And for years, it was our most requested feature, by far. We had instructions for how to pin the site to your home screen, and would explain to users how the website does everything an app can do. Still, constant requests for an app. Finally we relented and released one, and very quickly around half our mobile traffic moved to the app without us really trying to nudge people at all.
People just really like apps! I think it suits our mental model of different tools for different uses. We've also found that app users are much more engaged than website users, but of course much of that will be selection bias. Still, I can see how having your app on someone's home screen could provide a significant boost to retention, compared to a website they're liable to forget. For us now, that's the main benefit we see. Certainly don't use any additional data, though I won't argue that other companies don't.
I would say people really hate websites on mobile. The browsers are horrible, the pages are slow and oftentimes broken in some way. You get all these popups everywhere, ads are much more intrusive. It's just bad experience, so of course people would prefer app for something they use.
I avoid the browser on mobile as much as possible and I don't remember ever having a good time using it.
That said, the harder you "nudge" me, the more I want to avoid the app and the whole business. Especially if you have any other dark patterns - I will assume you want me to download your app just so you can abuse me better.
- Banking: Install it on a different android profile because my websites forces me to use the App one way or the other anyway.
- If the site uses an existing open protocol to interact (IndieWeb, Fediverse, etc), use a non-browser/non-electron app that can handle multiple instances of such protocols.
- If not, and it has PWA, is responsive, and I use it at least twice a day, use the PWA (so far I have one).
- If it does not have PWA, but have has nice responsive layout, Firefox Android with uBlock Origin (I use Iornfox).
- For everything else, if I'm outside without a laptop, whine, complain, and use the website in the mobile browser, enable desktop mode if it has a crappy UI.
- If I'm not outside, browse it from my laptop.
I think Apple's core apps that ship with iOS are about the only things that don't annoy me. They work offline and disconnected for days at a time quite happily and generally work as intended. No one else seems to bother with that and rather ships some fat web turd instead that works occasionally and forces you to sign in all the time.
This is the result of the inconsistent user experience to which gatekeepers like Apple have been actively contributing through active sabotage of web apps, such that all profitable apps can be more effectively and reliably taxed through Apple's App Store.
The manufactured perception of the general public then became that web apps are not "real apps" despite offering the exact same features. They have been dragged down by the subtle artificial friction that makes the UX feel subpar.
This reminds me of my own experience of mobile websites when they first emerged. I thought that the desktop version of a website is the "real website" i.e. that there is only one static original website and that its mobile version was some fake substitute, so I always activated the option "show desktop version". Then I learned about responsive web design and it clicked for me. I predict that a similar epiphany will occur among casuals once the active sabotage of web apps stops due to regulations reigning in the anti-competitive business practices of gatekeepers.
I'm sure that some people will still prefer "native" apps for whatever reason. However, if regulators do a proper job and allow web apps to compete on a level playing field, then a lay person wouldn't even be able to differentiate between them. This is even the case today where some developers simply wrap their web app in a WebView and ship it as a "native" app.
The problem is not just to make your site mobile friendly, it is also that the rest of the web isn't.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Every time I grab her phone I get dizzy and lost from the hundreds of apps. When she grabs mine, she wonders how I accomplish anything at all.
If web apps were any good, we'd see a plethora of them on Android. There are none (or very, very, very few).
If web apps were any good, nothing Apple "gatekeeps" would prevent you from building an amazing web app for iOS. The things Apple "gatekeeps" (such as mobile push) would not prevent you from making a smooth fast web app.
And yet here we are.
> if regulators do a proper job and allow web apps to compete on a level playing field
They already are competing on a level playing field. It's not "lack of NFC" or "lack of Bluetooth" or "lack of <another moving goalpost>" that prevent you from having good web apps.
This statement alone is evidence that you didn't understand the crux of the issue. You are also confusing cause and effect. I clearly explained the root causes for that. The reason there are not more web apps is not that they aren't "good" - what does that even mean? what is the criterion for "good" here? If you say that it's because they lack certain features, then you confirmed my point that it's due to active sabotage and denial of equal rights. Be specific, why are they not "good"? There wouldn't be coincidentally a mysterious opposing force that actively prevents developers from improving those aspects, right?
>There are none (or very, very, very few).
