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Honestly I think the future of mobile will just be... mobile websites. What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality? -

Honestly I think the future of mobile will just be... mobile websites. What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality? - Accelerometer and all sensor support (some of these are already supported on various browsers on various OSes) - Background support - Bluetooth - WiFi - Better notifications - etc. Sure there will always be a need for native, but 99% of apps don't need any of that stuff, really. Though I suppose both Apple and Google have an inherent interest to gatekeep. Looking at my own most used apps: - Messenger - Mail - White Noise - Teams - Google Maps Literally all of them could be implemented as responsive pages with acceptable performance. There are a small number of companies that don't bother with mobile apps, Craigslist being the most notable of them until a few months ago. Part of the issue though is that the app stores give you a lot of visibility and to get that visibility you need to be in the app store. Sure you can use a web view, but in some ways that's even worse than just a responsive website because now you have to deal with the abstraction of your site that is a WebView. Not to mention the temptation to try for "best of both worlds".

privateSFacct 7y ago
Look at your most used apps - none of them are "responsive pages". That should tell you something. Folks who have tried responsive pages haven't done that well. I am curious - what is the most popular responsive webpage on iphone would people say? I'd like to check out the current leader in this space.
- hopia 7y ago
  Google?
- akmarinov 7y ago
  I use Facebook's as I don't want Facebook's grubby hands using private APIs on my phone to get every bit of data they can. At least the browser limits them.
  - edgyquant 7y ago
    Plus the facebook app eats battery life. IME my phone battery lasts all day unless I install facebook: then it lasts a few hours.
    - asdff 7y ago
      and for whatever mind boggling reason their stand alone chat client is 300mb.
- newfeatureok 7y ago
  None of my most used apps are responsive pages because Safari neuters the functionality. - White Noise -> Safari can't play background sounds once closed. - Messenger -> Notification trouble, not to mention Facebook won't let you use the mobile version of Messenger without a lot of effort. - Google Maps -> Close, but a lot of the functionality, like reminders require notifications which isn't up-to-par with just Safari - Teams -> See messenger.
- j2bax 7y ago
  Apple does some fairly beautiful responsive webpages... Albeit rather heavy! https://www.apple.com/apple-arcade/ https://www.apple.com/apple-arcade/
- jayd16 7y ago
  Whats the slack app written in?
  - jamil7 7y ago
    The iOS app is native UIKit I believe.
  - philshem 7y ago
    Desktop apps are (in)famously Electron.js iOS is native: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/931599784137363459?s=20 https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/931599784137363459?s=20 Android is native, too (no source)
- aantix 7y ago
  Because once a company is invested in the native side, they probably aren't going to look at greenfield solutions anytime soon? If you're considering building a new app, a responsive site with JS is definitely a contender. Take a look at the performance numbers. https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1174802413548474368 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1174802413548474368 And they're only increasing, making it a more viable choice with each year passing.
- wpietri 7y ago
  I haven't tried it on iOS, but Twitter's web app is quite good on Android/Firefox and Android/Chrome. Not quite as good as native, and prone to developing lag if I don't occasionally restart the browser. But surprisingly good. They talk about the process of building it here: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-source/2017/how-we-built-twitter-lite.html https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-sourc...
  - distances 7y ago
    It's unusable on Firefox Focus though. Trying to expand anything completely breaks scrolling on the page.
    - iudqnolq 7y ago
      No just focus. And I've run into issues even if I don't expand anything. Around 40% of pages have a point below which I can't scroll (I'm jumped to the top of the page if I try). And then there's the unspecified error you get on around 60% of page loads that requires a refresh to fix.
  - AgloeDreams 7y ago
    I tried it, it's pretty close honestly, but the performance just feels off and it does weird stuff all the time. The iOS app is just better.
  - mattacular 7y ago
    I use the web app on iOS. Feature parity is 100% for me because I don't use push notifications at app on Twitter. The performance is a little worse (mostly touch targeting is not as good) but once you get used to it it is not noticeable. This is an acceptable tradeoff to me because it allows me to block almost all promoted tweets with Safari content blockers. I also think the Twitter native app may do devious things that are less likely to be permitted by Safari.
xenihn 7y ago
The fact that Facebook themselves will never be able to replace their native iOS and Android apps with RN implementations says it all imo.
