One of the main arguments i see in my organisation to create apps for our ventures is the fact that it will enable touch login. I recon it should be rather simple to duplicate / wrap the localStorage API to do this?
Require the same developer registration process as they currently do for iOS apps. Then require some apple provided javascript to provide access to these needed functions. App review as before.
At that point they can do interesting things: charge per 1000 installs, enforce the use of apple pay. They can operate a business model that is slightly different, but the same at its core - tax developers for access to their user base/platform.
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.
Apple isn't responsive to complaints in general. Are they less responsive to web app complaints than other complaints? Otherwise, the argument holds no water.
I don't even want to start on "PWAs work more seamlessly than native". I just cannot take person making such claims seriously.
https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-...
If people _insist_ on making phone apps as websites, there's Cordova and all that. Such apps are never very good, of course. I still haven't seen a website-based desktop/phone app that wasn't a clunky non-native-looking resource-hogging mess.
I remember Twitter.app had code to get the currently installed apps, to "better target ads." It's user hostile and we are paying with the multi gigabytes of data.
Apple wants in-app purchases. Why deliver full flexed apps in the web were people pays using PayPal or VISA if you can force people to use your store?
This is the reason Apple killed Flash and is the reason why they may kill any other web technology.
I'm sure there are a number of legitimate uses but as of now, every craptastic "news" website I visit now wants to pester the hell out of me with notifications when they post new clickbait.
-- (Please lets not do the fanboy "Flash is garbage" here - even if you do feel that it was heating up your CPU with ads - it would have taken a lot less than 8 years to fix that then to reinvent everything and find out that money still makes the world go round.) --
The HTML5 version is compiled from the same source that the App that goes to the Apple App Store (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/papa-pear-saga/id572542612?m...).
What's so different? It is literally the same code base (minus some platform specific code).
As much as this annoys me (developer for iOS) I do believe it leads to a better platform.
They later reversed that decision, of course. But the Flash decision was right at the beginning and had nothing to do with in-app purchases.
Note that Android never got Flash to work well on phones either. It just killed performance and battery life.
It's tough to get developers to care about things like offline-first, because it's tough for them to convince managers to allow them to spend time on a feature that won't work on iOS (since it won't work in Safari, and Apple has banned other browser engines on their platform).
Ultimately it's users that lose out but also the web as a platform, as it pushes people, like the author of the article, towards walled-garden solutions like native apps.
Apple is looking for service worker use-cases, so if it's something you're interested in, let them know https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2017-July/0292....
It's not about learning a new language. Most web developers are comfortable in many languages. Plase stop attacking a straw-man. Not many web developers say stuff like "omg these new things are web scale" or "oh javascript is everything I need, I hate everything else". Yeah the author didn't want to learn a new language. Which is not an insane decision at the very beginning of a project.
The biggest deal, though, is code reuse. If I'm not given enough budget, I'm not developing a native app for your precious walled-garden, sorry. I can also rightfully complain that what you have is a walled-garden, and also that the owner of the garden inhibiting a cross-platform alternative.
This has nothing to do with ignorance. Give me a cross-platform API, I'm happy.
At the end, as long as there is docs & support, most really don't care if it's Haskell or PHP.
Here's a quick short list of things that developers still have to write because the current implementations are broken, buggy, inconsistent or absent:
- Date pickers.
- Image upload [1].
- Autocomplete and datalist.
- Range pickers.
- Upload time remaining without javascript.
- Number min/max/step, use up/down keys to increment/decrement.
- Form elements that are unable be styled by CSS.
- Color picker (arguably not as important as the others, and some OS color pickers suck anyway).
[1] Basic things like resize image on the browser prior to uploading. Size, aspect ratio, crop could be hinted by the html or chosen by the user. Server check is still needed, but upload size and times would be reduced drastically.
Shouldn't those be more important?
I didn't know app loading screens were "a great feature".
Anyway I really don't see the point of PWAs or much future for them anyway. Even if Apple started supporting these with Safari, the web apps still could not interact with different hardware components/sensors, iOS SDK's etc.
React Native already brought a platform which allows making apps with native components and good performance with JS + decent access to hardware and iOS and still it's barely used outside of hobby projects.
I'm sorry, but native apps aren't going anywhere.
To say that Flash on mobile was great but Apple killed it anyway, gives Apple way too much credit. Flash on mobile killed itself.
I don't want to pay with UX if some "developers" can't be bothered to learn new languages and insist on doing JS everywhere.
It should always be opt in, but it is a useful thing for many use cases.
Offline support? Only if you happen to live in the 99.99% of the world that doesn't have 24/7 perfect WiFi/4G coverage with unlimited data. If you've ever kept a page open in the background and wished the data would still be there when you come back, offline support could have helped with that.
The choice is not between a native and a web app. The choice is between a web app or no app. There are certainly apps that could cease developing platform specific native apps when PWAs are supported on iOS but the vast majority of apps that benefit from PWAs being supported universally are apps that simply would never be available as native apps (let alone native apps on more than one platform).
It's not like you're being force-fed notifications against your will. And it's not like offline content hurts you. Any inconvenience offline support causes to you pales in comparison to how much people benefit who actually need to be able to access content on spotty connections.
Walled gardens with one app per platform with 1000 different rules per platform so users don't spend more than 100ms to understand a layout shouldn't be the solution as well. Javascript apps being convoluted isn't even an objective observation.
> Do I really want my weather app to be running on top of the browser app?
It's yet another VM with more abstractions. What's the big deal?
> So much for "Apple mobile Safari is the new Internet Explorer", lol.
I never had any significant app work only on one browser since years but even if this was a big problem, why make it worse?
> Push notifications for browsers are a weird concept, anyway.
I don't see the big deal? You are asked to allow it, no?
They had more than 8 years to fix it on the desktop and didn't. They had more than 8 years to make the Mac version perform at rough parity with the Windows version and didn't.
Either way... "it's fine, we'll make it work well within a decade" is NOT a good message to your users.
According to this, Facebook was 32 MBs 4 years ago. It's similar with Twitter.
It's their fault that they keep adding stuff to track you. And Facebook contains just about every library that has ever existed now.
Original www is very successful at mouse-based UX, but horrible at touch based.
Actually browsers could agree on a dozen touch based standard input elements and we don't need 80% this JS framework cruft.
Why can I not "Create an app loading screen" without service workers? Why can I not "Create an initial app UI to load instantly"? Seems these are trivially possible with regular Javascript, but maybe I'm misunderstanding?
Similarly, "Use push notifications", "Add offline support" and "Prompt installation to the home screen" do not sound like APIs that are dependent on service workers, but I guess they are? (or the article makes no sense)
(By the way, the 300ms tap delay that he gripes about can be hacked away, see fastclick.js)
If a normal website can't do the job, and the developer isn't willing to develop a native app, then maybe the product simply isn't necessary.
As a user I don't want to have web apps giving me notifications or having loading screens. I have always liked that the web was tightly sandboxed and limited in what it can do. The nature of the web; where when I follow a link I'm basically installing your application -- sight unseen -- means that what your app can do needs to be tightly controlled and limited.
As a developer, if I want to make a native app for any platform, I'll write a native app. If you don't want to learn Objective-C or Swift, that's fine. There's plenty of ways to write Native applications iOS using cross platform languages like C++.
Frankly, those languages are easier to write testable, dependable code in than JavaScript anyway.
In Firefox, just open "about:config", search for dom.webnotifications.enabled, then double-click it.
If using other browsers, don't :)
(PS: I like desktop notifications for Slack, but since I'd prefer not to use Slack in the first place, I'm not sure I count)
It's used in a lot more than just hobby projects.
- Yeah we don't support offline mode on iOS, sorry.
- How much would it cost to implement that?
- Hmm, a rewrite plus more devices to test and licenses and... hmm. Just 50K for a start.
- What, are you kidding? I just want to enter this order when offline?!
> Most web developers are comfortable in many languages.
"Walled-garden" has long ago became thought-stopping cliche. But if it is walled garden, then I am thankful that Apple does not allow to litter it with some JS scraps. All this cross-platform talk is just being cheap, being lazy or both. It save money, but it produces the lowest common denominator UX wise. And I would not be surprised that maintaining cross-platform monstrosity eats away any cost-savings pretty quickly.
Apple supporting PWA (Progressive Web Apps) is hugely important because it enables a future where web apps can natively support browser, Mac/Windows/Linux desktop, and mobile iPhone/Android/Windows native mobile with a single codebase of open technologies.
Why is that important? By fragmenting development effort, the overall product isn't as good on any platform.