X (Twitter) - has PWA
Pinterest - has PWA
Spotify - has PWA
Uber - Hybrid
Starbucks - has PWA
Again, you're confusing cause and effect. It's like actively sabotaging a runner and saying: "See? that runner sucks!!" - Yeah because that runner is being actively sabotaged. You're completely ignoring all the evidence and simply claiming that they are unpopular because they are not "good" when in reality they are unpopular because they have been sabotaged to prevent them from challenging the gatekeeper's taxation funnels.
>If web apps were any good, nothing Apple "gatekeeps" would prevent you from building an amazing web app for iOS. The things Apple "gatekeeps" (such as mobile push) would not prevent you from making a smooth fast web app.
That's not even a coherent argument. Gatekeepers can sabotage competitors in many subtle ways to make the user experience subpar, it's not a 1-dimensional game where only feature parity can be weaponized. It's clear that you are actively refusing to understand the points being made. There is also documented evidence that Apple consistently engaged in practices that made any competing platform a worse experience. Gatekeepers have a conflict of interest and they consistently act in a manner that makes that bias glaring. Gatekeepers are also not morons, they know that it doesn't take much to introduce artificial friction while also maintaining plausible deniability. e.g. see court documents where Apple's engineers admit that they strategically use "scare screens" and that their managers would "definitely like that".
>They already are competing on a level playing field. It's not "lack of NFC" or "lack of Bluetooth" or "lack of <another moving goalpost>" that prevent you from having good web apps.
That's factually incorrect. As previously stated, it's not just a 1-dimensional form of sabotage where only feature parity is being weaponized but any form of artificially introduced friction, while being able to maintain plausible deniability - any of that will get the job done of shutting down any threat to the gatekeeper's taxation funnel. Furthermore, as open-web-advocacy.org states:
- #AppleBrowserBan Apple's ban of third party browsers on iOS is deeply anti-competitive, starves the Safari/WebKit team of funding and has stalled innovation for the past 10 years and prevented Web Apps from taking off on mobile. (https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban...)
-Deep System Integration
Web Apps need to become just Apps. Apps built with the free and open web need equal treatment and integration. Closed and heavily taxed proprietary ecosystems should not receive any preference.
- Web App Equality
All artifical barriers placed by gatekeepers must be removed. Web Apps if allowed can offer equivalent functionality with greater privacy and security for demanding use-cases.
Android also benefits immensely from the store revenue, it's not called a duopoly for no reason.
I do
> You are also confusing cause and effect.
I don't
> I clearly explained the root causes for that.
You didn't. You went on a rant about "public perception" and your own experience building mobile web sites.
> If you say that it's because they lack certain features, then you confirmed my point that it's due to active sabotage and denial of equal rights.
See. Again with the rant.
> Be specific, why are they not "good"?
E.g. Reddit's mobile web site loads every post in 3+ seconds. And reloads the full page when you click on a subtree in the comments.
When you scroll through Twitter, it will just randomly load a bunch of stuff and replace your content losing your scroll position. Same with going back from a tweet to the timeline.
Most websites take multiple seconds to display text-only information with broken layouts, layout shifts, and multiple loading states.
To quote myself from 3 years ago: >>34517503
--- start quote ---
Features HN developers think are missing from the web to deliver an experience "as polished as a native app": notifications, prompt banners, link interception, Chrome-only non-standards like bluetooth etc.
Features actual users think are missing from the web to deliver an experience "as polished as a native app": actual native-like experience: responsiveness, smooth animations, polished usable and accesible controls, maintaining scroll position and location in the app, fast scrolling through large lists, no loading states for the simplest actions...
I mean, people people keep bringing up Twitter's objectively bad web app as an example of one of the best PWA apps... Have these people never seen an actual native app?
--- end quote ---
> There wouldn't be coincidentally a mysterious opposing force that actively prevents developers from improving those aspects, right?
There is no such entity. Besides, Google invested hundreds of millions of dollars into PWAs, and there are still so few that people can point to even on Android.
> X (formerly Twitter) - has PWA
Yup.
I discovered that all our self hosted applications were easily adopted after I added SSO. My wife just wants one account to rule them all.
I got her accustomed to installing web apps by adding all the links in a shared note. She clicks the link, pins the site and uses SSO to log in. Easy.
This is it. I’ve worked on plenty of projects that have web/iOS/Android, and the reason for offering native apps has always been user demand. All of this “spy on the user” crap literally never even comes up in conversation. We don’t care at all. We care about native apps because users care about native apps.
