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I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

debuggerdotbreak.judahgabriel.com

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Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#321

Post by WA »

saagarjha wrote: post #206
WA wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forcing you to use native controls. This is wrong. Cordova has been around for years. Furthermore, it’s detached from reality. I released an app made with Ionic. It’s an app for average joe, not for devs or designers. Out of 20,000 downloads, I received exactly 0 complaints about performance or UI. Most users don’t care and don’t notice anyways. And it’s pretty much the only way how I can maintain an app for both p…

> I released an app made with Ionic. It’s an app for average joe, not for devs or designers. Out of 20,000 downloads, I received exactly 0 complaints about performance or UI. Most users don’t care and don’t notice anyways. Personal anecdote: I wrote an app to replace one that was written using Ionic because the experience was so poor. None of the complaints for that app were about the UI, because I assume most users,…

Average rating on iOS is 4.4 for my Ionic App.

Average rating on Android is 4.1

Especially the iOS app is almost indistinguishable from a native iOS app. Ionic is very well designed to mimic native UI controls.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter if your native UI lot runs some sliding animation in 60fps or if the very same animation is done in JS and runs with 60fps.

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#322

Post by WA »

zghst wrote: post #176
WA wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forcing you to use native controls. This is wrong. Cordova has been around for years. Furthermore, it’s detached from reality. I released an app made with Ionic. It’s an app for average joe, not for devs or designers. Out of 20,000 downloads, I received exactly 0 complaints about performance or UI. Most users don’t care and don’t notice anyways. And it’s pretty much the only way how I can maintain an app for both p…

How accessible is your app? Have you tried it with VoiceOver? How does it do with battery and memory vs another comparable native app? When there's an OS upgrade, does your app automatically adjust to new resolutions and device classes?

I haven’t tested accessibility.

Battery and memory: no big difference. And JS doesn’t run in the background.

Download size: 5MB

Upgrades: I had a native iOS app back in 2011 and this app required quite a few UI adjustments over the years to work properly on the latest iOS version and hardware.

Can’t tell yet for the Cordova app, but it works out of the box for all iPhones and many Android phones without writing a single line of additional CSS.

For sure, there are downsides to Ionic, but I’d strongly consider it. The single code base has so many advantages and cuts development costs with almost no downside for the customers.

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#323

Post by rimliu »

judah wrote: post #194
al2o3cr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemme get this straight: you're mad that a company you don't want to pay $99/yr to won't build APIs so you can make money on their platform. So sad, lemme find my tiny violin.

Author here. I'm not making any money on their platform. I'm a non-profit, building a free app; this isn't about money. I mentioned money in the post as a list of all barriers to moving a PWA to app store. $99/year + 33% in-app purchases (plus a $1000+ Mac to build, and probably one or more Mac minis for CI) is a barrier. The bigger concern is Apple is lagging behind on web standards. I suspect the reason for that is…

The only thing web apps undermine is user experience. And if it is PWA, why would you want app store anyway?

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#324

Post by faizmokhtar »

chrisweekly wrote: post #165
shinratdr wrote: post #39

From a user perspective, this is why I love iOS. * Barrier to entry. If your project is more than a hobby, you can jump through a couple hoops to reach the iOS userbase. If the difference between $99 and $25 is make-or-break, you're probably trying to publish a hobby/low quality app anyways. There is a reason the Microsoft Store and Google Play are absolutely filled with trash, and this is part of it. * Forcing you t…

You might be applying your anti-Electron arguments a bit too broadly. PWA is not that easy, but the UX friction involved with downloading and installing native mobile apps is abysmal. Electron is (arguably) a shortcut for desktop apps, putting webdev convenience above UX. Whereas PWA is all about improving UX, and is also typically (in practice) more relevant to mobile than desktop.

> the UX friction involved with downloading and installing native mobile apps is abysmal

Wouldn't PWA be the same too? In fact, I think having to figure out the web address and type it in, and then add it to the home screen is much more tedious.