There's an app I'm making on the side to keep track of your contacts (like a personal customer management system). This needs to store all your contacts offline, because it'd be too much friction to load everyone you've ever taken notes on over the network every time you open the app.
Right now, the only way for me to accomplish that on iOS is to make a native app. This means I had to learn an entirely new technology stack (React Native and XCode), completely rewrite my views, tie everything into my backend, and go through Apple's Byzantine approval process (which I still haven't done because I can't figure out why my app compiles and runs locally but complains about libraries not being linked when I try to archive it to upload to the app store).
This is unnecessary duplication of work that could've been spent writing new features, makes it harder to add new front-end features in the future (because now they have to be added in two places), and adds a huge lag in the time it takes me to push changes to the iOS client (weeks, vs. the seconds it takes to push a change to the web client).
If apple supported PWA, I would've spent my time making the database keep a local syncing copy on the browser (with minimongo or pouchdb), and then every platform would've benefited from faster page loads and offline syncing.
Until Apple adds PWA support, I can't make as good stuff, and people can't use the better stuff.
Why not? WebUSB already shows otherwise.
The average customer (of which Apple has millions worldwide) wants a device that solves some basic desires like taking pictures, making phone calls, texting, email, etc.
I don't see how this feature serves enough of those customers for Apple to care more about it than something that will sell computers (in some form or another).
>Sixth, the most important reason.
Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.
We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.
Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.
Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.
Technically Apple does support offline via the older manifests mechanism (and "Add to Home Screen" which invokes it remains prominent in the safari share sheet) though it's a lousy (and pretty buggy) experience.
Interestingly they don't support any sort of web notifications on iOS despite having added local notifications ( https://www.w3.org/TR/notifications/) in macOS 10.8 and remote Safari Push Notifications (built on APNS) in macOS 10.9.
> Here are a list of things you still can’t do with mobile safari due to Apple’s refusal to support them:
>
> Create an app loading screen
> Use push notifications
> Add offline support
> Create an initial app UI to load instantly
> Prompt installation to the home screen through browser-guided dialog
Why do I want these things, as a user. App loading screens?
I love the web. I love hyperlinks, text and images. The web of connections that lead you to information. Everything in that list is detrimental to a good experience on the web.
I don't want push notifications, I barely enable them for native apps. And it bugs the hell out of me when every second website in desktop Safari prompts to send me push notifications. No. Why would I want this on mobile?
Same thing with the home screen. I love the fact that the address bar in my web browser is my history, my reminders, my bookmarks, my open tabs. I start typing what I want and I'm there. Finding native apps on my home screen is only just getting to the same place with Spotlight, why would I want to make the web worse by sticking icons for pages on my home screen?
And browser-guided dialogs to put more icons on my home screen? Seriously?
This author's post is a great argument against web apps on mobile.
It's not the only way - you can create a hybrid app with something like Ionic (obviously this is compiled to a native app at build time, but you never touch a line of XCode yourself).
One of the big selling points of hybrid apps is that you can use your existing Javascript/Typescript skills to create apps that look and feel like native apps.
Naive much? People and corporations don't tend to stop collecting wealth - that is, after all, how they became so filthy, filthy rich in the first place.
> I am thankful that Apple does not allow to litter it with some JS scraps.
Oh, so much for being objective. References and all.
> All this cross-platform talk is just being cheap, being lazy or both.
Are you even serious? You really blame engineers/developers coming up with trade-offs for being cheap and/or lazy?
> And I would not be surprised that maintaining cross-platform monstrosity eats away any cost-savings pretty quickly.
No it doesn't. I'm a developer since much more than 10 years. I guess that's enough of a reference :)
That doesn't sound encouraging...
And for prompting installation, I think the author wants it to appear native.
(Apple does have their own notification API but it requires an account).
Why not? Because they can actually be extremely useful. Such as for receiving emails, Facebook messages, Slack pings, or news updates you've subscribed to. Maybe somebody tweeted you. Any of these apps could work as progressive webapps.
Regardless if the platform is native or web-based, the feature remains opt-in. If you don't want them, then don't subscribe to them.
Safari should support Service Workers[1], because they allow you to safely intercept and modify navigation and resource requests, and cache resources in a very granular fashion, securely and on a different thread to your app JS. This is great for performance and offline/spotty reception.
The Web App Manifest[2] is the file that allows developers to "appify" the site, by prompting the user to add to their home screen (only once they hit a certain usage rate), show a splash screen etc. But that's a nice to have compared to Service Workers.
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/API/Service_Worker...
Go to about:config, search for dom.webnotifications.enabled, set it to false.
The overall vibes leaking from the Safari team on this matter have been arrogant, detached. I don't hold any hope.
As to JavaScript, with WebAssembly coming, there may be options in the future.
But for notifications, even the only-once* prompt is an annoyance we never had to deal with before. It's like the European Cookies Law: great in essence, but when every website bugs you about it then the problem has been exacerbated, not solved. I don't care about receiving notifications for a website I visit once in a blue moon, and I especially don't care to be even asked. There should be an action that triggers the prompt, like some kind of opt-in.
Edit: same with "app banners"
*it never is, because cross platform, multiple devices, multiple browsers. A fucking pain.
When the iPod came out, I never understood why I couldn't just drag the music files directly onto the device and I had to get iTunes and use iTune's tedious interface.
Now they have the app store; another unnecessary restriction. As a developer, it's nice to own an Android phone because I can just run whatever code I want on it and I don't need to buy any special licenses, hardware or proprietary SDKs to do that.
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-and-drop becomes a thing in iOS 11, native apps will implement that feature well. I think it will take some time for web apps to implement it as nicely (if ever).
There are thousands of tiny details that your web app just won't have. Those details are more important than your familiarity with a tech stack or how long it takes you to deploy something.
You say that:
> By fragmenting development effort, the overall product isn't as good on any platform.
But I would say that:
> By building a web app, the overall product isn't as good on any platform.
I have yet to find a "web app" that I delight in using, though I love many web sites and native apps.
If you're waiting on async requests than everything is fine without Service Workers, but if you're performing computation then the whole UI will be blocked.
I strongly disagree. We use Ionic (which is based on Cordova) for line of business apps, and the results are as good as native apps, but with the benefit (amongst others) of having a single codebase for both Android and iOS.
Hybrid apps aren't a good match for all types of app - games in particular - but they do work well for many others.
I wonder how much of that is an intrinsic problem with web apps conceptually, or a result of the various limitations and design fuck-ups of the browser vendors.
> we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen.
Yes, that's what (you and) Apple want. But what developers really want is a simple cross platform framework to target all OSes and the widest user base possible with the least effort.
These applications can then enable custom features on macOS where they get a better experience if they have a need for that.
Remember OpenStep? Yellowbox? We want those tools; right now the web is an ok standin, and until there is something better, developers will keep demanding these features. It's about targeting the widest user base possible, not about making a single platform the most successful.
And come on, JS is a C-style language. If you know one you know them all.
It's also not a difficult jump to OOP languages; especially now that Java 8 supported lambdas and C# supports async/await. It's hard to learn concepts, not syntax.
The entire front-end ecosystem is currently worse than enterprise Java at its peak and the quality issues stem from all sides.
On iPad it's worse. On iPhone strangely, it's not too bad.
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 Twitter client could easily be ~3MB on Android, for instance, if they just stripped the garbage out. And similarly, if you take a web app, and embed all that same junk into it, it will suddenly be a heavy download too.
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.
Having developed many websites and many apps, HTML and CSS are really quite terrible when compared to something like iOS' auto-layout system, or even something like a DockPanel in Xaml (WPF on windows)
However, you wouldn't want to layout a document in Xaml or auto-layout either. Different strengths for different original purposes.
Personally I feel like a non-trivial part of why "web apps" (i.e websites pretending to be apps) generally suck comes down to this impedance mismatch
As long as Apple continues to sell more product that dynamic isn't going to change.
Just discussing monopolies and drawing parallels.
To be fair Adobe was always pushing Flash as a cross-platform, cross-browser system - mobile browsers kind of changed the game and required a different approach since they were so tightly coupled to the OS and controlled by its vendor (BTW there was also a time where Microsoft was accused of monopoly for bundling its browser with the OS - doesn't seem to apply to iOS though).
If it was supposed work cross-platform on 2 mobile platforms - and one platform says no, well then 1 platform is not cross-platform any more is it? Adobe then gave up and stopped developing it - but yeah, Apple effectively did kill it. Especially since it was still a very early try. I mean up until 1-2 years ago even normal css/webanimation was laggy on mobile browsers.
You might even use a hybrid app without it knowing. Many apps just need to show some buttons, input fields, images or a map and hit a web service. Brushing ALL hybrid apps off as useless is in my eyes just ignorant.