I kept saying they had a website and why would you need an app. She couldn't understand what I was saying.
Seems like indeed the general public really likes apps and even thinks you can't do so many things in the browser.
A new Capacitor app has a size of 3-5 MB at most.
If such a simple app has 100 MB, they bundle shit like Facebook SDK and such.
While technically competent people might go:
"Oh neat, I don't even need to install an app, if I just put the website icon onto my home screen."
Most users are like: "Oh my god noooo! Not another way to do something! Aaaaa I cannot cope!" and panic.
That basically already exists on the desktop in the form of Electron apps. Those apps are universally hated because of it.
Web technology is not suitable for making applications. It was designed to format text documents and that's all it's really good at. That's why we have the web-framework-of-the-week problem, everyone is desperately trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Web apps are janky, fragile and feel out of place on every OS. It's a 'one size fits no one' solution.
Thus mobile is often even a better experience.
I think antifingerprinting means that browsers are constantly re-loading and rerendering tons and tons of resources. The web is much much slower than it could be in theory. If you have an siloed app then you don't need to worry about that and can reuse everything. You open a new tab and nearly everything displays instantly (except the different car or whatever you're displaying)
This would also decrease your network bandwidth load. So a win for you and your customers
In short: I do install apps of main platforms and physical shops I frequent. It's usually vastly better than a website, even if it just wraps a webview. But I don't want to install an app for every site I visit, for the same reason I don't want to go on a date with every stranger that smiles at me when I pass them by on the street.
I am not claiming it is. But it is different from what some people got introduced to. That's enough already to strike fear.
But what do you mean with websites have been neutered? Didn't HTML, CSS, and JS only got more capabilities over time?
Of course it’s possible to mess that up, but the default is superior.
They did, but almost all of them are just there so serve developers, to enable them to build even more sophisticated interactive billboards. The web serves marketing and advertising. So do apps, but the web does it better in many ways.
What I meant by websites being neutered, is along the dimension of empowering users. Webapps as tools that provide functionality and play well with others. Composability, interoperability, end-user authonomy. Those are anathema to modern web.
And as I said, apps ain't better. It's really "pick your poison", whether you want to be fighting with your browser sandbox, or with your OS sandbox - and half of the things you need sit on the server-side anyway, out of your reach.
How does that follow?
More generally, do you have any sources for your repeated claims of intentional sabotage? You make accusations of ignoring evidence but you have provided none - unless you're saying that apple has already poisoned the well and anything they do is suspect.
To a certain extent, I fall in this camp. With privacy in general.
Without dedicating my life to it I won't be able to beat the system I live in, so why not just accept it and take what I can from it?
Their web app is fundamentally broken in half a dozen ways, and has been for years. A couple examples (not all):
If you are in the middle of typing a comment and switch to another app, when you come back, it will reload the display, losing your comment.
Video shorts load in a way that hides the video after about two seconds. Editing the URL to remove the parameters fixes this.
The layout of comments/posts often breaks, forcing me to switch to "ask for desktop version" to make one feature work, then switch back to "mobile version" to make another feature work. Neither is completely functional.
As I said, there are more. As I said, I don't even remember why I rejected their app, but at this point, if they can't make a mobile web site, why would I trust them to make an app?
This is the rule for a lot of apps and mobile websites now. I don't understand why - we have so much RAM available - but they love to refresh whether there's a reason to or not. And even if there's a reason not to. I can't count the number of times I've tapped on a tab that has a minature version of all the information I want, only for it to be replaced by a loading screen or 404.
A while ago I noticed my battery usage had gone way up. It was because any time I was distracted from my phone (or lost internet connection on a train), I would just leave the display on. Locking the phone meant that I'd lose whatever context I had.
It’s not even that. There are APIs to persist state beyond app termination. Even if your app gets killed due to memory pressure, it should continue where it left off.
Whereas on Mac, Meta are keeping their native app presumably because they can't be in the Mac app store with just a web wrapper
But maybe I've just got the exact delusion youre talking about in that I view the app as having more functionality. Maybe they need to free web apps to be on a level playing field as you say
But they're not real apps, they're webpages. They are two different things, both very useful, but both very different.
It's a very good thing for a user to be aware that there's a real and important difference between a signed binary from the App Store which lives on their device and a blob of minified JS coming down from quite literally anywhere.
