371–380 of 451 posts
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You can make a a native app, which will always be better than a webapp. As an iOS user, I have no intention of ever using webapps (including things like Cordova apps). If you can’t be bothered to make a iOS-native app with iOS native look, feel and features then just don’t bother.
A native app will never have instant install, or update without download. A native app will never be available on all platforms. Sometimes a native app is better, sometimes it is worse. It's certainly better if all you care about is fancy animations.
I can download 95% of apps in under 30 seconds and all of my apps update whilst I am sleeping. And nothing is stopping you downloading new content in a native app which is where the majority of use cases stem from.
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Why wouldn't you want that? PWAs are seamless (no downloading/installing), allow native features, can be saved offline for later, run in a secure sandbox, and are completely open and cross-platform.
I'm pretty sure it boils down to "we're fancy iOS users who want nothing to do with those peasants over in the Android world". It seems like the majority of the comments opposing web apps oppose them because they're cross-platform and not written specifically for their chosen platform, which is a very silly stance to have. There are some more coherent arguments in play, don't get me wrong (in particular, the argument…
"It seems like the majority of the comments opposing web apps oppose them because they're cross-platform and not written specifically for their chosen platform, which is a very silly stance to have."
But it's not. By not being written specifically for the platform, everyone is just getting a least common denominator approach. Nobody is getting anything that integrates with their platform. Nobody is getting anything that embraces what makes the platform special, or good.
"but a lot of the rhetoric around here really reeks of elitism."
No, it's more that we want developers to actually make an effort to embrace the platform they're trying to work on. And, quite frankly, use something that's not JavaScript. Learn a second language.
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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…
> loading screens, push notifications You seem to be laser-focused on this one tiny part of PWAs. There's way more too it than that, like offline support, background sync, etc. Imagine if you could press a button on the page to save that article you're reading for later, and have it available offline next time you need it. Or what if you could write a comment while offline, and have it be automatically posted next ti…
We're laser focused on the annoying parts that we know will be abused to death.
"Imagine if you could press a button on the page to save that article you're reading for later, and have it available offline next time you need it."
Most browsers already do this.
"PWAs are just flat out _better_ than existing web apps. It's remarkable to me that so many people seem to be against these incredibly useful features just because the app they're using is web-based rather than native."
Because we already have native apps to do these things. I don't want websites to do these things. I want a website to be a website.
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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 b…
Nobody but designers who think too highly of themselves wants this. Everyone else wants the app to fit in with the platforms toolkit. This requires the designs to be different.
"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."
Which is why I don't do it the way you described. I embrace what makes each platform unique.
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That doesn't have anything to do with native vs web though. Twitter's native app is heavier than their web app because Twitter has historically filled the native app with junk (like a fullscreen video just for the login screen, "moments", "highlights", hijacking browser URLs, a bunch of ads and ad tracking, etc). Facebook does the same, to an almost silly degree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8162342 The Twit…
In theory you could make a web app look like a native iOS app too, yet in practice developers don't either.
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Look at it from the opposite perspective though: "because I only want to develop webapps, the web itself should be bloated to contain everything I need to create apps already possible elsewhere." "Because that's not the way I want to develop" is not a good enough reason to increase complexity, security footprint, and unintended side effects.
That's cheeky. "because I only want to develop webapps, the web itself should be bloated to contain everything I need to create apps already possible elsewhere." I think the point is rather that single-codebase "productivity apps" that satisfy basic modern experience expectations (like "I could run it offline") are not possible elsewhere - but they should be. And they would be, if some browser vendors cared about the…
Why?
"Also, the thing about expanding the Open Web Platform is that the new features that are available to me don't take anything away from you if you don't want to use them. "
As a user, they do. If you go whole hog on the PWA stuff, then I no longer have the regular website you used to have.
A lot of people here seem to be advocating the superior experience that native apps provide, but forgetting how saturated the app market is and what a poor job Apple does to help its users discover new apps. Further, the majority of US smartphone users download zero apps in a typical month. What's the point of making a "superior" app, if no one is ever going to see it? https://qz.com/253618/most-smartphone-users-down…
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I was responding to the first two lines of their comment. If they are going to divert that way, then I'm going to respond to it.
You're not making sense to me. u/jondubois dislikes the walled garden, which is the inability to run apps that don't go through Apple's app store (with the corresponding review and fees). You respond to those two lines by saying that the walled garden prevents fragmentation. It does not. * If you were unable to run apps other than via the Google Play Store in Android phones, the OS versions would still be fragmented.…
Apple has on multiple occasions over the years removed apps from the stores that weren't updated to use the latest iOS SDK. This meant that since all apps are targeting the latest iOS there is little impediment to moving the entire platform forward.
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>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. I would wager that the average quality of an iOS app written by someone like OP that "has a web experience and _has_ to learn iOS just to work on that platform" will probably be lower than if that person (with web experience)…
> 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…
Never is a pretty strong word. Have you tried some of the apps on the site pwa.rocks? Flipboard and AliExpress are non-trivial examples of PWAs that do a good job. Who knows what app development will be like in 5-10 years?
As a developer I would much prefer a cross-platform way to write apps.
Have you looked into the web components spec yet? I think a combination of PWAs + Polymer (or React with web components) has a pretty good shot at easing cross platform development. It already has the support of most browser vendors and is relatively easy to pick up.