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) could just extend their web app natively with PWA.
I completely agree with you that the app should feel native to the platform (I actually quit a job a while back because they wanted me to theme our web Android experience as iOS for "consistency across all devices" instead of matching the user's device's design patterns), but there is huge value in giving the devs the tools they need to write the best product they can, and splitting codebases and requiring more work/knowledge/moving parts is actively detrimental to a quality end-product for everyone, unfortunately.
- lower performance. It can't be as fast as native as long as there's still the browser underneath - non-native experience. I use iOS because I like it better than android. I like the UI and UX, how it looks and feels. I don't want an web app, with an UI feeling different, looking different and behaving different. - multi-platform. All platforms will never have the same capabilities and features. You will always have to use the least common denominator or hack your things around.
Apple provides ObjC and Swift, the latter being a terrific way to develop apps, in my humble opinion a far better language and environment than JS (or JS). Just use it, your users will thank you.
I can't stand it: that a web site has the ability to display a modal prompt sheet that I have to cancel.
But it is not in Apple's interest to support these kinds of apps. They make money on the app store, and like to keep developers within the walls of their ecosystem.
Even though my Mac never had significant problems with Flash. I mean - fix what? I don't have Flash installed any more but my fans still spin-up with multiple tabs and overactive pages trying to open a bunch of animated or video tabs.
You are definitely right that Apple has a lot of leverage for now. I love my Apple products, as a user I have no intention of switching away from them (I stuck with them through their worst period, '96 - '00, because I was so excited for the coming of Unix). Again as a user I want them to succeed because I love the products.
As a developer though, I want my favorite tools and languages available. And I want to spend the least effort in targeting users...
At least that's the case if it's logically similar. C, Java, JS, etc are mostly transferable. I might not say the same about something like Haskell.
It feels like many developers are adamant to never leave their comfort zone. Hence, JS everywhere.
If native web apps are to be more of a universal thing, I believe there ought to be a blank-canvas "meta-browser" layer that sits above the browser and that all web apps (including today's browsers) are built on top of. Basically a lightweight, sandboxed pseudo-OS that offers a robust standard library, a URL scheme and easy networking support, some sort of bytecode, maybe a UI toolkit, etc. Web apps would still take up the same amount of space and would still be able to run without installing, but they would now be endowed with native performance, app-specific features, and a consistent, functional UI. (Quiz: how often do your back/forward buttons fail when using, for example, your bank's website? The fact that these two ubiquitous controls simply break the web more often than not should be telling.)
Shoehorning all that stuff into a hyperlinked, navigable document browser is insanity, and you can always feel it unless your web-app has basically reimplemented the DOM from scratch[1]. The web is currently layered upside-down and I think web apps won't lose their reputation until this is fixed.
I think it's valuable for games. Unity and Unreal engine have demonstrated that.
Applications necessarily intersect with the underlying platform in a way which games do not. Accessibility, system-wide services (e.g., dictionary), system-wide interactions (e.g., drag and drop). There are reasons I choose macOS, and when applications embrace the design philosophy and features of the platform they become great applications. PWAs will not do this to the same extent (and if they try to, the effort would be so significant they might as well go native).
I feel strongly that the platforms you develop for should be the platforms you love using. And so the things you develop should bring out the best and most valuable features of those platforms.
I would rather encourage developers to embrace each platform's strengths. I understand that many companies might not care — they want as many users as possible as cheaply as possible. But I do not appreciate that attitude at all.
Consider, for example, the interaction between generics in structs and classes, and protocols with associated types, and why you have to make stupid type-erasing wrappers like 'AnyObject' and so forth.
JS barely even has types at all, let alone generics. There's a lot less to go wrong there :-)
There are some more coherent arguments in play, don't get me wrong (in particular, the argument that web apps are a bastardization of what the World Wide Web was intended to be for; I agree with that wholeheartedly), but a lot of the rhetoric around here really reeks of elitism.
Because MTP is utter rubbish.
Really, people complain about iTunes? It's never failed me as slow as it is. Try using MTP...
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 lacking. My proof for this? Java programs. TCL programs. Electron programs. There has yet to be an application which uses the same GUI code across applications that is as good as a native application.
Maybe because it's a business app, and the loading screen checks whether you are on intranet (corp wifi) or not.
> I don't want push notifications, I barely enable them for native apps.
I would enable them for important apps (eg. business apps), so I want the technology, but I absolutely hate the popups on news sites for notifications.
So nobody wants that on mobile, but they still want to be able to use notifications when they start using an app from which they want to get notifications. It's that simple.
Let's say a fitness app. Let's say a basic simple fucking calendar app. Or a whatever run of the mill business workflow shit app, that requires your attention from time to time. And it'd be easier if there were no need to build for every fucking platform.
> why would I want to make the web worse by sticking icons for pages on my home screen?
Maybe people have great spatial memory (I like organizing icons on my home screen on Android), maybe you don't want to type?
> And browser-guided dialogs to put more icons on my home screen? Seriously?
Yeah. Consistent UX and security. Why not? It can be OS provided.
Why do I need a native binary, tens of thousands of lines of code, an app with a massive permissions access to my device...
To read a news article?
To book a flight?
To comment on an internet post?
Adding a few more "app features" to light web pages sounds a whole lot more attractive than banishing all useful functionality into the den of apps, where only larger teams and more experienced developers can roll out even basic functionality.
While I'm not an Android user, when I build an Android app I try to embrace the platform's strengths. I try to understand best practice, and follow the designs encouraged by Google. The resulting apps often look and behave completely differently between iOS and Android because the platforms are so different.
I have mixed opinions about a lot of Android's design philosophy, but there's no way I would build an Android app that didn't conform to the platform. Because I expect Android users enjoy consistency too.
There's probably some elitism in there. But there still is no web app on macOS or iOS that feels good, consistent and integrated in the same way that a good native app feels.
Those who do not learn the lessons from XML are doomed to repeat XML.
The DOM is simply an in-memory representation of an XML structure, and any attempts to populate a DOM with JSON (or YAML or ProtoBuffers or...) will simply re-create XML. CSS is a language for writing XML transformations (i.e. XSLT).
Of course, we already have JSON versions of schemas, transformations, xpath, namespaces, and incompatible decoders, so perhaps it is already too late for JSON.
I don't want push notifications from every site, but in this case it's valuable.
I wish it worked offline-first, but I know it's something they're looking at.
It's a feature some people like and use. I like getting notifications from some services I use without needing to keep a browser window open on that page to get notified. And I like not having to download and install yet another flipping app to get that feature.
Apple is ensuring that most of its ecosystem is fast and pleasant.
You don't need all these extra features for a website. However, they are useful and needed for many web apps. Just because websites sometimes abuse these features doesn't make them bad.
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 their strengths, and I think it's okay to accept that.
The Stocks and Weather app were originally HTML/CSS/JS apps just like Dashboard widgets (note Steve Jobs actually describing these apps on stage as 'widgets'), but the performance just wasn't there so they got reimplented using native apis.
If I'm using a web app and not realising it, then I would happily keep using that app. I do not think I am, though.
Also, there are plenty of native apps which are terrible and not consistent with the platform. I do not like to use those either.
I booked the holiday I'm currently on to China almost entirely on an iPad, I could easily have done all of it that way, with none of these features.
The author got it right:
> Apple treats web apps like second class citizens because they don’t generate money like native apps in the app store.
There won't be good support for web apps unless they find a way to make money out of them. If the day comes that native apps don't make money anymore, maybe because everybody gives them for free as front end to services paid outside the Apple Store (think Slack), then Apple could improve Safari and live only with revenues from the hardware.
It's going to be a hard fight because the goals of Apple and the goals of developers (and maybe also the goal of their customers) are not aligned and they own the platform.
I understand where you're coming from, I do. But when it comes to a phone, I greatly prefer the standardized hardware/interface/OS over the free for all. I hate to use the "it just works" nonsense, but that is exactly what it does.
Working in the Enterprise, the iPhone is infinitely easier for us to troubleshoot, and manage. Because everyone is running the same thing.
Similarly Facebook is just fine without the app and I'm happy with it. It has notifications etc. I'd like it if it was offline first but I'm more than happy with it as is.
> To read a news article?
I refuse to use a native app for this (e.g., Apple News, Flipboard). I love reading my news on the web. In a browser. Where the page is the content and the browser is the convenience. Even better is having Safari's "Reader Mode" enabled constantly so every article is consistently and nicely formatted and I get just the text and links.
> To book a flight?
