I built a progressive web app and published it in three app stores • Hacker News Board

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

#381

Post by judah » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 3:05 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #225

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…

> I'm a non-profit So the only thing that applies to you is the price to have access to a Mac. Since you're a nonprofit, Apple will waive your developer fee, and you wouldn't need in-app purchases anyways. Also, IIRC the cut Apple takes is 30%, not 33%, in line with the rest of their App Store policies.

Author here. That's correct - Apple waived my $99/year fee. I documented that in the post. But my post wasn't about me, it was about the hurdles involved in getting a PWA into the app store. For many people, $99/year + 30% in-app purchases + $1000+ Mac for build and testing + a few Mac Minis for CI servers ...that is a barrier.

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

#382

Post by judah » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 3:09 PM UTC

Angostura wrote: post #342

jakobegger wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 possibl…

as an iPhone user, I'm extraordinarily glad that the author cannot play audio at me from a website in the background.

Author here. I'm with you for random websites. But what about apps that are media players, ala Pandora? My app is a music playlist/radio station hybrid. It's expected to play music; it's the whole point of the app.

iOS Safari doesn't let me play audio until user interaction. OK, that's fair.

But it also blocks me from playing the next song when the current one ends. That's not cool. It breaks my app. It forced me to bundle my PWA as an app in the store, just to get around this restriction.

FYI, I reported this problem to Apple's iOS Safari team. They acknowledged the issue and said they can probably fix it in the future. (That was 2 years ago.)

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

#383

Post by EGreg » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 3:10 PM UTC

tuchsen wrote: post #306

mr_toad wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple is lagging behind on web standards. Google’s bright ideas aren’t necessarily standards. Service workers are only a working draft, and only implemented in 2 of the major browsers. Obviously Google and Apple have different priorities, and clearly service workers benefit Google more than the other vendors.

My understanding is that service workers have buy in from all four major browser vendors now, with implementations in all of them. I haven’t played with it yet but it seems like service workers are here to stay https://caniuse.com/#feat=serviceworkers

And when will Push Notifications be implemented?

Maybe ask jon at apple

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

#384

Post by kalleboo » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 3:12 PM UTC

mthoms wrote: post #368

Angostura wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't care. Don't want to have to unlock my phone in a meeting and sort though the tabs to stop the racket.

This could be as easy as: 1. Open control center. 2. Control music from there. 3. There is no step 3.

You hit pause, 5 minutes later the webpage starts playing again.

So now we need to add a "block webpage" button to control center?

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

#385

Post by gkya » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 3:19 PM UTC

judah wrote: post #377

gkya wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The free and opened web presents a challenge to Apple's app business. The free and opened [sic] web is BS. The "web" was always free and open, if you had worthy and user-respecting stuff to publish. Autoplaying video and other similar features are just plain evil. And if web apps are second class citizens on iOS, that's really a nice thing to hear, IMnsHO, because they are second class citizens on the WWW itself. T…

The free and open web is BS? Well, I disagree. That any person with the will and the skill can publish something for all the world to see, without the need for gatekeepers? That's incredible freedom the world has never before seen. >> "Autoplaying video and other similar features are just plain evil." I'm not even asking for that. My app is a music player in the vein of Pandora. iOS Safari doesn't let me play the nex…

You are confounding things here. The actual free and open web is certainly one of the best things ever. But all the app ecosystem we have built on it, the insecure and wasteful universe of web apps, and all the cruft that is created to support them in the name of free and open web, none of them are necessary for tye web to be free and open. Is the open web this whole business of tracking and data ransom? No. It is the content that people publish, and it needs only a fraction of all this complexity. The rest is the closed web. Nobody bars anybody from publishing proper application software or make usable web applications that do not require clients to have software that takes hundreds of megabytes on disk and multiple gigabytes on ram.

In thr nineties MS had almost 100 marketshare in consumer OS market. How much does Apple ecosystem has now. MS and Apple is incomparable in that you can prefer to not use an apple device, but for a long long time you could not prefer to not use the MS software, whatever consumer hardware you had.

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

#386

Post by danShumway » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 4:23 PM UTC

fnordsensei wrote: post #344

strangegecko wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree that this is usable enough. Every webpage and their dog has now started to ask for permissions to popup notifications. I find this really annoying. Sure, I can disable it for one site, but then the next one I visit pops up the same question if it's OK to spam me. I've turned it off browser-wide as a result. If asking for permissions is to be an option in the future, I hope it is a completely manual opt-in,…

:) Browser permissions are also ahead of mobile on this one.

What they're starting to do is force some permission prompts to be behind user actions - so, you can request a permission as a response to a user clicking on a specific type of button, but you can't just request it anywhere.

A big reason notifications are spammy is because they don't have those restrictions, I suspect because Google was heavily involved in their design.

I suspect that browsers will start to move in the direction of "let the user turn this on via a button someplace" as notification prompts become more common. And I suspect that, like with everything else, those controls will get implemented on the web before mobile.

You're upset that every website can ask you to display notifications. With native apps on Android, they don't even need to ask. Apps I install are by default allowed to spam me with notifications, and I have to opt-out after the fact.

If we're comparing permission models between native and the web, the web is definitely giving users more control right now. I don't understand the perspective of someone who feels safer downloading an app than they do visiting a website.

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

#387

Post by Silhouette » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 4:52 PM UTC

iaml wrote: post #339

Silhouette wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile Safari's support for modern web standards has made IE look good for some time now. It seems very clear that Apple doesn't want a good experience for web users on its devices. It's very frustrating, because we keep getting requests from users for features we're happy to look into or even already working on... but then discover the user has an iPhone, where the necessary web technologies are supported poorly if…

It's quite contrary, actually - apple provides good experience for its users - tightly controlled, secure sandboxed environments. The fact that you find it hard to develop apps for it is irrelevant for them.

apple provides good experience for its users

Clearly what some of us call a good experience differs from others.

Customers who visit some of my sites on Android devices get useful facilities that customers who visit the same sites on iOS devices do not. This is a direct result of Apple's failure to support functionality in Mobile Safari that is available in other browsers and its policy of blocking any other browser from doing better on its platform. I don't really see how you can spin that as being a better experience for iOS users.

The implicit assumption made by a few contributors in this discussion is that if PWAs don't work properly on iOS then developers will write native iOS apps instead, but often a more realistic alternative is that developers just downgrade their expectations on iOS and concentrate on providing more value on better platforms, with the iOS users losing out.

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

#388

Post by vageli » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 5:16 PM UTC

asciimo wrote: post #376

schrodinger wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>permissions are reserved for apps that Apple has vetted That apps have been vetted is the difference.

I think the point is that web sites could also be vetted.

Websites would need to be continuously vetted because their content could change, unlike a binary release.

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

#389

Post by jakobegger » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 5:21 PM UTC

Angostura wrote: post #342

jakobegger wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 possibl…

as an iPhone user, I'm extraordinarily glad that the author cannot play audio at me from a website in the background.

I think you misunderstood something. Websites can play audio in the background on iOS. It works great for podcasts — but only as long as you don’t want to control playback. The API is there, Apple didn’t omit it on purpose. But it is broken.

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

#390

Post by z3t4 » Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 6:23 PM UTC

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…

The reason you don't like app's developed in a certain technology is because you are a developer. Normal users can't tell the difference, or don't care.