- EugeneOZ 7y ago
  It just says that web apps can't steal enough data from your phone.
  - xenihn 7y ago
    But RN apps are not web apps...?
    - bonestamp2 7y ago
      Tricky question. They start as web apps since they're built with mostly web technologies, but then they're compiled as native apps with native components and they don't run in the browser. So, I'd lean towards "no" -- they're not web apps at runtime.
      - robertoandred 7y ago
        React Native apps do not use web technologies.
        solarkraft 7y ago
        That depends on what you include in your definition of web technologies. React and Javascript at this point mostly fall under mine.
        bonestamp2 7y ago
        I guess we can agree to disagree -- I consider JavaScript a web technology.
- htormey 7y ago
  React Native is widely used in both Instagram and the main Facebook app (market places). It’s also used in a number of other apps they make (oculus, ads manager).
rajasimon 7y ago
I thought this too. You know recent TWA with PWA makes the website accessible with anything on the system level. Like the location and other information.
- duxup 7y ago
  I just wish with PWAs ... there was some more love as far as how they're handled. Last time I looked at them it was really wonky to install a PWA from Chrome. Developer advocacy at the time from Google was big on PWAs, but they were second class citizens everywhere in Google land....
  - untog 7y ago
    You can now wrap a PWA up as a TWA (Trusted Web Activity) and publish it to the Play Store, which should make a huge difference.
    - duxup 7y ago
      OH TIL that. That's good, showing up on the Play Store was kinda random benchmark I was looking for.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    They are first class on UWP since Microsoft decided to drop WinJS in favour of PWAs. It is also one of the ways they are pushing for cross platform development on their upcoming foldable devices (Other being React Native and Xamarin, depending where one is coming from).
    - duxup 7y ago
      Yeah I really liked MS's support that way.
ricketycricket 7y ago
> What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality? The desire to build web apps instead of mobile apps. > Literally all of them could be implemented as responsive pages with acceptable performance. Exactly. It's not a technical issue as much as an issue of focus/interest. Unfortunately, this has been a losing battle since 2008.
- newfeatureok 7y ago
  > Exactly. It's not a technical issue as much as an issue of focus/interest. Unfortunately, this has been a losing battle since 2008. This is true, but there are a lot of features missing from a responsive site that apps have. Of course, I'd argue that all of the missing functionality can easily be added to Safari and Chrome (to name the big two mobile browsers).
deepGem 7y ago
I feel quite the opposite, most of the phone apps will likely to be thick client variants of the web apps, given that the hosts have so much power and storage available. Privacy concerns are gonna force this model where almost every activity having minimal network overhead. We are going back to the desktop app era, is what I feel.
- na85 7y ago
  > We are going back to the desktop app era, is what I feel. Can't wait, to be honest. This era of everything as a service is great for developer convenience but is incredibly user-hostile in that it enables and encourages surveillance capitalism and the erosion of privacy.
tempsy 7y ago
No mobile website has match the performance of native though
- The_rationalist 7y ago
  No 2D renderer has matched the rendering engine of chromium aka skia. Show benchmarcks otherwise, instead of hearsay evidence.
lazyier 7y ago
> Honestly I think the future of mobile will just be... mobile websites. This. Having to install software on my phone to use a service is cringy as hell and is a huge red flag for me. Like when trying to order food from a restaurant or shop somewhere. It's almost always going to be a automatic no. I just don't trust them. They always want permissions to access things on my phone, which is just pure nonsense. It's going to take a while for businesses to realize that in order to get a wide audience for the software they are paying for the last thing they want to do is force people to jump through hoops in order to use it. For every one of 'google maps' there is going to be ten thousand other apps that simply have no benefit from being 'native'.
