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Without fanboying to much, I want to add how important PWAs are to breaking the walled gardens of the App Store and Play Store. Apple and Google can and will st
by reichardt 8y ago
Without fanboying to much, I want to add how important PWAs are to breaking the walled gardens of the App Store and Play Store. Apple and Google can and will stop your app from distributing via their stores if they see fit, but they can't stop users from adding a PWA to their home screen.
This is great for user rights and moves the needle more towards a decentralized and open ecosystem, while maintaining strong security guarantees to the end-user.
- codesternews 8y agoThere are several restrictions in iOS. You can not use much. You might be able to track some users but nothing much you can do without native app.
- reichardt 8y agoYes, that's true. However after using the Twitter PWA for some time, I believe there's a whole segment of native apps which could run just as well as PWAs. My biggest gripe was the Twitter PWA losing state while multitasking. This now seems to be resolved somewhat. In addition PWAs will only become more capable. WASM will have direct access to the web apis and opens the door to implementing PWAs without JavaScript. I'm keeping my eyes on WebGPU, which I believe could deliver huge performance benefits to webapps. At this point having no support for push notifications is probably the biggest holdback for PWAs.
- gok 8y agoWhich webapps are being held back by their ability to quickly dispatch instructions to the GPU?
- reichardt 8y agoI believe it's less than people would think but from previous discussions on PWAs it seems to me, that mobile developers just dislike JavaScript and it's ecosystem, rather than PWAs in general. And fair enough, I'm all for developers not being tied to a single language to develope apps. If my understanding is correct than WASM and WebGPU will allow for development of apps with any language of your liking and performance will only depend on how close to metal you can develop with said language. I'm more of a JavaScript developer but I would be very interested in how developing web apps with Rust and WebGL would look like.
- gok 8y agoWebGPU isn't really analogous to WASM. It's a replacement to WebGL. It will still have a JavaScript API with a non-JS shader language, it will just be more efficient.
- coldtea 8y agoIt bothers me that PWAs are a thing too. If we have a perfectly capable computer in our smartphones, just let a native app (whether it uses a higher level language or not) handle it. Better performance, better battery use, better integration, more platform features available, better look and feel, and so on...
- vatueil 8y ago> It bothers me that PWAs are a thing too. I think you accidentally replied to the wrong comment. It sounds like you're responding to lettergram's comment, which also complains that PWAs bother him: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19011910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19011910 Versus the parent comment from reichardt, which speaks favorably of PWAs.
- coldtea 8y agoNah, I switched what's the point of bother ironically. You're bothered by X? Yeah, I'm bothered by non-X as well...
- cm2187 8y agoThat's where wasm enters the scene! Pwa + wasm is I think a little revolution in client app development.
- coldtea 8y agoI think the problem is the DOM, not the execution engine. If it's just WASM and no-DOM, then it might as well be native.
- reichardt 8y agoI'm interested in better understanding your concerns. If the DOM and JavaScript are the main sticking points, how would you feel about web apps being implemented with WASM and targeting WebGL/WebGPU as the rendering target? Are you feeling more favorably towards technologies like Flutter? https://flutter.io/ https://flutter.io/