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

71–80 of 231 posts

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#71

Post by emodendroket »

athenot wrote: post #35
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.

> It's totally possible to build a PWA that behaves like a native app but Apple actively tries to destroy them. It may look the part but it rarely feels like it. Something like OmniGraffle would not end up feeling the same. Even Microsoft's apps on mac feel better than their web-based counterparts in O365.

The fact you can just run it without installing anything makes up for a lot of faults (doubly so when the vendor isn't Microsoft but somebody nobody's ever heard of).

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#72

Post by emodendroket »

njhaveri wrote: post #37
juststeve wrote: post #2

Or native apps will go through a revival due to new languages, compiler optimizations and access to intrinsics and C libraries.

As a developer of a native Mac email client, I sincerely hope that this is true. At least in the Apple ecosystem, there are new technologies like SwiftUI and Mac Catalyst that should make this easier, particularly for the army of iOS developers looking to bring apps to the Mac. Before starting my app, I did briefly consider going the cross-platform route, and I realize that it's possible to build a decent app that wa…

It's a double-edged sword. I like that no matter what OS I'm using I can set up IntelliJ to work exactly the same, down to non-native keymaps.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#73

Post by emodendroket »

possiblerobot wrote: post #36
allo37 wrote: post #25

The cheapest laptop I could find on walmart.com right now has 4GB of RAM. "Low-end" isn't what it used to be! Only techies care about things like how much RAM a program is using. End users, from my experience at least, don't really care - as long as it works.

You might be right with respect to non-techie users. But, it's not about whether it merely works. It's about what we could be doing with modern hardware if we used it as efficiently as old software had to use its hardware. What kinds of wild things could we accomplish on this hardware if we weren't bogged down in gigabytes and teraflops of bloat?

Probably fewer because we'd be spending more time pulling our hair out on trying to make cross-platform C++ apps work instead.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#74

Post by jjtheblunt »

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.

Are you suggesting Javascript has access to all hardware functionality exposed to C/ObjC/Swift?

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#75

Post by emodendroket »

MattGaiser wrote: post #55
tluyben2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a techie I mostly do not care as long as it works either, if I am not writing it myself (and sometimes even then but I care more now than years ago). However; things do not work a lot of the times; my wife is a writer, almost all my friends are non technical and they complain a lot about how crap everything is. And when I check the culprit is always lack of memory and it is always chrome (the browser and in Electr…

Does the end user care enough to switch? As if all you are doing is complaining but it does not alter behaviour (specifically usage or purchasing behaviour) then for all business purposes they do not care.

They don't know enough to even know what to blame, so there's little benefit to resolving the issue, I think.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#76

Post by allo37 »

fuball63 wrote: post #70
allo37 wrote: post #25

The cheapest laptop I could find on walmart.com right now has 4GB of RAM. "Low-end" isn't what it used to be! Only techies care about things like how much RAM a program is using. End users, from my experience at least, don't really care - as long as it works.

They may not care about how much RAM it is using, but the blatant disregard for resource usage manifests in other ways. Most people I know are just resigned to believe their 4GB RAM laptop will be obsolete in a few years. When things "get slow" it means chuck the whole computer. I do think that the recklessness to which we use our virtual resources contributes to e-waste, which is a physical problem.

Sure, but why can't I replace the battery in my phone easily? Why does the computer that controls my fridge cost as much as a new fridge to replace (if you can even get one)? Why is a cheap printer about the same price as the cartridges? Our throwaway, built-in-obsolescence approach to product development is definitely a problem, but I think it's pretty obvious that the causes reach far beyond the use of resource-intensive UI frameworks.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#77

Post by crossroadsguy »

ksherlock wrote: post #64
egypturnash wrote: post #34

I hate this trend so much. I just dug around in Time Machine for the old version of Evernote, after being frustrated by the Electron trash they are calling version 10. It's missing so many little touches that just magically happen when you make a real application instead of having to fake everything from inside a browser.

Have you tried Notational Velocity?

It’s been abandoned for almost a decade now. It survived changes until now.

In Catalina it’s crashing left, top, bottom. Moved to nvAlt which, it seems, is abandoned now as well. Author is focused on something caller nvUltra. No idea what’s that.

Besides for people who use Evernote, nv isn’t a replacement at all for them.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#78

Post by Silhouette »

capableweb wrote: post #30
vintagedave wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least there is a free Community Edition now. It is one release behind (so doesn't have the latest goodness, eg the LSP server for code completion), but it does let you build apps for non-commercial use or pre-income startups for free, using Delphi/C++, the VCL, etc. Ie, if you want to encourage people to use tools like Delphi, it is much more open to indie devs than it used to be. Link: https://www.embarcadero.com…

They are making it easy to get started with when there is a whole bunch of information I have to give them in order to download even a trial/community edition. Contrast that to most other programming languages / development environments, where you usually can just download and run it. Field required: First Name Field required: Last Name Field required: Email Field required: Password Field required: Verify Password Fi…

Contrast that to most other programming languages / development environments, where you usually can just download and run it.

There are, sadly, other offenders too. Microsoft is possibly the worst among them. Gone are the days of being able to use a free edition of Visual Studio to develop Windows applications with no strings attached. And good luck even figuring out what the privacy policy is, a problem that also applies with VS Code. I mean, why should desktop software even need a privacy policy?! Oh, right, telemetry, the plague of 21st century software. And then you have the mobile platforms and the offensive conditions and financial cut demanded by their gatekeepers, keeping Microsoft company in the obnoxious developer experiences department.

Meanwhile, OSS development tools and open platforms seem to be blowing away much of the proprietary stuff in administrative and business terms (as well as often in technical terms) now. Too many greedy platform owners trying to lock everyone in, not realising that Ballmer was right all along and without developers their platform is worthless anyway. And discussions like this, and the emphasis today on cloud-hosting (usually running FOSS) and web apps, are the result.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#79

Post by Silhouette »

wtallis wrote: post #45
athenot wrote: post #35

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. It may look the part but it rarely feels like it. Something like OmniGraffle would not end up feeling the same. Even Microsoft's apps on mac feel better than their web-based counterparts in O365.

Yeah, proponents of cross-platform frameworks love to ignore the second half of "look and feel". It's ridiculous to claim that a web app can behave like a native app when even Qt apps still tend to have obvious tells.

The important question is, does that matter?

Slick web apps are taking over the software world, whether the likes of Apple want them to or not. Looking like any specific native platform is less important, if it's even relevant at all, in an era when users are working with different web apps each with their own look-and-feel all the time anyway.

Re: Goodbye, Native Apps

#80

Post by ronanyeah »

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).

Check out elm-ui.

https://korban.net/posts/elm/2019-11-17-elm-ui-introduction/

Post reply on HN