- seemack 7y ago
  I agree with the overall points, less so the pointless vitriol. Installing software is cringey as hell now? The main issue here isn't native apps. It's the existing framework for installing them. For instance, would it be that far-fetched to be able to open an app in a single click? Current extended process: 1) Click link that takes me to app store page 2) Find and click install button 3) wait 4) Click "open app" button Streamlined process that accomplishes the same: 1) click link 2) wait 3) app opens up (download/install hidden behind spinner) Even if you have to add a pop-up in there to display permission requests, it's still a much smoother experience. You'd have to worry about app sizes but that's a solveable problem as well.
  - tadfisher 7y ago
    https://developer.android.com/topic/google-play-instant https://developer.android.com/topic/google-play-instant
  - Udik 7y ago
    > Installing software is cringey as hell now? When you know that the features you're interested in can be made easily available by a simple web app.
    - seemack 7y ago
cletus 7y ago
Apps are dominant on web because, well, the web sucks. We can gloss over this on desktop because of raw processing power but still, layout if html is just plain terrible. Of course mobile processors will continue to improve but on mobile you’re making a trade off between performance and battery life and battery life will probably never be not a concern.
- pier25 7y ago
  The mobile web sucks because of ads and bloated websites not because some inherent technological flaw.
  - angry_cactus 7y ago
    And because of the "separate sites" approach to mobile web development. Good for some media-focused applications, but usually the separate mobile site has an oversimplified interface that can't be zoomed in or out.
rolltiide 7y ago
I thought that native mobile would be out 4 years ago and not much has changed, my only conclusion now is that I don't want to do android/ios apps for startups, but I'll do it for large organizations that are actually leveraging all the technology.
_hl_ 7y ago
> What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality? Performance. But we're beginning to approach performance parity - not by the web becoming an faster, mind you, but by apps becoming slower. It used to be only cheap/poor-quality apps that felt like glorified web pages, but now even many high-profile apps are just parts of a web stack embedded into an app.
- weberc2 7y ago
  Absolutely this. Native apps are just so much smoother, and I say this as someone who really wants the web to win, and who used web apps almost exclusively because my 16GB iPhone 6 had very little space for apps. Also, the quality of native apps was much higher (e.g., Twitter feed doesn’t abruptly jump all over on mobile) although this could just be due to more budget allocation into native apps for whatever reason.
  - gargs 7y ago
    Not just smoother, native apps done right are interactive at the visual element level.
    - weberc2 7y ago
      Can you elaborate on this? I’m not following.
      - sciprojguy 7y ago
        Native iOS developer here (10 years). Knowing how to leverage UIKit and CoreAnimation properly can give a very smooth UX. SwiftUI has significantly upped the ante on iOS13 and future versions; it's reactive without the middleware layers, and it lets you get your app done (with live view previews) and not have to drag in a pant-load of external frameworks.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  It depends pretty much on what the app is all about. CRUD mobile apps can be made pretty fast when not doing an SPA bigger than Quake just for displaying text. SSR, pure CSS3, caching, server workers, mobile first, can go a long way. Naturally there are other kind of apps where native wins hands down, e.g. WebGL vs GL ES 3.2/Vulkan/Metal/DX.
alexashka 7y ago
You're viewing it through the lens of a developer. The user wants the best experience. Because software costs 0$ to distribute, the best user experience will always win out. The future of all software is faster, better software. Websites are shitty, arcane technology - the opposite of the future.
- rchaud 7y ago
  If a website is popular and does the basics well, it doesn't matter how 'shitty' the technology is. Amazon.com has easily the most hideously designed product pages out there. Because sellers can "customize" the product page, you get their content (usually hero images with tiny text) mixed in with text-only product details, "users also bought" carousels, Q&A and Reviews all jammed together. And they're still doing better than most large ecommerce stores (Walmart, Best Buy etc.) because the stuff that matters (pricing, delivery time) is better than the competition. Switching to the Amazon app doesn't fix any of these problems because it's primarily a content and UX issue.
