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> The fact is, webapps are suboptimal, and unless something drastically changes, will remain so. I agree it’s still suboptimal for now, incremental improvement

> The fact is, webapps are suboptimal, and unless something drastically changes, will remain so. I agree it’s still suboptimal for now, incremental improvements are making it less so year over year. More parts of native apps are also getting written with web technologies. Eventually, maybe, most of the app icons in our phones might just be a shortcut to some website

xg15 8y ago
That might happen, but I wonder if the distinction will then still have any relevance. If you continue the current trends, this process could involve making WebAssembly more powerful, making CSS and Web Components into an actual widget framework and adding more capabilities to service workers to enable OS hooks, background activities and offline use. However, all of those changes will push web apps into the direction of becoming more "app-like", not more "web-like". So after the improvements are done, I think we might end up with just another framework for building apps, not having moved away from apps. (With the one downside that HTML will still have to drag around reams of cruft to maintain backwards compatibility which other app framework could easily do away with)
- iainmerrick 8y ago
  Yes, I think you’re totally right. We’ll end up writing clientside code for phones, tablets, and desktops. A lot of the code can be shared if you use good engineering practices, but if you use good design practices, each UI will be different so there will need to be some custom code for each. It doesn’t really matter whether this code is Swift, Java, JS, “native”, “web” or whatever. I’d add that that’s the good scenario. The bad scenario is that everything goes the way of desktop apps, where everything just becomes a lowest-common-denominator web page with crappy UI design that doesn’t really use the platform effectively, just because it’s cheaper that way and cheap always wins.
KaiserPro 8y ago
> might just be a shortcut to some website For the longest time it was. Because $newsCompany was subscription it had to leave the apple store, or give apple ~25% cut. To get round this we had a fully offline HTML5 webapp. it was very good, but despite mega optimisations, it was slower than native, and had limited storage. Users were constantly asking for a native app, In every customer council/survey. Bear in mind that these people were not techhead, they were babyboomers who struggled with tech, they knew enough however, to know that native apps were faster. (for example the times, grauniad and telegraph. )

xg15 8y ago

That might happen, but I wonder if the distinction will then still have any relevance. If you continue the current trends, this process could involve making WebAssembly more powerful, making CSS and Web Components into an actual widget framework and adding more capabilities to service workers to enable OS hooks, background activities and offline use. However, all of those changes will push web apps into the direction of becoming more "app-like", not more "web-like". So after the improvements are done, I think we might end up with just another framework for building apps, not having moved away from apps. (With the one downside that HTML will still have to drag around reams of cruft to maintain backwards compatibility which other app framework could easily do away with)

iainmerrick 8y ago
Yes, I think you’re totally right. We’ll end up writing clientside code for phones, tablets, and desktops. A lot of the code can be shared if you use good engineering practices, but if you use good design practices, each UI will be different so there will need to be some custom code for each. It doesn’t really matter whether this code is Swift, Java, JS, “native”, “web” or whatever. I’d add that that’s the good scenario. The bad scenario is that everything goes the way of desktop apps, where everything just becomes a lowest-common-denominator web page with crappy UI design that doesn’t really use the platform effectively, just because it’s cheaper that way and cheap always wins.

KaiserPro 8y ago

> might just be a shortcut to some website For the longest time it was. Because $newsCompany was subscription it had to leave the apple store, or give apple ~25% cut. To get round this we had a fully offline HTML5 webapp. it was very good, but despite mega optimisations, it was slower than native, and had limited storage. Users were constantly asking for a native app, In every customer council/survey. Bear in mind that these people were not techhead, they were babyboomers who struggled with tech, they knew enough however, to know that native apps were faster. (for example the times, grauniad and telegraph. )