4 ms·
I went to pwa.rocks on my iPhone and briefly tried out some of the apps, and almost every single one was obviously broken in some way. In no particular order,
by comex 10y ago
I went to pwa.rocks on my iPhone and briefly tried out some of the apps, and almost every single one was obviously broken in some way. In no particular order, some of the issues:
- No or broken animation.
- Wrong dimensions for screen.
- Dropping frames (for the Flappy Bird clone - an extremely simple game).
- When viewed in-browser, swiping left to right to initiate a 'back' action causes flicker or a double animation, or is broken (doesn't go back to the right thing).
- Taps on the bottom navigation get messed up, showing/hiding Safari UI (this is unavoidable to some extent but there are workarounds).
- Clicking the hamburger button is so laggy on one of the apps it's probably making a network request.
After "installing":
- Doesn't work properly in a chromeless environment (e.g. the Google I/O app has a login screen that you can't cancel once you click it).
- Apple web app metadata missing or broken.
- Pressing any button takes you out of the app and into the same site in Safari.
- Icons that look bad when cropped to the iOS rounded rect.
Oh, and some of them didn't work because of missing Safari features, but that at least isn't their fault.
Even those that worked didn't look native; some of them looked like Android apps, which is nice if you're on Android. None of the ones I tried installing supported the swipe-back gesture in chromeless mode, which works in essentially every app on iOS not made by Google. (Presumably because the page would have to do it manually, as opposed to in-browser when it gets mapped to the browser back action, see above.)
Overall, maybe the browser primitives are there, but libraries for proper app-like UI are clearly not. I'll stick with my native apps for now, thanks...
- benguild 10y agoCross-platform development has always been a bit "function over form"
- ssalazar 10y agoIt sounds like in some cases its not succeeding at either.
- on_and_off 10y agoYes, pretty much but if they want to compete with native, they need to revise this.
- flukus 10y agoThere's always been some weird edge cases, like file dialogs, but in the 90's and 00's writing cross platform desktop applications was much nicer than this mess.
- z3t4 10y agoFor iOS and old HTML5 compatible devices you can fall back to web manifest / ApplicationCache. Custom CSS could be loaded after finding out the browser. But I think it's better to go with your own unique look instead of the charmless platform style guidelines. Standardizing style is an anti-pattern IMHO.
- movedx 10y agoI didn't go over the entire list, but I was convinced the issues you faced were very much local concerns when the Flappybird clone worked fine on my iPhone 6S. As did the paper planes game (which I thought was very cute.)