Same thing for booking a flight, last time I did that was on a web site. With some forms and a few "Next" links to go to the next page until I was done.
It was nice to get the boarding pass in Apple Wallet though and then use that to board.
> To comment on an internet post?
I'm commenting on this post right here in Safari. I wouldn't ever want to use an app for it.
I don't need more "app features" on light web pages. Especially not the ones mentioned in the article.
Part of that though is because they _don't_ allow PWAs. Contrast that with Android, where it's now entirely possible to make a PWA so deeply integrated into the OS that the average user can't even tell it's not a native app: https://blog.chromium.org/2017/02/integrating-progressive-we...
"You know the rule, Apple ALWAYS gets a pass. No matter what they do, no matter how bad they treat their customers, no matter how awful their "upgrades" are, no matter how non-configurable and locked-in their products get over time, no matter the lack of innovation for the past 5 years, they always get a pass. Deal with it, that Jobs residue works its magic for a loooooong time."
Why after over 30 years of experiencing cross platform "write once run anywhere* technologies do developers still think that's the best user experience? Yes it makes life easier for the developer but it's rarely best for the user.
Building what should be simple dynamic websites as native apps is as bad. Many things that are "appified" seem to me to be too complicated when developed as web apps and have too simplistic a use case when developed as native ones for mobile.
A site should label itself as either a "plain site" or a "web app". "Sites" may only use a limited subset and amount of javascript (perhaps none?!). Browsers, search engines, and plugins can treat plain sites and web apps differently.
You can too, if that's how you want to consume the web. That's the beauty of it - it allows for that by design.
What I don't like is the position you are taking that "because I only want to consume the web that way, the Web itself should be hamstrung to my limited view of how it should work." There is no good reason - when the capability exists - that the Web as a platform should be chaste with things like Offline-first and even push messages (which IMHO are a big privacy win over the current mode of getting updates about things you're interested in, because you can't ungive someone your email address but you can easily turn off notification channels.) "Because that's not the way I want to consume the web" is not a good enough reason to deny the rest of us who want to see the Web continue as a modern and relevant platform. If you feel like shouting "get off my lawn" at the kids using those things, just flip off JS.
The webapp ecosystem is making the same class of mistakes pure-Java UIs used to. They assume e.g. that a textbox is just a rectangle on a screen that you can type stuff in. But it's not just that; it's much more.
Each operating system has a large set of default UI behaviours and idiosyncrasies. Continuing the example, a native textbox may be a clickable rectangle accepting keyboard input, but it also has a set of well-defined behaviours for Tab-cycling, text navigation, right-click handling, keyboard shortcut handling, cut/copy/paste handling, etc. Web applications fail to replicate that functionality completely and consistently. And platform consistency is a feature - one that many users value.
On top of that add resource waste (spinning up a webview and parsing heavy markup languages just to show a bunch of buttons) and web-specific failure modes - many vendors do not care about making their webapp work correctly when connectivity is limited, spotty or lacking. Hence the occasional full-screen 404 or 501 or connection-lost error when you press a button.
I want my applications to be performant, platform-consistent and interoperable. Web apps fail at all three, hence I avoid them like the plague, and discourage everyone from developing them.
About the only benefit I, as a pro user, I get from web application is the relative ease one can reverse-engineer their backend APIs with.
Yeah I wouldn't have been a Mac or iOS user if I wasn't anal about every single app on my system being a good citizen. From the simple fucking calendar app, fitness app, or whatever. I expect the developers of those apps to be as passionate about the pixels I interact with as I am.
Attention to detail is a reason these platforms are so loved. Encouraging "simple fucking calendar" apps to disregard the platform in their design is exactly the opposite reason I chose this platform to begin with.
> And it'd be easier if there were no need to build for every fucking platform.
It's easier to build badly for every platform. But no matter what technology stack you choose, if you want to build well for every platform then you are in for a lot of work. Cross platform is not going to make it easier because writing code is not the hard part.
Oh, but quite many will be able to tell after 5 seconds of using it. The rest will realize the moment the Internet connection drops temporarily.
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 time you have a connection. (Or optionally, have a notification pop-up next time you're online asking if you still want to post it.)
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.
I too dislike the fact that web developers have the freedom to make design decisions with which I disagree.
ObjC/Swift may be somewhat more complex than Javascript (or whatever) as programming languages, but one thing I like about iOS development right now is the relatively stable and well-integrated toolset.
I love web development. It's how I got started in all of this. But. The web development world is (in my eyes) currently an over-complex mess of standards and practices and tools coming from twenty different directions and sometimes changing radically from one year to the next. And I have complained before about the fact that Javascript is the primary language for using all of these. (I know, you use XXXScript which transpiles into Javascript. But that kind of adds evidence to my point, no?)
Anyway, this is not a central point to the article linked, but just something that caught my eye.
I suppose this is a compatible idea, but the PWA idea is based on everything going in the wrong direction generally. PWA aims to make everything "app" like even when it's not warranted. The vast majority of apps and PWAs don't need to exist at all. People don't need all this JavaScript interactive excess.
What I like about PWAs: a move away from everyone downloading ridiculous numbers of apps for each website. What I don't like about PWAs: turning websites into apps when not needed.
> Why do I need a web app, tens of millions of lines of code, a website with massive permissions to my browser.
> To read a news article?
> ...
You're making a circular argument to the original point. If you pointlessly cripple the best "cross-platform toolset" (the web) then of course the products made with it won't be as good.
Native mobile apps belong in the same category as desktop apps - they are good when you need close-to-the-metal graphics but there's no reason you should have to open up a desktop app to read the news or even do some light word processing.
I mean, the expected workflow is: I hook up the device to the computer, it shows up as a storage medium in my system. I can move files between the device and my computer as if it was an external disk or USB drive.
Anything on top of that is designed to be annoying.
On booking a flight: I'm not sure how doing this offline helps? Last time I did it, I did have to wait for pages to load after clicking links but it was on the order of seconds or less. And not anything frustrating.
On commenting on an Internet post: Doing it offline is not really interesting to me, and I'm not sure how that would work (which is why I'm happy to do it in a browser). Hacker News is more than fast enough. It's really minimal.
Well, actually they can, as Twitter has shown. It looks like Apple is trying to pull an Internet Explorer on us though.
> Create an app loading screen > Use push notifications > Add offline support > Create an initial app UI to load instantly > Prompt installation to the home screen through browser-guided dialog
All of these things are possible in Safari, no? It just doesn't support ServiceWorkers?
Aside: as a web security guy I think serviceworkers are a tragedy. Any crappy site you accidentally visit and immediately hit the back button on gets 10 minutes of freebie time to execute Javascript, roam your local network, exploit "slow" browser vulns, eat your bandwidth, etc. Gone are the days when the only things running Javascript are your open tabs.
Or, in other words, since we live in it, if the web turns into shit (even more than it already has), we'll have to live in that shit.
This is a non-sequitur. Fragmentation of Android OS versions isn't caused by Android letting you use web apps.
Sure, but PWAs allow for so much more than that. For example, you could not only read the article offline, but also _comment_ on it offline and have your comment automatically posted next time you have a connection. Or you could click a button to have all future articles from a particular news site automatically synced in the background while you're on WiFi so they're available for reading next time you're out; no manual downloading of each individual article required.
> On booking a flight: I'm not sure how doing this offline helps? Last time I did it, I did have to wait for pages to load after clicking links but it was on the order of seconds or less.
A PWA would allow much faster interaction than that. Seconds or less? That's terrible compared to the performance you _could_ be getting out of a PWA (i.e. near instant, like what you'd expect from a native app).
> Doing it offline is not really interesting to me, and I'm not sure how that would work (which is why I'm happy to do it in a browser). Hacker News is more than fast enough. It's really minimal.
Sounds to me like you're already content with the experience you're getting from the web. That's fine, but it's no reason to oppose features that would make the experience even better for those of us who do want them.
This is available on Safari, the same browser the author is bashing and comparing to IE.
And it's synced across macOS and iOS. It's called "reading list". It works with airplane mode and everything.
I've used Electron apps where no such restrictions have been put in place; it has lead me to believe HTML/CSS/JavaScript is nowhere near the best "cross-platform" toolset. It's more accurate to say that it's the lowest common denominator. Electron desktop apps today look and act like Java apps from ten years ago.
I'd say that the onus is on web developers to prove that it is capable of creating cross-platform apps that are even as good as, say, Eclipse, before attempting to call themselves "the best".
> do some light word processing.
Due to how much latency affects typing and interaction with an editor, I absolutely do want a native desktop app - neither Atom nor VSC react quickly enough for my editing uses, and Google docs is aggravating to write more than a page or two in.