  - solarkraft 7y ago
    Of course if a store is just plain cheaper and over all quality wise better, it it's not that important that it looks hideous and abandoned. But to some people it matters. And if two stores provide the same product at the same price, I think I'll prefer the one that looks nicer. It doesn't decide everything, but it's pretty certainly a factor (although Amazon must have determined that it's a small one to them, as they are still micro-optimizing for other page-related aspects like loading speed).
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  I don't know, I get to use uBlock when I use web apps and I have some control over the client even on my phone. Native apps can basically do whatever they want and users are waking up to this. I would like all of my applications to be sandboxed by a browser I have control over.
- carierx1 7y ago
  The web is truly a horrible user experience. Thankfully the its dying and native apps will prosper.
jszymborski 7y ago
It's times like this where it becomes painfully clear that FirefoxOS was (1) ahead of its time and (2) woefully poorly managed.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Actually Symbian Web Runtime and WebOS were ahead of their time.
NickBusey 7y ago
I was really impressed recently by Wealthfront's mobile site. It's so good and fast, they don't even push you to download their native app. You just don't need it when the website works that well on mobile.
deleted 7y ago
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phreack 7y ago
It can't be overstated how many apps are absolutely dependent on working push notifications (all chat for example) and can't be replicated as websites. And that's not yet implemented for iOS so we're all at Apple's mercy until it is, which may never be.
- jonny_eh 7y ago
  There's no reason why a web app can't work with push notifications. Won't? ya. Can't? no.
- Random_Person 7y ago
  The sites I build at work have proper push notifications. This problem has already been solved.
  - berns 7y ago
    How did you solve the lack of push notifications on iOS?
    - xyby 7y ago
      For iOS, can't you just wrap your web application in a thin native app layer that provides the push functionality?
      - berns 7y ago
        From the app store guidelines: 4.2 Minimum Functionality Your app should include features, content, and UI that elevate it beyond a repackaged website. If your app is not particularly useful, unique, or “app-like,” it doesn’t belong on the App Store.
        cma 7y ago
        Perhaps the main distinguishing app-like thing is distracting notifications.
carierx1 7y ago
Running a UI within a virtual machine is the stupidest idea ever.
kitsunesoba 7y ago
Only if mobile web can jump the hurdle of feel. Even the best mobile web apps still feel kinda clunky/laggy in subtle ways that the average native app doesn’t. It’s actually pretty comparable to the situation with desktop Linux where the gaps between the layers are subtly perceptible, which leads to a sort of slipshod/duct tape impression that isn’t great.
- partiallypro 7y ago
  A lot of native apps feel clunky because they are poorly coded and thought out. As OP said, 90% of cases are where companies don't need native apps, because they simply don't require that performance level or permission set.
- wayne_skylar 7y ago
  This is the right answer. You've got the web paradigm of the nav bar showing up when you scroll up (among other oddities). I think it would be very easy to have a mobile browser extension to show pages full screen in a special interactivity mode to make most mobile apps work on the web.
wpietri 7y ago
I'd believe you for some of those apps. But definitely not for Google Maps. Even on their own OS and their own hardware, they are clearly pushing performance limits for the Google Maps app. And have been for years. I think you're definitely right about gatekeeping, though. Apple's app store gross revenue is ~$50 billion/year. That's an incredible incentive to make sure that web apps will never be as good.
pastor_elm 7y ago
Shopify's growth model relies on bringing people into an app dependent ecosystem. They're not looking to be a one app company. They want users to locked into having many Shopify apps. When people are using mobile sites, the sense of dependency just isn't there. Not to mention it feels terribly inconvenient and the tracking can be stymied.
avip 7y ago
Offline is still a thing.
- partiallypro 7y ago
  But website can be packed up and saved as PWAs, also "offline sites" have been a thing since the 90s.
  - asdff 7y ago
    pwa are one thing, but safari based web apps are nothing more than a bookmark that happens to sit on your home screen. should they and could they be catched? absolutely. does apple care enough about us nerds with our web apps to implement a 30 year old feature? not at all.
EthanHeilman 7y ago
>Literally all of them could be implemented as responsive pages with acceptable performance. Speaking personally I like the division between highly sandboxed websites (no GPS access, no notifications, etc...) and trusted apps.
