The reality is, most webapps for mobile just suck. The UX is nowhere near that of a native application. I don't want any text to be selectable. I don't want pull to refresh on every page. I don't want the left-swipe to take me to the previous page.
You can probably find workarounds for all these issues. The new Silk library (https://silkhq.co/) is the first case I've seen that get's very close to a native experience. But even the fact that this is a paid library comes to show how non-trivial this is.
- text is selectable
- content is zoomable
- you can have an ad/nuisance blocker
- page source is open
While native apps have their own advantages:
- much smoother experience esp. navigation, scrolling, animations, etc.
- better overall performance (JavaScript will always lose to the native binary)
- access to hardware opens new possibilities; audio, video accelerators etc.; there's a ton of things you can't do in the browser with audio for example
- widgets, some of them are nice and useful too
- for publishers: an app icon on the home screen is a reminder, a "hook" of sorts; this is the main reason they push apps over web versions
I've had enough browser apps try that on my phone. Usually they start to lag out and become unbearably slow due to the framework bloat, compared to native apps that have no such issues.
Browsers are some of the very few apps that work well on a phone. Most of the other ones feel like a mess (except games I guess).
Guess which one of us has way more problems, due to both functionality and a constantly changing layout?
Strange. This inability to select any text has always felt like one of the most hostile things developers could ever do. It feels like pure vandalism.
Another thing that causes massive productivity degradation is not being able to keep multiple pages open so you can come back to some state. I cannot imagine how anyone could possibly use these apps for any serious work.
The UX of almost all native mobile apps is absolute crap. But it's not their nativeness that makes them crap. I'm not complaining about the idea of operating systems offering non-portable but high performance UI primitives that make use of OS facilities.
Many native desktop apps don't have these UX issues (at least not all of them at the same time). It's the mobile UX patterns, conventions and native UI frameworks that are causing this catastrophic state of affairs.
Real question here, what are you trying to do when you "swipe back"?
By instinct I swipe back like I am in Safari, and that does something else in those.
Disabling text selection is not just worse UX, it is actively user-hostile
These are more like byproduct of the fact that web apps are built on the stack not suited for modern UI apps. It's literally a text typesetting engine pretending to be a rendering engine for high-performance UI.
So, it can also be framed as:
- everything is selectable, even what shouldn't be - buttons, drawers, video players, etc - content is zoomable, which most of the time just breaks UX in hilariuous ways. Developers have to do extra-work to either disable zoom or make hacks/workarounds.
"Everything is selectable" and "everything is zoomable" makes total sense if it's a blog post. If it's a UI for the modern app, it does not.
In the past, occasionally there would be an error message in a message box dialog that I wanted to copy and paste. And then I discovered that despite it not looking selectable, it actually was.
I don't want to accidentally select the text of my menu bar, or of a text box label, or a dialog tab title.
Reddit on iOS was one that did it.
Iconic mirrors a lot of it, but Apple/google could have just as easily made them native components triggered in the browser
Lots of limitations for you to not accidentally do something, maybe there is a way to not accidentally do those things and also help people that need them.
This is an outdated view of the web. Catch up or be left behind.
You're awfully arrogant in making a judgement about my empathy... if you want to make this personal.
Or maybe you can justify why people need to be able to select menu labels in the first place? That's not standard on any OS I've ever used, so it's up to the person who wants to change things to justify why.
Maybe be less judgmental of people here on HN, and contribute something factual instead? I at least gave a factual account of my personal experience, which is a data point. Describing one's experience isn't egoism.
At least in recent versions of Android there is that OCR (?) powered functionality to select text when you're in switch-app view.
But mainly don't expect any good web app integration on mobile, because it would hit the store 30% tax.
Other than that, I'd like text to be selectable! I don't like it when apps don't allow you to copy text.
I use Copy [1], and when that doesn't work I use the OCR text selection feature on my Pixel phone.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.weberdo.ap...
I would suggest that these days you'd be much better off taking a screenshot and putting that into Google Translate.
That way all the text remains in-place, and you can keep it as a visual reference to refer to.
If you were selecting text, it would wind up in a kind of jumble that would be much harder to use.
Use Circle to Search? Native capability that works on every single app, and is close to perfect (with the exception of handling text at the very bottom/top of your screen that's covered by your navbar/Google logo).
There are cases like media apps, camera apps, videogames, terminal emulators, clipboard managers etc. that won't become Web apps any time soon.
Either because they need to operate closer to the OS, or for performance expectation reasons.
But I've just had a quick scroll through the apps on my phone, and I can confidently say that 90% of them are basically HTTP clients that interact with an HTTP server.
And even those that do more could probably be wrapped into a WebAssembly artifact with comparable performance in a near future.
The reason why they are not PWAs, and why engineers are often expected to do triple work (iOS, Android, Web), and why there aren't more products released as PWAs, keeps eluding me.
Sure, you have to tell folks how the "Install/Add to home screen" process works from a mobile browser, but is it that really that much more friction compared to an App Store paradigm to justify the abuse of native apps that either reinvent the wheel multiple times, or are just unglorified Web browsers running an Electron app just to show you the discounts at the supermarket near your house?
Even if you could (which you can't, at least on my, modern, phone), it would be a workaround, not a solution.
A solution would be allowing free selection like in the browser or, better yet, ditching "native" apps for web apps, as the person above suggested. As a bonus, this "exodus" will force browser makers to iron out any UX issues very quickly.