Are you hand-writing notes and storing the notes as images?
I use Apple/Google's built-in notes fields on the default addressbooks and it works just fine. I can't imagine having huge write-ups on individual contacts unless it was for some business purpose. In that case, I'd move to a dedicated note-taking application anyway.
"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.
If only we had a standard way to do this...
Not to mention PWAs would allow for more complex offline features Safari doesn't support, like syncing the front page of a news site and all associated articles, or automatically downloading new articles as soon as they're posted.
Now imagine a world where PWA is substantially implemented across all major browsers. Given this scenario, let's pretend Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook in that environment. There's the case for PWA - some apps are more engaging (for better or worse) with push notifications, home screen access, offline functionality, and optimistic UI updates.
Do I care if my favorite blogs have push notifications? No. Do I care if my favorite social networks and messaging apps have push notifications? Yes.
I use web apps every day (JIRA, CircleCI, Slack, Google Docs). And reflecting on it, Google Docs has always been pretty damn good.
But I get irked every single time I try to do something like paste an image, or drag-and-drop, or lookup in the system dictionary and it just fails or works weirdly. I let those annoyances blind me to the value that these web apps provide.
I want the web to continue as a modern and relevant platform. But I don't see the point of trying to "escape" the browser chrome, or trying to copy the look and feel of native apps. If web apps are going to be cross-platform then they should embrace not being truly integrated with any native platform.
The article we are commenting on feels focused on making web apps "more like" native apps. I do not like that direction at all. I don't need, or want, to pretend my web apps are just like native apps. Because they never will be, and putting them side-by-side on my home screen with launch images will just increase my expectations of them to behave natively, and my annoyance with them when they fail to do so.
> When drag-and-drop becomes a thing in iOS 11, native apps will implement that feature well. I think it will take some time for web apps to implement it as nicely (if ever).
All these things the browser should be able to do well, if they wanted.
Nope. A properly-written PWA will continue working just fine when the user goes offline, just like a native app would.
BUT I also believe that Apple cares deeply about quality and its MAIN reason to refuse support is to protect the quality of user experiences on its iOS platform and steer developers to use its native API's which produce vastly superior apps.
It would take Apple years of wasted effort to guarantee similar experiences in the browser.
My opinion, since we're expressing them as responsible inhabitants of the Web, is that bringing the web to feature parity with mobile apps - in a responsible and well-governed way as I believe the standards committees who worked on the ServiceWorker spec have done - does more to keep it relevant and provide good User Experiences than forcing devs to try to match user expectations without the facilities.
Since we're expressing opinions, here's another one: Apple is purposefully dragging their feet by not implementing these things fully on Safari because they want to protect their precious walled garden as long as they can to the detriment of everyone else using the web.
Back to the original point I made - if you are concerned about the things being bolted on to the web "turning it to shit" you can turn them off. Maybe the UA vendors should make that easier to do, or easier to do selectively? That's an opinion you could express to them.
A big part of the reason they didn't is the reason that people dislike these fake-native web-apps; they just don't feel right.
You'd hit "Next", the screen would push over instantly. But there'd be a loading indicator right in the middle of it until the server returned the necessary data. Asynchronous apps or web sites or web apps will always need to load data from somewhere. PWA doesn't magically make loading go away.
I'm okay with adding offline support, faster loading, and all of that for web apps and sites I use in my browser. None of those features sound bad to me. In the browser.
To be sure, the guy who wrote that has never built a native app and knows nothing of native development. That is not actually a story of a native developer being converted by PWAs.
This is a newish change though, within the last couple of years.
That seems like circular logic. IMO, very few products are "necessary," and sure, right now developers have pretty much no choice but to support native walled gardens if they want to support the list of features PWA offers.
But what if users had a real choice? What if the web browser could offer an immersive user experience on par with native mobile apps? What if browser vendors actually put in effort to optimize for user preferences regarding PWA call-to-actions? What if PWAs were as widely promoted as native app stores?
Can you elaborate on this a bit? I primarily use Chrome as my browser on iOS. Is it really just running the Safari engine under the hood?
A11y is also being taken seriously.
I kinda feel you on that one - and to be honest, I'm not sure how you would "turn that off" but if memory serves I think it only happens if you opt to "add to home screen" which Chrome only prompts for things you visit a lot.
With most "native" platforms you can have a WYSIWYG UI editing (because those markup languages were designed with that in mind). You visually define the layout (with mouse/trackpad), drop components there, and it's all nice and easy to use. Surely, you can code your UI as well, but to best of my knowledge no one in their sane mind does this, unless they have some very good reasons.
With web apps (progressive or not), the usual approach is to code stuff by hand, and see the results in the synchronized preview pane (or nearby browser window), patching the code until it all fits. Even if there's some tool/IDE somewhere that would let me bootstrap a React/React Native/Elm/whatever app with a mouse - by dropping a button on a pane and connecting an event listener with another mouse click (like I had it in Delphi, 15 years ago), I think it would be an exception, not a rule.
Or maybe I'm just unaware about how things are really done and have false beliefs, heh.
I could easily have made it in HTML and JS except it required access to the camera which Mobile Safari doesn't (well didn't, I think maybe it has changed now) allow. So I ended up doing nothing.
Now, that's obviously just an anecdote and the world is at worst one useless app down but I think it makes for a good example as to why arguing against these improvements is silly: it's not in order to make websites more app-like, it's to allow things that would otherwise not exist. Yes, we should all write everything natively if we could, but sometimes that will just mean that things won't be developed at all.
As for the web being the de facto solution for light tasks, I'm not sure I agree there either, at least with the web's present resource consumption problems. There's no reason, for instance, for a word processor that barely matches modern WordPad or Word 95 in terms of features to be as heavy as it is (Google Docs).
If web apps were being approached from the angle of resource consciousness and taking advantage of platform strengths, I might have a different opinion, but that's not what anybody developing web apps wants.
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 bar, etc.).
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.
Making a PWA which gets 90% of the way there, and integrates as well as possible with the system (ie: fonts, location, notifications, accelerometer, etc.) is generally _less_ expensive than doing a single native app well, and has the chance to get you 90% of the way there on desktop and your "alternate" mobile platform.
PWA can be incredibly powerful (along w/ manifest.json-style support as android has), and I'm waiting for the day apple catches up to android on this one.
But there are other important factors to consider. I was working on a B2B app where users could see graphs and maps of a construction site in real time. The users were extremely happy how fast we could implement and release change requests and bug fixes. It was an ionic app. As far as I know, performance or lack of OS integration was never a problem. At the end of the day it's about choosing the right tool for the task.
I think that's where we'll have to disagree in some sense.
Adding features to the web platform will of course mean that web applications have access to more features. Some of those are great – I'm really glad we have geolocation, for example.
The trade-off is that every feature added to the platform incurs cost and complexity. Trading these off is important; what is the point in web apps that do everything native apps do, but in a somewhat less good way?
There are obviously pros and cons here, and I'm not convinced that the use cases for more complexity are beneficial enough to justify it.
When I right-click on the one I'm typing in right now, on Chrome running on a Mac, I even get an option to "Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track", whatever that might be, same as with the native text boxes.
This is hard to argue for/against, because having one (native or cross-platform) generally precludes you from simultaneously having both (necessary for a proper comparison).
Of note: I find Slack's Electron client as good as, if not better than, many native applications that I also use in my workflow. There are also benefits I know exist (as a dev) that I don't see (as a user) like shared code that shouldn't be discounted just because the end-user can't see them -- they indirectly result in a better product for the end-user by making it easier to add new features and maintain existing code.
Also: I've never had any issues with Minecraft's cross-platform java client either. Would it be any better as separate native apps targeted at each platform?
I'm okay with them living in the browser and gaining the performance advantages, offline support and push notifications.
They would have if people weren't "improving" them with JavaScript as some sort of a rite of passage, or something.
Web applications are fine, and have their place. I'd argue that place is not as frequently-used, heavily interactive applications; native apps exist for that, and are better in most ways.
This is the thing – some publishers insist on using their stupid application when all I want to do is browse some content. Other publishers insist I use their shitty JS-HTML-Hybrid nonsense because they are too stingy to develop proper applications. I wish we could learn to more effective use technologies in the right places.
We already see this (and solve for this) on desktop and platforms with a lot of variance in capability like Android. Just because people out there run 2.3 Android doesn't mean my 7.1 apps are going to be any less quality, even if they still work on the least-capable platform's featureset.