And they're correct to feel that way! Apps, when made correctly, feel way better to use! It's a bit surprising to me you attribute this preference for ""native"" apps to "whatever reason". I've always felt the difference was extremely stark and obvious, I couldn't imagine getting them confused. It seems you're a little misinformed with how most native apps are built; it's just not true that any meaningful number of apps you interact with regularly with "simply wrap their web app in a WebView." In fact, if you try to ship an app which does solely this (webpage in a WebView), Apple will reject it. Have you built any mobile apps, kelthuzad?
I encourage you to try Google Docs or Youtube from a mobile browser and observe whether you find differences between that and the native experience. I think you'll be surprised :)
Google is the primary champion of PWAs, they have a vested interest in its success. The reason I focused on Apple is because its actions are one of a profit-maximizing gatekeeper actively defending its most lucrative business against an existential threat that is PWA. Every bug, every delayed feature, and every artificial limitation imposed on PWAs on iOS is a calculated strategic move in this defense of its walled garden that makes maximum taxation possible.
>PWA's just never took off.
That's just the lazy manufactured and false narrative that I've already thoroughly debunked. I'm not going to repeat it, since you would just ignore it again.
Discord and Visual Studio Code are among the most popular apps on mac, those are electron apps. None of that is relevant to the core issue either way. It's not up to Apple to decide any of that, that's what the market and regulators are for. Apple uses and pushes self-serving and false narratives as pretext to engage in anti-competitive business practices.
>Web technology is not suitable for making applications. It was designed to format text documents and that's all it's really good at.
That statement might have been true in 1995, but today it's categorically false.
> Web apps are janky, fragile and feel out of place on every OS. It's a 'one size fits no one' solution.
I've already debunked this manufactured, reductionist and false narrative above.
Apple has a 10/10 vested interest in the kneecapping of PWAs - why?
A Progressive Web App, if allowed to reach its full, un-sabotaged potential, is the technological manifestation of the Digital Markets Act's goals. So it would be utterly absurd for Apple to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into fighting the DMA, just to let PWAs pass which achieves the exact same goals.
Many of the DMA's mandates are an existential threat to Apple's business model and the PWA is the DMA in disguise:
- DMA mandates Apple to allow alternative App Stores & sideloading i.e. Force Apple to end its monopoly on app distribution. PWAs are sideloading by nature. A user "installs" a PWA directly from the web. The browser is the app store. The open web is the distribution platform. This completely bypasses the App Store.
- DMA mandates Apple to allow alternative payment systems. Forcing Apple to let developers use their own payment processors and avoid the 15-30% commission. PWAs use Open Web payments. It can use Stripe, PayPal, or any other payment processor with standard web APIs. Apple gets a 0% cut.
- DMA mandates Apple to increase Developer & User Choice. Give developers the freedom to choose their tools and give users the freedom to choose their apps without being locked in. PWAs are the epitome of choice. They are built with the most universal, open technologies on earth (HTML, CSS, JS). They are cross-platform by default and free users from being locked into a single company's hardware/software ecosystem.
Why would Apple have ANY interest in nurturing a technology that would voluntarily subject them to the very conditions they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying and legal fees to fight against?
The answer is: They wouldn't and they don't.
Apple's actions are not those of a company with simply "low interest". They are the actions of a profit-maximizing gatekeeper actively defending its most lucrative business against an existential threat. Every bug, every delayed feature, and every artificial limitation imposed on PWAs on iOS is a calculated strategic move in this defense. The brief, hostile removal of PWA functionality in the EU was not an outlier, it was Apple showing its true face when it thought it could get away with it.
Or at least this was my experience working on a mobile PWA a few years ago. I don't even own an apple device, it's just the ios bugs were always the most painful / memorable.
You download a DMG file or something, then you drag and drop some icon into your “applications” folder
It is kind of dumb. I haven’t seen any graphical package manage interface to handle this.
Maybe they are hated by nerds on reddit and hackernews.
I gather most people are just using the apps and have no idea how they’re built.
You have points, I agree that web technology is well suited in 2025 to make interactive applications. I agree that web apps are being held back from expressing their true potential. And while Electron is largely skewered for being bloated and heavy, the web can be fast and fluid.
