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Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

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Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#4

Post by grzm »

symlinkk wrote: post #2

push notifications from web apps isn't even supported yet on iOS

Personally, I'm thankful for that. I can see how some might find them useful. I personally disable them whenever the browser presents me with the request dialog. I'm glad I'm presented with the option.

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#6

Post by lkrubner »

Native apps are helped by the weakness of HTTP/HTML. For some reason, the tech industry has been slow to admit what seems obvious -- that a technology designed in 1989 to let academics trade documents is a terrible solution for doing modern apps. At least for now, the tech industry has chosen a strategy of incremental improvement (of HTTP/HTML) rather than radical overhaul, but there does come a point when the pain is too much, and a radical overhaul begins to seem like an easier solution.

Consider React, and also Om, and Om Next. These strike me as proto-types for the technology that will eventually replace HTTP/HTML.

If you'd like to build a great GUI for an app that has to constantly interact with outside events/data, then you might expect to have these 4 elements:

1.) inbox

2.) outbox

3.) meta

4.) display

Both React and Om Next have moved somewhat in this direction. But both still struggle with the limitations imposed by HTTP/HTML. A particular limitation is the old notion of a "markup language", with its roots in SGML. Markup languages are great when academics exchange documents. But markup languages are terrible for GUIs for apps.

Also worth noting, of the 4 items I listed above, consider how much they map to what Joe Armstrong wrote about modules in Erlang, and consider how much thought and research, over the course of decades, has suggested that these 4 ideas, bound together, are important for building resilient systems.

At some point the tech industry is going to get rid of HTTP/HTML, and something like React or Om Next is going to become the dominant paradigm for building a GUI for TCP, that is a GUI for an app that interacts with events over the network.

Until that happens, native apps will continue to thrive, at least because they are built with tools that give sane options for the GUI.

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#7

Post by helthanatos »

Native apps will die to hybrid apps but probably not to full web apps. There are some functions for apps that are much better done natively than through support wrappers and such that overly complicate the whole scenario. Hybrid apps are great for providing a UI that can be drastically overhauled with relative ease. They provide ways to make web feel native. Any app that is installed should feel like a native app. Hybrid apps are the way forward for small developer teams but large app devs should stick to native for the power and performance.

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#8

Post by elsigh »

I'm a web developer, and excited about progressive web apps. But until we have access to sensors and video streaming that isn't subpar, and sweet/easy camera APIs - this idea is good but simply not great- and that's a big difference when it comes to making an amazing UX on your crappy little phone. At least today: * service workers only on chrome * the install prompt is totally not a native browser feature * mobile web browsers are straight up slower at rendering

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#9

Post by josephg »

As a web developer, I honestly hope the author of this post is wrong. Performance of modern web apps is simply awful compared to their native counterparts by any measure. They load slowly and consistently feel sluggish in comparison to proper native apps. Slack takes seconds to load and it'll happily sit on over a gig of ram while in use. (And remember, its a glorified IRC client.)

Web apps only have two benefits over native apps:

1. They're easier to build in a cross-platform way, because you just have to make the app once

2. Users don't need to install anything

I hope in the long run we solve both of those problems for native apps and move back to writing applications which don't depend on a DOM implementation to run. React-native is a great step toward solving (1). I hope that in time we can have modern (reactish), good looking cross-platform toolkit for native app development.

But the biggest hurdle is (2), which very few people are attacking. App stores have helped a lot, but we need to be able to run native apps without installing anything. It should be as easy as it is on the web. Unfortunately native app authors usually assume all their assets are bundled. Nobody even thinks about how long it takes from the point when a user decides to install an app to when they see the first content. On the web we count that time in milliseconds and on native apps we count minutes. There aren't any hard technical problems there - we obviously manage it on the web, so its easily possible. We need native apps to catch up if they are ever going to be able to compete as a platform.

Re: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

#10

Post by chetanahuja »

Reading that post feels like sincere but wishful thinking. Both major mobile platforms provide the developer with sandboxed access to a more or less complete unix machine. This means complete access to things like underlying network interfaces (via sockets), Full File API access to local storage (inside the sandbox), threads, memory management (via JVM/ObjC or at a lower level in Native C), Graphics hardware via OpenGL just to name a few.

Just because there's now the web standard has some half-hearted attempt at notifications doesn't change the fact that the HTML/javascript based machine available in web applications is a severely crippled platform for app development and always will be.

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