The obvious solution to this is to exclude or disable features from devices that can't handle them, which is also possible and encouraged on the web (with some decent precision through identification and fingerprinting provided by a myriad of things like service workers). Your banking site probably works in IE8 (barely), but that doesn't mean your up-to-date Chrome/Safari/whatever is going to be a worse experience.
>If web apps were being approached from the angle of resource consciousness and taking advantage of platform strengths, I might have a different opinion, but that's not what anybody developing web apps wants.
Web apps are focused on optimizing _different_ resources than native apps, that's all. Google Drive, for example, offers me an experience with no local installation cost in storage, virtually unlimited storage space for files, ancillary services like backups/authentication/sharing/etc handled for "free", native-like responsiveness while working offline, a low barrier-to-entry (unlike downloading/installing an app), a smoother experience across multiple devices, etc etc. These are all qualities that a web experience does better, and I think these are all qualities that people (myself included) value over the separate benefits of traditional native apps.
Well it seems like either each and every website could build offline support and background sync into their site, or you could use a browser that does it for you.
In the former case, if you rely on sites integrating it, you could be frustrated when some sites do not implement background sync and offline support (or do it badly).
Having the browser do it seems simpler. Especially given the real world use cases for this feature.
(I'm not against having these technologies on the web. Just seems more sensible for a browser to do your reading list — just like it manages your tabs.)
There's two big differences:
- There was an unsatisfied need back then to move your apps and data with you as you moved to another PC. The phone moves with you.
- Microsoft couldn't prohibit Mozilla and Google from writing non-crippled Windows web browsers. Apple learned from that "mistake" and won't let it happen on iOS.
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 web more than their walled garden.
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. Keep making static sites if that's what suits your purpose and don't register any ServiceWorkers or any other things you consider "bloat". (As an aside - As fashionable as it has become to moan about Web "bloat" let's strive to remember that the Web standards are debated and governed by committees of consummate experts mostly in the open.) If we expand the Web platform we can both develop "the way we want" (assuming you want to keep doing things the way you have and I want to use new features).
And this complaint practically always comes from the front end web crew... every other type of developer I've met has zero issues with learning the technologies relevant to a particular platform.
Notifications are tough to do as is - and a core user need. You and I might turn them off, but many people rely on them heavily. If I have responsive web app with notifications - that's the dream for me. because I don't want to have to build a native app JUST for that. Nor, should many others need to.
That's fine for them, but ultimately, I think we've got far too many apps with crappy UIs.
So what's the the real value to the platform and the people who use it for another source of them?
Your argument seems to indicate that you just like iPhones better. Otherwise, I think you would have said "I'd prefer that our company either standardize on one model of Android phone or the iPhone." because both would have the same effect - things would be easier to troubleshoot and manage since everyone would be running the same thing.
Anyway, currently as an iPhone user I think Apple comes up massively short on basic features. For instance - on an $800 phone they're missing a physical message-waiting indicator light! That's completely absurd to me. Some others: You can't have multiple users (and this is big for the Enterprise). You can't put app icons wherever you want, you have to stick them all together in one big pile on the screen. You can't see the time a text message came in until you perform a non-obvious gesture. You can't see anything useful in the call history list until you click an item. You can't even change the default browser!
It's no wonder to me why Enterprise customers don't standardize on the iPhone - they'd be giving up all control to Apple.
Developing for a single platform and being able to run everywhere is great. I'm not sure what your "not possible elsewhere" is referring to, though. Java is one example of a language that's possible to deploy pretty much everywhere. Or do you mean natively in a browser?
While it's true that as a developer I'm free to use or not use any newly-introduced features and standards, as a consumer I don't have that choice. I either continue to use the sites and services I did before they changed everything, or I have to find an alternative which may not exist. Remember all the sites that required flash to run? That's what I want to avoid with responsive web apps.
At the same time, you're no longer focusing on what makes each platform unique, and just giving them all a lowest common denominator. That's not really good either.
"This means I had to learn an entirely new technology stack"
Learning new things is good.
"Until Apple adds PWA support, I can't make as good stuff, and people can't use the better stuff."
This is absolutely wrong, and is just an excuse. You can make great stuff, and people can use it. You just need to put in effort.
PWAs are a great idea for me. Getting an Apple developer license is not.
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-download-zero-ap...
From a user perspective, I care less about whether the app is a PWA or native, and more about the "goal" I'm trying to achieve. If my goal is to find a new house, a PWA allows me to instantly see results (without first having to download an app), then use native-like features such as being notified when new properties are available. I can use these features after I visit a given website and am prompted to save the app to my homescreen.
Compare this to the random native apps that people accumulate on their phone until it slows down so much that they have to perform an "app purge".
This is going to radically change with Webassembly, stay tuned.
>The same goes for Electron-based apps.
So a web app is easier for you, but aren't you really just transferring the cost to your users in the form of battery and data consumption?
+1
We're going to end up at an "Idiocracy" of programming.
Yes, service workers would be nicer, but you don't have to go native to do an offline app on iOS. I built one years ago, appcache is good enough.
Um. Email?
News readers requesting that level of access is bad, but at least they tell you when they're invading your privacy.
Doesn't mean you have to reinstall all your apps every week?
Everybody by now knows what a hamburger button, tabs, and toggle switches do.
Do you feel the same way with QT?
There's a reason all of those you cited failed. That reason is not "a cross platform environment can not be good".
I also find the comment about needing to learn a new stack “React Native and Xcode” to be ridiculous– no, what needs to be learned is Swift and Xcode.
Far too many “web” developers consider native mobile to be some kind of subset of web development and thus expect to use the same tools as they use for web.
Web is a different medium! If you want to program embedded systems, then the first question isn’t “how can I do this with JavaScript?” They would learn the correct language for the platform, perhaps embedded C. You don’t launch a Linux server and then ask “how can I make this server run Windows? I guess I should write a JavaScript library for that!” It’s ludicrous.
With iOS, developers often just think of it as a “native” website rather than an actual application. It seems like some developers will do everything possible to avoid simply learning Swift and making actual apps that fully exploit the power of the device.
React Native – if that is considered “good” then we have major problems. Facebook applications are horrible at power management; they suck power at phenomenal rates compared to other applications. The smoothness of the UI isn’t as “native” as actual Swift apps coded correctly. There always seem to be a slight amount of glitch in the experience. Facebook has famously avoid actually coding real native apps – from the beginning of their mobile experience they have seemingly embraced doing everything except writing actual Swift or Objective C. It is almost a religious opposition to it – and despite being a multi-billion dollar company, some tiny app studio in Poland could write higher quality apps. It should be an embarrassment, but they’re Facebook so everyone just accepts the status quo of less than perfect. No person here can say that the Facebook apps are perfect. But they should be. They have a gazillion dollars and can hire almost anyone they want, so they have no excuse for anything less than perfection. At the very least get power management right!
There’s always this argument that x-Native is “good enough” – if, as a company you want “good enough,” then keep making apps that conform to the lowest common denominator. If you want to make extraordinary applications that move the needle of quality, then use Swift and build it correctly.
This will likely get downvoted into oblivion because the HN crowd seems to be exhaustingly enamored with React Native, however, regardless of how it’s framed, writing PWAs or using some cross-platform “solution” is a cop-out. It’s lazy and it provides users with an experience that is worse than they deserve.
iOS is better than Android in so many ways, yet developers insist on making iOS apps that are really just cross-platform compromises.
My tiny bootstrapped company is working to release our iOS app, with Android soon to follow – if we can do it, there seems little excuse for actual funded companies to skimp on providing the best experience for users. Those arguing that PWA or x-Native cross platform systems are just as good as actual native, well there is no amount of argument that will change your minds. Which is sad. Rather than trying to make React Native, etc. “better” why not just use what is already better? Why not let users enjoy the full power of their devices instead of writing these average “good enough” compromises. It’s like this ridiculous trend of using Electron or, in the past Adobe Air. Nowhere near the quality of writing an actual native app. Looking at you Slack. Slack is even proud to have made a “native app with web technologies.” WHY? Damnit make a native app with native technologies! Can you not hire two actual MacOS developers? Why should making Electron apps be celebrated? It’s sloppy. It’s lazy. It’s a disservice to users. Why use some Electron-wrapped webpage and just not the webpage?
Every day it seems on HN people are posting about <some language> but very few posts about Swift. Is there some opposition that I am missing? Why must JavaScript be the language of everything? what ever happened to picking the right language for the job rather than trying to force a web peg into a native hole.
By the way, my exact arguments could be made for Android development as well. Android users are also being short-changed by these pseudo-native cross platform “solutions.”
I only use GMail as gateway to aggregate my email accounts and synchronize with my Android devices, native mail client.
On Windows and GNU/Linux systems at home, I happily keep using Thunderbird.