But you haven't proven that web apps don't feel janky, fragile, and out of place. Because they just factually do. The native UI elements of each OS that you can tap into from the web is limited, and not enough to create the same UI in a WebView that you can in a native Swift app, for instance. You of course can coerce the web into imitating any appearance you care to recreate, but it won't look that way by default, and it'll now look even more starkly out of place on every other platform besides the single one you targeted. This is all an intentional aspect of the web as a cross-platform platform.
The web's internet-native status means a bad internet connection or a brief crossing through a dead zone will kill almost any web app. Yes, there's strategies around this with web workers nowadays, but those are quite complex to implement for even simple applications and often aren't worth the effort to do anything more than pop up a branded "you're offline" page. An app can be completely cut off from the internet, it doesn't have that base assumption of network connectivity and isn't built from the ground up from network-based parts.
Their mental model of how they LIKE to use them is different from yours though - and that should be ok instead of arousing angst.
I don’t buy this for one second. The web is well known, and well understood - I’ve never run into anyone, in any age group, with any level of education, who wouldn’t understand what a website is.
Either you’re being overly dramatic and exaggerating here, or you had a very difficult time pronouncing the words you were intending to say.
Then there’s a measurement element where app installs became an important KPI around the time ad blocking became more popular and interfered with detailed website engagement tracking, creating a self-fulfilling kind of thing.
On top of this I think another factor is that many websites are in terrible shape, super bloated by ten thousand tracking pixels and third party snippets added willy nilly by marketing teams using Tag Manager, so apps benefit from gatekeeping that bloat to a degree.
I just find apps more practical and convenient than websites in a browser most of the time, on my phone.
They work fine performance-wise. The example of Reddit’s website being shit is just pointing out that Reddit’s website is shit.
Google maps web applications also works really well. Both Photopea and Google Maps are far more complex than reddit.
At this point I am sure reddit’s website is shit so people are forced to use their app so they can track users better. Not because of some underlying limitation of web technologies.
>You didn't. You went on a rant about "public perception" and your own experience building mobile web sites.
I have no time to engage in your shallow kind of tit for tat, where I do all of the work and you simply respond with infantile one word responses with zero elaboration or outright denial, misrepresentation or just repetition of already debunked narratives. I will still briefly debunk the parts where you put in at least some minor effort of trying to substantiate.
For a more elaborate analysis:
>> Be specific, why are they not "good"? > E.g. Reddit's mobile web site loads every post in 3+ seconds. And reloads the full page when you click on a subtree in the comments. When you scroll through Twitter, it will just randomly load a bunch of stuff and replace your content losing your scroll position. Same with going back from a tweet to the timeline. Most websites take multiple seconds to display text-only information with broken layouts, layout shifts, and multiple loading states.
Those are some specific apps that have bad implementations, not an inherent limitation of the technology, so it's irrelevant to the bigger picture. I asked you for the specific technology. That's like me saying "Give me a specific reason why electric cars will never be a viable technology as you claimed" then you respond with "This specific brand has an electric car with this specific issue". It's such a transparent strategy of deliberately missing the point.
> --- start quote ---
Features HN developers think are missing from the web to deliver an experience ... --- end quote ---
All of those are issues that have already been fixed, so I don't get why you would bring up your severely outdated comment. It also contains aspects for which I clearly explained why and who is to blame for those.
>There is no such entity. Besides, Google invested hundreds of millions of dollars into PWAs, and there are still so few that people can point to even on Android.
I already responded to this in many different comments:
"Google is the primary champion of PWAs, they have a vested interest in its success. The reason I focused on Apple is because its actions are one of a profit-maximizing gatekeeper actively defending its most lucrative business against an existential threat that is PWA. Every bug, every delayed feature, and every artificial limitation imposed on PWAs on iOS is a calculated strategic move in this defense of its walled garden that makes maximum taxation possible."
A native app has access to OS information for the same kind of fingerprinting as with browsers, except with more bits of information. The reason, for example, iOS has the “ask app not to track” button is because the tracking could still happen, even more comprehensively than in a browser. Not exactly sure about macOS but I don’t see why it would be different.
Meta is keeping their apps as native presumably because native apps make better spyware. I think they literally do not have any other reason; if web apps made better spyware, Meta would push people to use their web apps, simple as. Meta is a spyware company. Technical decisions about deploying/developing their spyware will be informed primarily by their desire to make it more effective as such.
It wasn't that long ago that when you used the mobile internet, you would be getting a "fake version" of the site that could render speedily, despite the limited speed of 2G networks.
