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> The author also points out (correctly) that web apps are smaller than their equivalent native app. Well, the author straw-mans that web apps are smaller. Yes
by maxsilver 9y ago
> The author also points out (correctly) that web apps are smaller than their equivalent native app.
Well, the author straw-mans that web apps are smaller. Yes, web apps are lighter than equivalent native apps. But not to anywhere near the degree described in the article.
There's no legitimate reason for the Starbucks app to be 100MB. None. A native Android app equivalent to the PWA in the article would come in at about about 2MB, for instance.
Starbucks app is huge because they stuffed it with something (same for Twitter, Facebook, etc). Starbucks new PWA is clean and light because it hasn't (yet) been stuffed with the equivalent junk. It's not a technology difference, it's a political/corporate one.
- Brakenshire 9y agoGoogle will punish badly made web apps though, whereas the same apparently doesn't apply to native apps.
- WoodenChair 9y agoEven worse every time you go to Starbucks.com you might re-download all of the junk. If you use it multiple times a day, that's a lot of wasted bandwidth compared to a slim (unusual in these days) native app.
- ben336 9y agoThe value of PWAs with service worker support is that redownloads don't happen. That's also how they can have offline support (on Android at least, safari currently has a lest robust caching story)