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

Goodbye, Native Apps

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 231 posts

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#151

Post by thrashh »

nicoburns wrote: post #62
emodendroket wrote: post #54

As much as anything else the growth of hybrid apps is a symptom of a couple of things: 1) people now expect apps to run on a million different devices and nobody has the time or resources to develop four or five native apps with feature parity between them 2) progress on UI frameworks is pretty much stalled. Just looking at .NET, because I'm familiar with it and traditionally desktop software has been a big area of c…

Indeed, my prediction is that native apps will make a comeback when the UI toolkits catch up. Flutter is in this vein. And some of the Rust UI ecosystem looks promising (although very early stage).

Can they catch up? I feel the reason why web apps took off is because so much money has been spent on the underlying technologies (HTML, CSS, etc.) that makes them extremely powerful.

I’ve used a lot of UI frameworks and getting to do anything complex is always much harder than doing the equivalent in HTML/CSS/etc.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#152

Post by cookiengineer »

emodendroket wrote: post #54

As much as anything else the growth of hybrid apps is a symptom of a couple of things: 1) people now expect apps to run on a million different devices and nobody has the time or resources to develop four or five native apps with feature parity between them 2) progress on UI frameworks is pretty much stalled. Just looking at .NET, because I'm familiar with it and traditionally desktop software has been a big area of c…

If you take a look at the GTK+ ecosystem...it's kinda broken, too.

Simple use case: Make a sidebar fade in and fade out, while changing the dimensions of the right box. Pretty close to impossible to implement in a clean manner, even within glade.

And then, try to support a mobile device in a responsive way with libhandy.

Now you throw the towel and just get on with 20 lines of CSS and literally two HTML elements.

CSS should not be underrated when it comes to layouting. It is super flexible, and UI frameworks always will lack behind due to their architectural patterns.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#153

Post by leadingthenet »

emodendroket wrote: post #56
nbrempel wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, JetBrains runs on the JVM which arguably has the same problems.

Yeah but if it didn't, would I be able to run it with no differences on Linux, OS X, and Windows?

But maybe you shouldn’t be able to run it with no differences on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#155

Post by emodendroket »

leadingthenet wrote: post #153
emodendroket wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but if it didn't, would I be able to run it with no differences on Linux, OS X, and Windows?

But maybe you shouldn’t be able to run it with no differences on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Well... why not, exactly? I have work to do on all three, as do many others, and it seems like a win both for me and Jetbrains for that not to matter.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#156

Post by pseudalopex »

emodendroket wrote: post #144
wtallis wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, most web apps don't offer their full feature set without requiring you to go through a sign-up process that is at least as onerous as downloading and unzipping a Mac app bundle. Even when a web app outsources authentication to something like Facebook, there are still at least as many clicks.

It's not about clicks so much as sandboxing.

Mac apps are sandboxed.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#157

Post by someUserTonight »

candiddevmike wrote: post #58
Razengan wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's totally possible to build a PWA that behaves like a native app but Apple actively tries to destroy them. Ugh, no. No it's not. At least not yet. Accessibility features alone are almost always woefully crap in web-apps, compared to what native apps have access to, at least on macOS (and SwiftUI is amazing in how it lowers the barriers in implementing accessibility in your app from the get-go.) Shit like Electro…

You really think accessibility for native apps will always be better than a web app that follows a11y?

I think so. If we're talking about "out of the box" or what you'd find on average. As an Android dev for a few years now I think we get a lot out of the box and I get that web devs also use libraries or frameworks that have similar benefits. At that point it's comparing framework A's a11y vs framework B's a11y vs Android a11y.

Not an Android fanboy but I'm going to assume that the bigger (widely used/constantly iterating) "platform" (for a lack of a better term) has better a11y. And if there is a web framework that provides this (react?) do the majority of websites use it ? like they do native api's for native apps

(and this isn't even talking about the api's accessible to native vs web app)

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#158

Post by leadingthenet »

emodendroket wrote: post #155
leadingthenet wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But maybe you shouldn’t be able to run it with no differences on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Well... why not, exactly? I have work to do on all three, as do many others, and it seems like a win both for me and Jetbrains for that not to matter.

Because the platform conventions are different.

Think of it this way: if you have a system full of apps that conform to platform conventions, then you only need to learn the platform conventions and you’re suddenly more or less an expert in every new app you encounter.

If you need to learn every. single. apps. stupid rules and UI all over again, then sure, you can transfer skills in that one app over to another platform, but that’s it. You want an email app? Good luck learning every keyboard shortcut and ridiculous UI decision all over again.

Let’s just say this paradigm shift has not been driven by people with OCD (or good taste, for that matter).

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#159

Post by gabereiser »

baxtr wrote: post #141
reader_mode wrote: post #96

How is this getting uovoted ? Is nobody reading the article ? A few paragraphs in and I can see the author has terrible writing skills and doesn't know what he's talking about >In fact, writing software with C/C++ was hard because developers had to work with different operating system API(Application Programming Interface). Seriously ? Writing C++ apps is hard because you had to use different APIs ? That's the least…

"Goodbye, Medium articles". That's the article I want to see trending...

I’ll upvote that

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#160

Post by intellix »

burtonator wrote: post #32

Here's the thing. Apple, Google, etc are trying to lock developers into specific platforms. This is why Apple has been so hostile towards PWAs. It's totally possible to build a PWA that behaves like a native app but Apple actively tries to destroy them. There will never be a viable hybrid app platform.

This is why Apple should be forced to allow multiple web browser rendering engines on iPhone. Cause they're so damn anti-competitive and being forced to develop for Safari makes developing web apps horrible
Post reply on HN