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#325

Post by jakobegger »

rimliu wrote: post #323
judah wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. I'm not making any money on their platform. I'm a non-profit, building a free app; this isn't about money. I mentioned money in the post as a list of all barriers to moving a PWA to app store. $99/year + 33% in-app purchases (plus a $1000+ Mac to build, and probably one or more Mac minis for CI) is a barrier. The bigger concern is Apple is lagging behind on web standards. I suspect the reason for that is…

The only thing web apps undermine is user experience. And if it is PWA, why would you want app store anyway?

He doesn't want app store. The whole article is about how the author is forced to submit an app to the store just to allow playing audio in the background.

The author would prefer to just have a web app / website that plays audio, but it is not possible. On iOS, apparently you need to use Cordova and submit an app to the store if you want to play the next song while the app is in the background. And it is not possible to use lock screen controls to control playback (apart from stopping it).

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#326

Post by callumlocke »

shinratdr wrote: post #39

From a user perspective, this is why I love iOS. * Barrier to entry. If your project is more than a hobby, you can jump through a couple hoops to reach the iOS userbase. If the difference between $99 and $25 is make-or-break, you're probably trying to publish a hobby/low quality app anyways. There is a reason the Microsoft Store and Google Play are absolutely filled with trash, and this is part of it. * Forcing you t…

> There is a reason the Microsoft Store and Google Play are absolutely filled with trash

So is the iOS App Store. If you dig past the first few search results you find tons of trash. But I'm not sure it matters how many low quality apps there are overall, as long as the store does its job of showing me the good ones first.

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#327

Post by n-gauge »

This is why I favor Android in these situations. It's far easier and cheaper platform to get a (web) app out there.

I have created a scratch to apk service (requires no permissions either) using javascript and then an apk signer (which can then be side loaded) - Job Done as they say.

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#328

Post by emj »

Zanni wrote: post #292
judah wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. I'm not making any money on their platform. I'm a non-profit, building a free app; this isn't about money. I mentioned money in the post as a list of all barriers to moving a PWA to app store. $99/year + 33% in-app purchases (plus a $1000+ Mac to build, and probably one or more Mac minis for CI) is a barrier. The bigger concern is Apple is lagging behind on web standards. I suspect the reason for that is…

Just a note on style--your post reads as a complaint, whether you intended it that way or not. The strong editorial slant actually undermines the meat of the article for me, which is, as you mentioned, documenting the hurdles in publishing a PWA. You could make this a better resource by stripping out the overt anti-Apple editorializing. Let the facts speak for themselves--for those who agree with you. Which I don't.…

There are two different arguments here, one very common and long lived that Apple is good at protecting users, and the other that Apple is not prioritizing the process for web developers. Maybe you are conflating them?

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#329

Post by myguysi »

judah wrote: post #207
hamiltonkibbe wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you install $ANYTHING as a PWA. It's now on your homescreen, you launch it. You do $THING. now you switch to twitter. Now the PWA -- in the background -- loads some ad with an autoplaying video and now theres ad audio coming from ... well, you're not sure where, but it doesn't seem like it's coming from twitter. now you have to go find it and stop it. Meanwhile bitcoinminer.js is burning through your battery…

Stepping back a moment, it's worth noting that this was Steve Jobs' original vision for the iPhone: “The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, they can send an email, they can look up a location on Google Maps.” Here we a…

That vision was abandoned while Jobs was still around. It was a way to bootstrap the first wave of apps but Apple’s principles of quality and security mean it’s not feasible. I’ll be really disappointed if they give in to the PWA movement and sacrifice those principles.

I don’t quite understand what the issue with native apps is in all honesty?

Re: I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores

#330

Post by strangegecko »

imron wrote: post #316
danShumway wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way we stop native apps from doing that? It used to be fairly common in Android for developers to just request everything. Developers still request too much, but it's gotten a bit better because in newer versions of Android you have to actually start using the API before the permission will be requested - so as a user if you request microphone access, I know it's because right now you intend to record sound.…

> Developers still request too much .. > it's gotten a bit better .. > It's a very small improvement, but it helps .. > These are all small steps Thereby illustrating the parent's point that developers will still ask for too much and that the power balance is in favour of the developer. Apple on the other hand heavily restricts what developers can do. It's developer-hostile, but user-friendly.

You can be just as user-friendly by giving the user a button "never let web pages ask me again for this / all permissions (you can undo this in settings)" when the first page asks for permissions.
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