Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#251

Post by emsy » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 3:25 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #194

mrkrabo wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copying files... how? Emulating a FAT32 disk? That sucks. exFAT? Patents. MTP? Sucks. So how?

What's wrong with emulating a FAT32 disk? I mean, the expected workflow is: I hook up the device to the computer, it shows up as a storage medium in my system. I can move files between the device and my computer as if it was an external disk or USB drive. Anything on top of that is designed to be annoying.

FAT32 is a terribly outdated filesystem and should just not be used today, period. The filesize and name restrictions are awful. Mrkrabo does have a point.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#252

Post by euyyn » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 3:25 PM UTC

jpttsn wrote: post #41

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently according to the Jobs biography, Steve Really did oppose native apps https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-...

Well, Steve said "nobody wants video on an iPod" when it wasn't ready yet. I'm not convinced that link shows me his true emotions.

You're getting downvoted, but public statements by a businessman when a lot of money is on the line are always to be taken with a grain of salt.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#253

Post by drdaeman » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 3:26 PM UTC

borland wrote: post #112

Dude2018 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flow-oriented markup is meant for documents not GUI.

Very much agree with this. Having developed many websites and many apps, HTML and CSS are really quite terrible when compared to something like iOS' auto-layout system, or even something like a DockPanel in Xaml (WPF on windows) However, you wouldn't want to layout a document in Xaml or auto-layout either. Different strengths for different original purposes. Personally I feel like a non-trivial part of why "web apps"…

I think it's also about the tooling.

With most "native" platforms you can have a WYSIWYG UI editing (because those markup languages were designed with that in mind). You visually define the layout (with mouse/trackpad), drop components there, and it's all nice and easy to use. Surely, you can code your UI as well, but to best of my knowledge no one in their sane mind does this, unless they have some very good reasons.

With web apps (progressive or not), the usual approach is to code stuff by hand, and see the results in the synchronized preview pane (or nearby browser window), patching the code until it all fits. Even if there's some tool/IDE somewhere that would let me bootstrap a React/React Native/Elm/whatever app with a mouse - by dropping a button on a pane and connecting an event listener with another mouse click (like I had it in Delphi, 15 years ago), I think it would be an exception, not a rule.

Or maybe I'm just unaware about how things are really done and have false beliefs, heh.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#254

Post by _pdp_ » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 3:27 PM UTC

archagon wrote: post #134

interpol_p wrote: post #72

I hate using web apps. On desktop, mobile, wherever. The author's list of things they want supported by Mobile Safari is just aggravating: > Here are a list of things you still can’t do with mobile safari due to Apple’s refusal to support them: > > Create an app loading screen > Use push notifications > Add offline support > Create an initial app UI to load instantly > Prompt installation to the home screen through b…

Agreed -- squeezing these native app elements into the document-based paradigm of the web is a horrid, Frankenstein's monster of an idea. It's like doing app development in Excel. If native web apps are to be more of a universal thing, I believe there ought to be a blank-canvas "meta-browser" layer that sits above the browser and that all web apps (including today's browsers) are built on top of. Basically a lightwei…

Literally all businesses are run on top of Excel, which, if you like, is sort of a generic app development environment.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#255

Post by kristiandupont » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 3:29 PM UTC

interpol_p wrote: post #225

dccoolgai wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I, too, pine for the days of "hyperlinks, text and images"-only web. So I turn off Javascript. You can too, if that's how you want to consume the web. That's the beauty of it - it allows for that by design. What I don't like is the position you are taking that "because I only want to consume the web that way, the Web itself should be hamstrung to my limited view of how it should work." There is no good reas…

That's true. I have started getting a militant attitude towards web apps and I really shouldn't think like that. I use web apps every day (JIRA, CircleCI, Slack, Google Docs). And reflecting on it, Google Docs has always been pretty damn good. But I get irked every single time I try to do something like paste an image, or drag-and-drop, or lookup in the system dictionary and it just fails or works weirdly. I let thos…

I had an idea for a tiny app a while ago. It didn't have business potential and was certainly not something I would bother putting in the App Store (let alone trying to figure out how to make the equivalent in Java and submit to Play Store).

I could easily have made it in HTML and JS except it required access to the camera which Mobile Safari doesn't (well didn't, I think maybe it has changed now) allow. So I ended up doing nothing.

Now, that's obviously just an anecdote and the world is at worst one useless app down but I think it makes for a good example as to why arguing against these improvements is silly: it's not in order to make websites more app-like, it's to allow things that would otherwise not exist. Yes, we should all write everything natively if we could, but sometimes that will just mean that things won't be developed at all.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#256

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 3:30 PM UTC

matthewmacleod wrote: post #160

criley2 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely disagree, to be frank. Why do I need a native binary, tens of thousands of lines of code, an app with a massive permissions access to my device... To read a news article? To book a flight? To comment on an internet post? Adding a few more "app features" to light web pages sounds a whole lot more attractive than banishing all useful functionality into the den of apps, where only larger teams and more expe…

Why do I need a native binary, tens of thousands of lines of code, an app with a massive permissions access to my device... You don't – but why do you need loading screens, push notifications, or any of that other stuff either? The web is great in concept for document-oriented information and some application uses. Mobile applications are greater for richer user interfaces and more device integration. They both have…