First it was all about WML[0], which would be processed by a proxy that would deliver the file in a binary format that would be smaller.
And even when mobile phones that could access proper HTML content hit the market, it was often still accessed through the use of an accelerator proxy[1] which would optimize the page (stripping unnecessary parts) that you were trying to access so that it could be downloaded faster.
These technologies are still in use in some places, as I understand it. But it's generally not necessary nowadays for locations with access to 3G or better.
For the rest refer to https://whatpwacando.today
but I understand more. Its more a folder oriented system. kind of
I saw a tweet where some Zoomer was roasting an "Elder Millenial" for switching devices from a mobile phone to a desktop when making a big purchase (airline tickets? I forget).
I didn't feel like wading into that argument (what's the point? like spitting in a campfire), but... yeah.
Some folks say that we are regressing wrt technological proficiency, but it's really just that more people use technology than they used to. Regression to the mean, maybe? Is that the right expression?
I've literally never had that problem. Firefox Mobile + uBlock Origin eliminates ads.
They may have no idea how they are built, but they do notice how janky and out of place they are. Take for example Microsoft Teams, have you ever met anyone who actually likes that app? It's insane that a simple chat app uses well over a gigabyte of RAM.
It's absurd that one of the biggest software companies in the world can't seem to produce a sleek, native app. It's purely a cost saving measure. They decided mediocrity is good enough for them and they get away with it because the people making the purchase decisions are not the people who have to use it daily.
My friend was trying to explain an app to me. How everyone at his work was amazed at how well it worked compared to their Salesforce solution that they were forced to use.
The app? A website. Not even a web application. It was just a brochure type web catalog that allowed them to show their customer the brands and products they sold.
Other's I've told about ChatGPT or Claude, have trouble finding it. They go into the App Store and search for the apps. They are inundated non-official versions. All with similar titles. Some stop, some install the wrong versions.
All of my documents, my spreadsheets, email, chat, and video calling is all done from my browser. I keep Emacs open for scratch just because I can't quit Emacs and I have a terminal open to run some servers. And this has been my working model for at least the last five to six years.
What's remarkable about it is that web apps are doing almost all of the heavy lifting of my work every day. I thought this was worth noting in the context of your comment that web technology is not suitable for making applications.
If you don't care to engage with the substance of my points, fine, nobody is owed discussion, but this style of conversation is deeply unproductive and I believe even you are losing track of what you have and haven't said.
Because people who develop these only care about one thing: ease of development. They couldn't care less about what users say, and if they cared they wouldn't understand users, because users don't use terms like "latency", or "startup time", or "lag".
The preference for apps is a learned behavior, not something fundamental. The vast majority of people with real understanding would prefer the web
The main topic originated through OP's "why some users demand a 'native' app when the web app should be enough" for which I provided explanations as to why web apps haven't lived up to their potential i.e. conflict of interest and the corresponding sabotage by a gatekeeper in contrast to the manufactured narrative of "they are unpopular because they suck". That's a false narrative which I've explained in many comments:
- "A Progressive Web App, if allowed to reach its full, un-sabotaged potential, is the technological manifestation of the Digital Markets Act's goals. So it would be utterly absurd for Apple to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into fighting the DMA, just to let PWAs pass which achieves the exact same goals."
- "The reason I focused on Apple is because its actions are one of a profit-maximizing gatekeeper actively defending its most lucrative business against an existential threat that is PWA. Every bug, every delayed feature, and every artificial limitation imposed on PWAs on iOS is a calculated strategic move in this defense of its walled garden that makes maximum taxation possible."
Since you've stated that "I agree that web apps are being held back from expressing their true potential" you confirmed my thesis. That's why I stated: "I already responded to any of your points that are RELEVANT to the CORE DISCUSSION"
>But you haven't proven that web apps don't feel janky, fragile, and out of place.
That's not even part of the core issue and it has still been explained in my post anyway, which you even confirmed by saying "I agree that web apps are being held back from expressing their true potential" and is also expressed here:
- Apple's ban of third party browsers on iOS is deeply anti-competitive, STARVES the Safari/WebKit team of funding and has STALLED innovation for the past 10 YEARS and PREVENTED Web Apps from taking off on mobile. (https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban...)
-Deep System Integration
Web Apps need to become just Apps. Apps built with the free and open web need equal treatment and integration. Closed and heavily taxed proprietary ecosystems should not receive any preference.