Would it be, in a way, pushing costs onto users? potentially. But, it's a matter of shipping something that works at the loss of some battery and data usage (minimal) or spending 6 months to a year learning and developing a native app which is more efficient for end users. But both approaches are subject to market validation - one lets you reach validation quickly, the other requires quite a detour.
So, I'd rather not throw away all that time. If I can get notifications that work, even if only checked every 10 minutes vs. instant, I would be happy. Then, if there is market fit and proper demand, I can likely afford the time/money to build out a native experience.
We could have a better DOM too. It could be more semantic, and more modular. The good thing is that on this one we are moving in the right direction.
CSS would gain by becoming Turing complete. It also could be aware of runtime values.
But yes, JSON, YAML, and ProtoBuffers are all worsened versions of it. The good news is that we abandoned SOAP, but at the cost of abandoning service directories too.
I only put up with it due to being the editor with the best support for Rust plugins.
The day I can have the same experience on Emacs for Rust, VSCode gets kicked out.
But how much happier would they be with 100/100. Just because you feed your guests chicken and they like it doesn’t mean that they would not like lobster more.
A good MacOS or Windows Dev can move just as fast as a web developer trying to make fake-native apps.
E.g. Thunderbird apparently only introduced threaded conversations 7 years after GMail did.
How many details does an app that doesn't get written have compared to a website?
> I have yet to find a "web app" that I delight in using, though I love many web sites and native apps.
There are a lot of websites I like using. There are very few apps I like using so much I want to install.
Keeping that attitude means that Apple can not grow¹, but not that it will shrink.
1 - All the times they acquired a lot of market share, they weren't doing that.
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. App developers have nothing to do with that.
* If only Google manufactured and updated Android phones (hence no fragmentation), you would still be able to run whatever you wanted in the phone. "Walled garden" doesn't mean "closed source".
That was the case in the 90s, and hasn't been the case since. "Some times, that are so rare that people point to it and comment on it on forums", yes.
Loading screens are obviously a good thing when lots of assets need to be loaded for a game. The presentation can inform the user where things are at in the process of fetching those items. Flash could do it quite well.
Isn't that obvious though? A loading screen is informative and functional.
> This is the thing – some publishers insist on using their stupid application when all I want to do is browse some content.
That's exactly the problem PWAs solve. Those publishers want some features that on iOS are only available to native apps, and so have to make the experience suck for Apple users by using an installed native app instead of a web app. Both publishers and users have an aligned interest there for PWAs, which goes against Apple's own interest.
Not all our individual tastes align with what's most popular, obviously.
I still manage my own email servers.
Java on a phone is nothing new, but the Java for Symbian you'd write probably wouldn't work very well on a desktop. VC++ for Windows Mobile apps wouldn't work well on a desktop either. The web is the lowest common target, even though it's quite a high level to target. We still run into plenty of HCI issues (why is there a big fat + button in the lower-right on my laptop in GDocs instead of "New" or File -> New action? Because Material is mobile-first and applied thoughtlessly to non-touch experiences), but if you play your cards right, it's now possible to have a codebase, and truly the same app, running on whatever OS and architecture the user has, without specifically building and packaging for 30 different target combinations.
Sometimes a native app is better, sometimes it is worse. It's certainly better if all you care about is fancy animations.
If Android and iOS made it easier to share middleware libraries (C++ is a second class citizen for both), I think there would be a smaller incentive for HTML5 apps.
If the comments were limited to "Safari needs X and Y", and there was no discussion about the an inherent need for PWAs it would be a pretty short thread.
Safari's support for PWA features is a proxy referendum of PWAs themselves.[1]
[1] And Google's desire to not being dis-intermediated as an arbiter of access to information/functionality via web properties.
WebRTC is an API/Protocol that enables Real Time Communication between browsers.
No, that's not what I said at all. I guess you're only going to read what you want to hear...
How is it hard to imagine a service I don't frequent use but when I do, I want notifications? I use these services a few times a year at most. Why would I want to install an app if they have it?
For instance, maybe instead of being an always online application, they can put in effort at caching for offline use instead of duplicating features across different platforms.
I did my senior project in Electron and there was no way we could have implemented as much as we did if we had to build a native solution for every platform.
> The apps implementing the standard are called progressive web applications, not to be confused with confusingly similar terms like progressive enhancement or responsive apps.
Front-end moves at the speed of light, I reckon it's hard to come up with original names...
My brain already has to remember thousands of software library names and techniques and argument orders, etc. Not making your label meld into people's brains by being similar to other software names in the SAME niche is a good place to start though.
If 'a single codebase of open technologies' is so important then the same argument says Apple should abandon their platforms in favor of linux/AOSP. I'm sure a number of people here believe that (and strongly) but ... (1) Apple has a few hundred billion counterarguments sitting in the bank and (2) the entire industry has greatly benefited from Apple's efforts at pushing their closed platforms.
And if 'a single codebase of open technologies' isn't the be all end all then the argument reduces to "Apple should subsidize the technology I'm invested in". I bet turnip farmers think Apple should buy lots of turnips too.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So ? Updates happen automatically anyway.
> A native app will never be available on all platforms.
I don’t need it on all platforms, I only use iOS.
In the end, Apple got what they wanted. I needed a feature that PWA's can give me - but Apple hasn't added support for them in mobile safari, so I paid the $100 to get access to the app store, and was forced to learn a completely different language.
Yes, the end product has an arguably better and 'native-like' experience, but it took me longer to do and it is lacking some of the features that I could have rolled out if I was able to use PWA's. And it would have worked on Android out of the box as well.
I don't regret learning React Native. It was actually really, really fun. The community is great, and being able to write native apps now feels really good.
But its the principal of the matter. Holding back innovation for your company's own selfish reasons is a shitty thing to do.
If I'd have to guess, I'd say that all of your examples sucked in different ways and it is not a general trend.
If you're talking about fonts rendering differently, or some line being some pixels further to the right, same thing; incomparable.
If you're talking about corporate web apps written for IE, those aren't accessible from a phone anyway, so the distinction between native and web app is meaningless for them.
If, instead, you're talking of websites that really don't work on a modern browser, and you stumble on them day to day, you just have an experience that's different from most other people. The easiest way to tell that what I'm telling you isn't just my individual experience is to compare what you see and read today from what used to be the case in the days of IE domination.
Acting like a dick that thinks people that disagree with you are in a sorry little bubble of ignorance is just a character flaw; nothing to do with this.
So am I as an end user suppose to be upset that you were forced to make a better product.
Holding back innovation for the company's selfish reasons?
Back in 2008 they said the same thing about Apple not supporting Flash and Java.
If anyone is being selfish to try foist cross platform apps that you admitted weren't as good, it isn't Apple.
As an iOS user I don't expect Apple to mandate your preferences for me
> There are thousands of tiny details that your web app just won't have. Those details are more important than your familiarity with a tech stack or how long it takes you to deploy something.
They are more important to you. They may not be to me if they prevent an app I need being made, or being available cross-platform (much more important to me than it being perfect on any one), or being affordable (to me).
The notion that every app must be the perfect gold-plated 'delightful' experience is corporate marketing drivel. It is relevant to some (people and apps), but not others. We don't need the personal tastes of some precious souls to be mandated for all of us by the platforms we happen to use (today).
True or not, this is only relevant if it's indubitable that every app has to be 'the best product that can be made' in terms of platform-centric gold-plated polish. But it's not. Values often clash and tradeoffs are made. For some apps I would prioritise cross-platform availability far above platform polish. For others the converse is true. Some products don't merit the effort or expense of being 'the best product that can be made'. Others do.
Applets were not seamless (requiring a plugin to be installed), did not allow most native features, and ran in anything but a secure sandbox.
They were open (by nature of the JVM), and cross-platform, but that's it.
Hold on - do you know what a progressive web app is? We're not talking about apps like Slack which bundle a browser inside of them - we're talking about webpages that behave like applications.
>many vendors do not care about making their webapp work correctly when connectivity is limited, spotty or lacking.
Offline support is a key feature of PWAs, so this point is moot.
>Each operating system has a large set of default UI behaviours and idiosyncrasies.
Browsers are completely able to define their own design language, so a text box need not look the same in every browser. As long as they conform to common standards, everything will work fine.
As such, you don't get the Java problem where everything must conform to the same style, and thus feels foreign in different environments.
>I want my applications to be performant, platform-consistent and interoperable. Web apps fail at all three
PWAs excel at all three. That's the whole idea.
It's not comparable to writing multiple native apps, but it's the exact same model as having to use cross-platform toolkits like QT. The web has just replaced OS with browser.
