zlacker

[return to "Apple’s refusal to support Progressive Web Apps is a detriment to the web"]
1. pluma+E2[view] [source] 2017-07-27 11:39:35
>>jaffat+(OP)
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 delivery platform rather than an application platform. Their proprietary additions (mostly CSS) largely focused on making things prettier, their rationale for opting out of standard features (e.g. autoplay) often only work under the assumption that the only use for those features would be in the context of traditional content pages.

You want an app? Develop for our walled garden we tightly control to offer our users the best possible experience. If you want it on the web, stick to creating content our users can consume in Mobile Safari, our app for reading websites.

◧◩
2. IBM+Y3[view] [source] 2017-07-27 11:54:34
>>pluma+E2
Is there a reason for users to care about this at all? Because it seems to me that this just solves problems for developers while making the user experience worse or not as good as it could be. The same goes for Electron-based apps.
◧◩◪
3. jvzr+N4[view] [source] 2017-07-27 12:02:05
>>IBM+Y3
Exactly. I don't want websites to send notifications. And I dislike websites with Offline support: I always have to refresh twice to make sure the content I'm seeing came from a fresh source and not from cache.
◧◩◪◨
4. egeozc+mb[view] [source] 2017-07-27 13:04:08
>>jvzr+N4
Why is your complaint specific to websites with offline support? I always get stale data when I open Twitter app. I have to go to the top and refresh to get new tweets (and then they serve you with even more stale tweets but that's another problem).
◧◩◪◨⬒
5. jvzr+Ed[view] [source] 2017-07-27 13:24:04
>>egeozc+mb
It's very specific and I realize I'm being privileged. I don't think my argument holds much ground.

My thing is: I visit a particular website to get the latest news on a topic but it's done with some kind of poorly coded implementation of offline cache. Despite my privileged, first-world, 4G-everywhere connection, it insists on loading stale data even though it looks exactly like a regular website. And this clashes with my vision of internet, which is, as others said, regular pages with hyperlinks, and a Refresh refreshes the page to get the newest version, even if it's stale. If things haven't changed, then they haven't and I instantly know nothing's new.

As I've said, pretty minor and I realize that Offline mode has much more pros than cons.

[go to top]