Wouldn't you at least consider this a useful use case: Purchase a flight online on a website, but then get a push notification if there is a flight change? Why should we force a user to download an app to support that use case.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#257

Post by kitsunesoba » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 3:31 PM UTC

dccoolgai wrote: post #192

falcolas wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> iOS app written by someone like OP That's a business choice that they made, and will suffer for. If a developer and business choose to half-ass the native iOS application, there's no reason to believe it would behave any better on iOS when written as a webapp. > the tools they need to write the best product they can The best product that can be made will never be made with cross-platform tooling. It will always be…

"The best product that can be made will never be made with cross-platform tooling." You're making a circular argument to the original point. If you pointlessly cripple the best "cross-platform toolset" (the web) then of course the products made with it won't be as good. Native mobile apps belong in the same category as desktop apps - they are good when you need close-to-the-metal graphics but there's no reason you sh…

Even if web browsers were on the same page across all platforms and did everything front end dev's dreamed of, web apps are still not going to be as good as native for the fact that they do nothing to leverage what makes any particular platform good, and worse, will be developed around the least capable platform's feature set. In a world where web apps dominate and are the overwhelming majority, why should OS vendors even bother with furthering innovation on the OS level? Nothing would be taking advantage of it. They'd do just as well to boot straight into a generic grey browser environment and call it a day!

As for the web being the de facto solution for light tasks, I'm not sure I agree there either, at least with the web's present resource consumption problems. There's no reason, for instance, for a word processor that barely matches modern WordPad or Word 95 in terms of features to be as heavy as it is (Google Docs).

If web apps were being approached from the angle of resource consciousness and taking advantage of platform strengths, I might have a different opinion, but that's not what anybody developing web apps wants.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#258

Post by ramses0 » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 3:31 PM UTC

interpol_p wrote: post #91

christiangenco wrote: post #65

I think a lot of commenters here are missing the point and getting distracted by push notifications (who wants a website spamming them with notifications?) and loading screens (hardly a feature). Apple supporting PWA (Progressive Web Apps) is hugely important because it enables a future where web apps can natively support browser, Mac/Windows/Linux desktop, and mobile iPhone/Android/Windows native mobile with a singl…

But as an iOS user I expect you to use the technology stack provided by my preferred operating system. I don't want to use your app if you're targeting a lowest-common-denominator feature set. When I change my preferred text size through accessibility settings, good native apps respond correctly. If I need voice over support, the operating system knows how to read the view hierarchy to me in a logical way. When drag-…

You can't get pixel-perfect (including android) between all devices, but to the extent that a manufacturer enables a "better" experience, it gets much closer and more consistent behaviour compared to native apps:

https://webkit.org/blog/3709/using-the-system-font-in-web-co...

...and even if you get pixel-perfect between android and ios, you sacrifice "cultural-correctness" (ie: floating buttons v. top bar v. bottom bar, etc.).

Writing two pixel+cultural perfect apps on two platforms, keeping them in sync, making sure they're not buggy, attempting to share code, attempting to keep them both secure is incredibly expensive. If you don't believe me then do it yourself.

Making a PWA which gets 90% of the way there, and integrates as well as possible with the system (ie: fonts, location, notifications, accelerometer, etc.) is generally _less_ expensive than doing a single native app well, and has the chance to get you 90% of the way there on desktop and your "alternate" mobile platform.

PWA can be incredibly powerful (along w/ manifest.json-style support as android has), and I'm waiting for the day apple catches up to android on this one.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#259

Post by archagon » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 3:32 PM UTC

_pdp_ wrote: post #254

archagon wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed -- squeezing these native app elements into the document-based paradigm of the web is a horrid, Frankenstein's monster of an idea. It's like doing app development in Excel. If native web apps are to be more of a universal thing, I believe there ought to be a blank-canvas "meta-browser" layer that sits above the browser and that all web apps (including today's browsers) are built on top of. Basically a lightwei…

Literally all businesses are run on top of Excel, which, if you like, is sort of a generic app development environment.

I know, that's why I brought it up! Imagine if the user-facing app ecosystem of the future had to be built on top of that platform.

Re: Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web

#260

Post by saurik » Thu, Jul 27, 2017, 3:32 PM UTC

FussyZeus wrote: post #21

pluma wrote: post #4

I think push notifications and offline support are the real killer features that Apple currently doesn't support. It's kind of funny as a web developer because for the longest time Apple seemed to be the one pushing the mobile web forward but now that web apps are reaching for feature parity with native, Apple's initial momentum seems to be ancient history. It seems Apple still thinks of the mobile web as a content d…

I've never met a single end user who wants desktop notifications for web "apps," including myself. In fact I wish I could turn it off globally and more easily. I'm sure there are a number of legitimate uses but as of now, every craptastic "news" website I visit now wants to pester the hell out of me with notifications when they post new clickbait.

OK: today you have met one. I have notifications turned on in desktop Safari for Facebook, Twitter, Slack, a handful of news sites that I like to keep up on, and probably some other stuff I am not remembering right now; and no: the idea of installing a native application for any of these services sickens me for numerous reasons (everything from concrete reasons of security and convenience to philosophical objections related to wanting to maintain an open, searchable, and hyperlinkable web).