes sure accessibility is good).
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> 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.
Since web apis have caught up and allowed the same functionality, the common perception hasnt shifted back as App Stores have perpetually tried to keep attention so that they keep getting their cut of sales. If everyone knew you could do everything in a wepb page that you can in an app, sales would stop flowing and that is a bad thing for Apple/Google.
Most 'native' apps are just electron wrappers around a webpage these days, so how do you know you 'want a native app', just because it has the convenience of being managed through the app store?
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> You can send notifications with PWAs with Web Push API + Service Worker, same as a regular page. While the app is awake, sure. I'd like notifications to work even if the OS backgrounded the app, and even without a network connection, like I'd expect a reminder to work. > https://github.com/GoogleChrome/developer.chrome.com//blob/m... Looks like this is what I need and it doesn't exist. So the short answer is "no".…
> While the app is awake, sure. That's not true. The browser's push service wakes the service worker on delivery, even if the PWA is fully closed. That's the entire point of Push API vs polling.
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> 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.
Imagine that from tomorrow, hackernews is an app. You can't do stuff like open 10 different tabs of it, put it in a tab group, expect it to restore where you left off after shutting down your device. It's interaction with other pages is also wrong. It would have to either open a webview or a separate browser app, both of which make navigations more complex. Extensions no longer work, you can't change stylesheets or use user scripts and so on.
This is why I don't like Reddit pushing an app and breaking/limiting the mobile website. It's just not how I want to use it at all.
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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.
The original reason apps were popular was because they provided access to device apis such as accelerometer and gps which websites didnt. Think the beer drinking app etc. Since web apis have caught up and allowed the same functionality, the common perception hasnt shifted back as App Stores have perpetually tried to keep attention so that they keep getting their cut of sales. If everyone knew you could do everything…
Desktop apps tend to be ElectronJS, because somehow Desktop failed. But because ElectronJS sucks doesn't mean that it's impossible to have good desktop apps. I have high hopes that Kotlin multiplatform and Compose multiplatform will make desktop apps cool again.
Then mobile apps are a completely different story: a good mobile app is a lot better than a webapp. At one end of the spectrum, I don't need an app to show a website (this should be visited from the browser). At the other end, I don't want a complicated webapp in my mobile browser, I want a mobile app.
Another thing that web people tend to completely forget is that a webapp is re-loaded every single time. A mobile app is downloaded once and fetches the data, and can sometimes mostly work offline.
I am very, very happy that CoMaps is a mobile app and not a webpage.
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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.
There are many reasons to prefer an app, most of which are ways OS makers have crippled web apps for reasons that TOTALLY HAVE NOTHING TO DO with the fact that they get a 30% cut if the user chooses the native app.
- I can download it once and then use it.
- I can see when it gets updated (versus a website that gets updated every time I load it). For security reasons it's better, I can even verify my app with other people online and make sure we run the same thing.
- End-to-end encryption doesn't make much sense in a webpage, because I fundamentally have to trust the server (which serves me the whole app I run every time). If you care about end-to-end encryption, you want an app.
- For open source apps, I can audit the code, possibly edit it, and use it. I cannot do that with a webpage.
- I exclusively use free apps, so 30% of zero is... zero.