- Web App Equality
All artificial barriers placed by gatekeepers must be removed. Web Apps if allowed can offer equivalent functionality with greater privacy and security for demanding use-cases.
These are all factors that have already been mentioned and they fix all the real issues that are not the product of active sabotage.
Furthermore, I'm using many web apps like Discord and Visual Studio Code and they do not feel janky, fragile or out of place, that's your subjective perception. And even if that were an objective fact, which they are not, it would still not be relevant to the core discussion since they are not inherent to the technology but product-management related trade-offs that can be improved and fixed.
>The web's internet-native status means a bad internet connection or a brief crossing through a dead zone will kill almost any web app. Yes, there's strategies around this with web workers nowadays, but those are quite complex to implement for even simple applications and often aren't worth the effort to do anything more than pop up a branded "you're offline" page.
Your first claim is just factually wrong, but you admit that in the following statement which contains another claim that is also wrong. Those are exactly the kind of problems that PWAs solve and the user experience in that regard has been steadily improving (see also https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first )
>An app can be completely cut off from the internet, it doesn't have that base assumption of network connectivity and isn't built from the ground up from network-based parts.
That's just straight up nonsense. Any native or web app that relies on internet connectivity will be equally affected. Any native or web app developed with a local-first or local-only approach will work perfectly fine without internet. You clearly have outdated knowledge on the matter. (see https://whatpwacando.today)
So I really had addressed your points that were relevant to the core issue, but you just wanted to nitpick details that had already been partially or fully addressed and are also insignificant in the bigger picture of the topic and technological progress in general. Those ones you listed are based on your subjective experience, your outdated knowledge on the tech or simply a transitory state of software that can be easily improved since they are not an inherent technological limitation.
For their own operating system that they own the APIs and development tools for, no less!
But aside from that, even if I had claimed that, it wouldn't imply, that anyone preferring an app must be computer illiterate.
Now, you would say that these people (35yo) used to use Facebook (and maybe Google meet) and such on desktop. So they should know that many things can be achieved through a browser. But it seems like when thinking about mobile, people think differently. A website that "does something" other than displaying information (which is a weird and blurry definition) must be an app. I'm absolutely sure my friend has never thought it could be possible to use Facebook on through her mobile browser. If you access something with your mobile, it must be through an app.
PWAs are only as good of a user experience as the developer programs it to be. The average local TV news affiliate website spends 5MB-20MB of bandwidth within a minute of downloading 1 page. My last iOS app was only 5MB shipped and only consumes a few KB of bandwidth per session.
There are massive convenience features that native apps support which aren’t available to browser APIs. Auth, payments, notifications, parental controls, power efficiency, and perhaps security and privacy (depending on how prevalent analytics/ tracking/ advertising libraries are on native apps).
A well crafted PWA can compete on most features with a well crafted app, but ultimately the App Store review process means native apps have a decently high floor, whereas PWAs have zero floor.
I do grant that web is likely more up to date. But only because they can ship immediately, without the app store review process. Technically web could also be slower to release, nothing guarantees web freshness.
-But it's less pain than trying to turn a generic Android tablet into something more like a kiosk, best I can tell (there are third-party apps that do this, which survives reboots, I'm led to believe, but I'd rather not mess with third-party stuff). I previously made Android apps in Java for the tablets, and while I enjoyed the fragment system it uses, the permissions handling was always a nightmare whenever I wanted to do something neat or experimental -- TTS and mic listening in a PWA makes me much less frustrated than trying to do it via native app (which seems backwards to me), and I can still use the website on any non-Android device.
I hate a few apps on desktop because they're web apps. Because those specific apps should _not_ be webapps. Other webapps I hate on the desktop _because they use electron_ and maintain yet another browser engine running constantly on my PC--not because they choose to write their UI in HTML and CSS. I don't need 15 browsers running on my computer. Give me a native stub for the taskbar and whatever other functionality is needed, and if you _must_ use HTML then render it in whatever browser I feel like opening the app in. I've got several programs that do this, and they're the best of the bunch (Intel driver assistant, cfosspeed) as they don't have an entire chrome process stack running all the time just in case you maybe want to open their interface (I almost never do).
This sounds like a you problem. Web frameworks have improved significantly to handle anything way beyond text and that has been the case for a long time. This is really about corporations trying to exert power over the open web by trying to route around it with apps.