> taking about fonts rendering differently
This mimics what happens when using something like QT or Java since they at least try look kind of like the platform they're running on.
> talking about corporate web apps written for IE
IE & Chrome specific features are exactly kinds of things that make cross-browser development just like cross-platform development. Your site either has to use the lowest common denominator or be littered with platform ... err browser specific code -- exactly like native apps.
Yes!
Qt is a nice library, and was almost certainly the right choice for an open-source application like Wireshark that had previously used the execrable GTK lib on non-X11 platforms, but Qt tries really hard to make water not wet in MANY cases.
Just look at what it takes to get a Mac Qt application to work well in full-screen mode on multiple monitors. Or handling keyboard-focus changes when a notification window pops up (especially one for iMessages). Or any number of things where the underlying platform libs on Windows, MacOS, and X11 differ significantly.
People who've only programmed web applications don't understand how weird platform GUI libraries are or how many corner-cases they have, especially when dealing with multi-window applications, keyboard focus changes, and notification & tool windows. Programming an application to this stuff is tricky - wrapping it in a cross-platform lib is nearly impossible!
Qt exactly proves the point that cross-platform libraries will NEVER give you the same high-quality experience that native applications written to the platform libs will.
It's a sad state of affairs for the web when we see articles claiming that one company's failure to adopt a standard amounts to threatening the web. The open web supports and should encourage competition, not blind homogeny.
I don't think it's misguided for a company to hesitate in supporting a platform which will enable its users to jump ship to another competing company.
WebRTC support is arriving soonish so I'm getting what I want despite the downvotes :)
If I just picked iOS and told every one of my app's users that they have to use it, it would be pretty difficult for me to succeed.
Its not that I don't want to learn another language. Its that the time it takes me to maintain 3 separate codebases takes away from my ability to iterate on product features and build stuff that will actually help the people using the app, and ultimately make my company successful.
I bet that's how Apple feels about implementing PWA.
That says nothing except the sad state of the other native apps you use in your workflow.
The truth is that yes, indeed, I can find a lot of native apps that are just about as "good" as slacks native Mac (and iOS - it's really bad too) app, and I can also find a lot that are a lot worse. But why compare to them at all? We should be measuring how good an app is by comparing it to, in this case, the best of the best native apps on the particular platform, or across all platforms, if so desired.
I get that sometimes it's not feasible to built native apps because you have to do the work twice in the same time and so on, but that is completely irrelevant to how good the product is. Is it good enough? That is a different thing entirely.
How much latency are we talking about here? I can't imagine how latency would affect typing..
> and interaction with an editor
Agreed, but again, how much latency are we talking about here? The projects I've used VSCode on have never had latency issues.
That way, the bulk of your team maintains the business logic, and you can get away with much smaller teams for the platform-specific bits.
I'm a C and C++ programmer with a background in embedded systems. My idea of a development framework is a Makefile, a bunch of headers and .a files. I've got an investment in a lot of libraries I've already written over the years. I want to develop great web applications. Should I feel frustrated that it's not straightforward to use my preferred toolset to build this web app? Should I blame browsers for not accommodating my development preferences? No! I need to bite the bullet and learn JS and HTML.
You need to pick the appropriate tools for the platform you're targeting, get out of your comfort zone and take the time to learn them.
I certainly don't believe so.
I think part of the gap is that some folks believe features are everything, and others believe that features are one thing, and quality, support, accessibility and other stuff is just as important, the stuff that in my mind makes good products in general, both in software and hardware, but also in wood-working and clothing and so on.
If features are everything, I can see why cross-platform is what you want, but that is so far away from anything that is Apple.
These things _used_ to work in the Slack app. What happened?
I do use an Android phone on a regular basis, and there it's useful, since it only pops up when important messages arrive (read: on-call stuff).
But my daily driver is an iPhone, and sorry - this would be an absolute mess with the amount of apps installed trying to notify me of things. It's virtually impossible to determine what notifications or messages are important. Is a waze notification that a friend will almost arrive important? Not really. Is a waze notification that I should leave in 10 minutes important since the traffic isn't optimal? Absolutely. Relying on such an indicator simply doesn't work the moment you have dozens and dozens of apps installed that all send you mostly mundane low priority messages, but from time to time want to tell you something you really want to know.
In my case, a light like that would be on all the time or off when you actually have a pretty important notification - which would mean you simply cannot rely on it. Notifications are already too complex, and at the same time too limited. Simplifying it into a colored light is just adding to that mess.
I feel the same way about Jupyter. Sure it's very clever to run it in a browser but it is clunky as hell compared to native RStudio (free) or MathCAD (commercial).
I want to be passionate, but - let's say - I know CSS/HTML/Java and a bit of C#, and so while I could spend time building an Android app and maybe fiddle a bit with a Windows Phone app, but there's no way in hell that I want to venture into OS X territory, ObjectiveC creeps me out more than Haskell and f#, so I can't. (Okay, Swift is nice, but I'm still not allowed in the closed garden, because I don't have access to Xcode.)
I would gladly pay the 100 USD for the Apple Store Developer privilege if I'd get to use nice Web APIs. It can be whitelisted on the Store settings, and it can even integrate into the store, that'd be almost better.
Also product builders usually want to provide good user experiences. You may be saving yourself from some additional code but delivering battery draining solutions with non-native UI patterns and broken accessibility to your users.
I'd be OK with a small icon in the address bar to indicate push notifications are available on a site but even one pop up asking for permission is too many.
Yet those of us old enough to remember the 90s also recall how the openness of the web freed people from the monopolistic behavior of Microsoft. Sure, the web was bad for Microsoft, but great for users.
This whole argument is circular. Web capabilities lag because companies like Apple deliberately drag their feet. Then people like you cite all the advanced features of native development as a reason not to try and use the web. All of which suits Apple fine, since they get 30% of native, and 0% of the web. Apple hobbling PWA is the new "IE-only" website.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
iTunes is beyond irritating to use, I've not once fired it up and accomplished what I came to do without at least one google search.
Being on a platform where users and developers care about exactly what shade of grey their menu bar icon was, or matching the platform characteristics, adopting system-wide services, making apps accessible, is very important to me.
You may not care, but that's how I choose a platform. It's not marketing, it's personal preference.
I'm going to push for iOS and macOS to develop in this direction by supporting developers who try their very best to make thoughtful and consistent software.
Your argument works against yourself: "cheap cross-platform apps are relevant to some, but we don't need the personal tastes of some precious souls to be mandated for all of us." (I'm not making this argument against you, but try to see how cross-platform is your own personal preference that you are trying to push onto others. In my opinion it degrades a platform even if you don't use any cross-platform apps.)
Generally speaking, they can all be worked around by a good designer. The inferior install, update, and cross platform experience for native apps can't be worked around.
Are you talking about like realtime video authoring apps or games? I'll admit in those categories the web is often not the best choice.
However, Opera Mini has a “Mini mode”, where the parsing and JavaScript execution is done on Opera's server, which then compresses the data and sends it to the phone for display. In this mode, it does not use the WebKit framework. Opera Mini has been on the App Store since 2010.
https://techcrunch.com/2010/04/12/surprise-surprise-opera-mi...
I wonder if section 2.5.6 applies to apps that display web pages as one function among many, and not to web browsers. Maybe Apple figures that if the user hits a “Web Page” button in some app, they expect it to work just like Safari, but if they download Chrome, Firefox, or Opera Mini, they actually want the web browser to be different from Safari. But I haven't researched this yet.
You can get close to the look & feel of native app, but you can never get there.
- Speed. It's sluggish compared to the FastMail web UI, and slow compared to Mail.app on my Mac.
- System provided UI editing controls which would bring richer editing and consistent controls
- Consistent hotkeys - I know Gmail has rich hotkeys, but all my other software uses a fairly consistent set which can also access a wider range of keys than a browser can do.
- Automation - I use automation and tools like Alfred (/Quicksilver/Gnome Do/etc) and these can interface with native apps much more effectively through things like AppleScript.
- Drag and drop (you can drag and drop much more than you might think on a Mac, and I use it extensively)
- Centralised notification control in system preferences
- Better (and faster) layout – you're constrained to a web browser so there's less you can do in terms of good use of screen real-estate.
- Prettier – it might sound superficial, but I enjoy using apps that have a nicer design and Gmail, compared with many native clients, looks pretty terrible.
- Real multi-window support - using new tabs doesn't provide the same interface or interaction patterns.
- Real right-click support, with the options I'd expect for any other system app.
That's most of what I'd like to see. Note that an Electron app like Slack doesn't exhibit many of these.