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A superficially obvious idea, but it misses the point of the article. Web apps solve almost none of the problems mentioned in the article, and the introduce som

A superficially obvious idea, but it misses the point of the article. Web apps solve almost none of the problems mentioned in the article, and the introduce some of their own. They don't solve any of the deep inter-app and cross-app integrations Dan talks about, except discoverability. They arguably solve sharing, but that's very questionable when your only form of "sharing" is copy/paste, which is not as easy as tapping on buttons on mobile. They don't solve the problem of keeping track of apps (at best - if a user adds web pages to their home screen, they are no worse than normal mobile apps). They revert everything back to a pull-based model, when what Dan is suggesting is an organized push-based model (as opposed to the push notification chaos today). And so on... And then web apps introduce massive (in relative terms) latency / load times, which is a whole other can of worms, which is even worse than downloading multiple mobile apps. Yeah, you can talk about <foo> initiative to speed up web apps, but the fact is, nobody can really enforce those things.

dangrover 11y ago
Actually, I think web apps could do it. Some browser could just add a ton of proprietary JS APIs for notification, payment, identity, etc, in the same way that WeChat and Kik have. The Chinese web browsers are beginning to bolt on features in the same way the chat apps have. News, offline file storage, ebook stores with offline support, etc. Chrome almost had the right idea, but their app store makes no distinction between web-based apps that actually make use of Chrome's app-specific APIs and those that are just normal websites. There is no standard for a good experience from a Chrome app. No reason Chrome/UC Browser/Brave/Opera in the west couldn't throw caution to the wind and rachet it up all the way, then wait a few years for WC3 to come along and pick up the pieces. Result wouldn't be as good as if the OS and web standards properly evolved, but it's one way to make it happen.
- argonaut 11y ago
  I was about to add that web apps could fix all those with more browser features, but somehow I don't think every web browser vendor implementing their own proprietary payment/share/identity API is what readams had in mind (they are certainly not going to agree on a standard any time within the next 5 years).
petra 11y ago
Google wroked/works on protocol called "the physical web " for a version of the web that is more push-based, fitting smart objects around you: https://google.github.io/physical-web/ https://google.github.io/physical-web/

dangrover 11y ago

Actually, I think web apps could do it. Some browser could just add a ton of proprietary JS APIs for notification, payment, identity, etc, in the same way that WeChat and Kik have. The Chinese web browsers are beginning to bolt on features in the same way the chat apps have. News, offline file storage, ebook stores with offline support, etc. Chrome almost had the right idea, but their app store makes no distinction between web-based apps that actually make use of Chrome's app-specific APIs and those that are just normal websites. There is no standard for a good experience from a Chrome app. No reason Chrome/UC Browser/Brave/Opera in the west couldn't throw caution to the wind and rachet it up all the way, then wait a few years for WC3 to come along and pick up the pieces. Result wouldn't be as good as if the OS and web standards properly evolved, but it's one way to make it happen.

argonaut 11y ago
I was about to add that web apps could fix all those with more browser features, but somehow I don't think every web browser vendor implementing their own proprietary payment/share/identity API is what readams had in mind (they are certainly not going to agree on a standard any time within the next 5 years).

petra 11y ago

Google wroked/works on protocol called "the physical web " for a version of the web that is more push-based, fitting smart objects around you: https://google.github.io/physical-web/ https://google.github.io/physical-web/