Even if each click only takes a second to load or wait, it's annoying for many clicks. Then there are all kinds of usability issues, like the page reloading in the middle of a form or process when scrolling up was misinterpreted as a refresh.
However, I'm not talking about apps that just load a webpage.
It you’re talking about the intrusive stuff that gets in the way of you using the website, then the answer to this is pretty simple: they don’t. The sites that do that are comparatively rare. They just appear more numerous than they really are because it’s the really big sites like Reddit that do it. The norm is either a page on the site that tells you about the app, or the banner that appears at the top of a page.
Piece by piece all of the app was replaced with web views for the website, and keeping the native tab menu at the bottom. No money was saved, but at least they didn't have to update the native parts of the app as features stopped working because of legacy systems being shut down. They kept the native mobile devs and fired some of the web devs instead to save money. Even though the website now needed a browser version and a slightly modified app-friendly version. No biggie, but it complicated the testing, as the responsibility for most of the app was moved to the web teams.
We talked about it on hacker h news awhile back[1]
[0]: https://games.productartistry.com/games/dark-patterns
[1]: >>42737778
https://www.androidauthority.com/auto-update-apps-google-pla...
Then, on a worldwide scale, you can see that a lot of people are running unsupported Android versions.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/android
Yes, there is no guarantee they a web app is more secure or up to date but tge likelyhood is far greater as it's a developer's responsibility and not the end consumer.
This is a very strange argument to make, the exact same applies to "native" apps. Every app "is only as good of a user experience as the developer programs it to be". There are countless of "native" apps on iOS like "wallpaper" apps that drain the battery, consume absurd bandwidth and have outright scammy business models which App Store "review" just lets pass (because Apple gets a cut of the scam!).
>There are massive convenience features that native apps support which aren’t available to browser APIs. Auth, payments, notifications, parental controls, power efficiency, and perhaps security and privacy (depending on how prevalent analytics/ tracking/ advertising libraries are on native apps).
Auth? https://whatpwacando.today/authentication
Payments? https://whatpwacando.today/payment
Notifications? https://whatpwacando.today/notifications
Parental Controls? Use Web Content Restrictions.
Power efficiency? If JIT (Just-In-Time) compilation were universally allowed for all web browsers and PWAs on iOS, it would be a complete game-changer, dramatically closing the performance and power efficiency gap with native apps. (see above why Apple actively sabotages PWAs)
Security and Privacy? PWAs benefit from the OS's sandbox and its own sandbox
>A well crafted PWA can compete on most features with a well crafted app, but ultimately the App Store review process means native apps have a decently high floor, whereas PWAs have zero floor.
You can't even compare the App Store review to someone actively going on e.g. Pinterest.com and clicking on install PWA. The user has already reviewed and decided that it's an app worth installing. Finally, the App Store "review process" is a bad joke, not only because it is slow, inefficient and often arbitrary, but because it fails to even filter out the most obvious of scams:
"Apple claims its App Store is carefully curated so that only the best apps get through. The truth is, the App Store is littered with scams" -https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/06/apple-a...
"The widely used Apple App Store has become a minefield of scam apps. While several scam apps have been removed by Apple, it seems they’ve only acted when directly called out on social media. Despite the removal of some scam apps, Apple has not yet acted to ban the guilty app developers from the app store."
https://mccunewright.com/scam-apps-sold-on-the-apple-app-sto...
Which is the point I was making. The parent and gp were making the argument that PWAs were positively better than native apps, which I was pushing back on.
None of your links disagree with my points, except the last one which suffers from survivor bias.
> There are massive convenience features that native apps support which aren’t available to browser APIs. Auth, payments, notifications, parental controls, power efficiency, and perhaps security and privacy...
Sounds like it would be higher than I expect, but I still claim it can not be more than fractions of a percent. Actively toggling a setting like is definitely esoteric behaviour even for a power user, never mind the large masses of smartphone users.
Unsupported Android version is not related to old app versions, Google Play will still work.
I do grant that web is more likely to be up to date than an app. Me claiming that it depends on the developer was just being pedantic: technically it depends on the developers and their release practices, but likely it's the web version that is more up to date.
Bad software is bad software. "Native" apps can be bad too.
Most of the difference you see is intentionally created by Apple, after they pivoted away from using web apps on phones.
Of the tech companies I've worked for, I can't even imagine how the web team would react if they were instructed to intentionally nerf their website.