- brlewis 7y ago
  This is only because the trust given to apps is insane. No distinction between foreground GPS and background GPS? Sure, I wouldn't want web sites to work that way either. But if permissions were sane there would be no reason not to have native apps and web apps ask for the same permissions in the same way.
  - EthanHeilman 7y ago
    I don't ever want to give a website access to microphone because someone could turn it on via an XSS. Websites on the whole seem to be far more vulnerable than mobile apps because: 1. their code is refreshed on every load, 2. their software is often updated on a daily if not hourly basis, 3. they will often pull code from remote sources on every page load, 4. they don't even have to pass the minimal review and code signing of an app store, 5. and it is very likely that they are written in javascript. I agree with your general point that better permissions would improve the situation. For instance asking each time it wants to use the microphone, rather than an approve once model.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    There has been a distinction between the two on iOS for at least two years.
solarkraft 7y ago
> What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality? Performance. > Literally all of them could be implemented as responsive pages with acceptable performance But not with great performance. A user feels the slight stutters, glitches and slow-downs.
ohadron 7y ago
Technically, and from user experience point of view, this makes perfect sense. Native apps are rarely actually needed. However, Apple is making a huge pile of money out of app store sales, and it has huge leverage as long as the 'app' model lives on. They are strong enough to prevent this from happening. Ever ask yourself why mobile iOS web doesn't support push notifications like Android does? It's because that will be a shift in the wrong direction from Apple's standpoint.
- scarface74 7y ago
  As I asked before, which apps have you paid for, that would have been better as a web app, and that needed push notifications?
divbzero 7y ago
Ten years ago Facebook fought this battle and lost. [1] [2] [3] [1]: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/using-html5-today/438532093919 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/using-ht... "Using HTML5 Today" [2]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/12/09/11/facebook_admits_html5_not_competitive_with_cocoa_touch https://appleinsider.com/articles/12/09/11/facebook_admits_h... "Facebook admits HTML5 not competitive with Cocoa Touch" [3]: https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/ "Facebook Speeds Up Android App By Ditching HTML5 And Rebuilding It Natively Just Like The iOS Version" I have always rooted for mobile web apps, but the lack of feature parity and distribution challenge (“Add to Home Screen”) puts them at a constant disadvantage and companies who control mobile OS’s have little incentive to change this.
- carlosdp 7y ago
  In re: distribution challenge, PWAs can already be published to the Google Play store.
  - marvindanig 7y ago
    Yeah, and those are called TWAs-as in Trusted Web Activities. As much as I dislike Google in general, they have been good at bringing web development and native apps closer than ever.
    - rbrtl 7y ago
      I think this is only another reason to dislike them. Google created the PWA as a way to encapsulate the market on their terms. As my other comments will belie me, I do not disapprove of this behaviour necessarily -- Apple do it too -- but they have the polar opposite attitude to my privacy and data protection.
- jollins 7y ago
  As you said yourself though, this was 10 years ago.
- 7y ago
api 7y ago
I'm convinced that the long-term future of all UI development is web based, at least at the rendering layer. WASM may free us from JavaScript.
- goatlover 7y ago
  IS WASM canvas-based or HTML/CSS? Because canvas is not what comes to mind when thinking in terms of Web UI.
  - api 7y ago
    WASM can access the DOM. Check out this: https://github.com/gopherjs/vecty https://github.com/gopherjs/vecty Like React but in Go. Not quite mature yet but getting there.
thespace12 7y ago
Actually the future of the application UI is React.
buboard 7y ago
I m a web fanatic and use only the browser. My other apps are dropbox and skype , a decibel meter and strava, so things that cant exist on the web anyway. I use multiple gmail accounts so webmail is better Since most content apps use browser links at some point it doesn’t even make sense to e.g. have a twitter app Now, i wish we could have a better api than web push notifications though
- asdff 7y ago
  I'm kind of done with notifications on my phone. Plenty of apps turn approving legitimate notifications into an excuse to push ads or attempts at engagement through os notifications. The most recent offender on my phone was the moovit app, that sent something inane with emojis in the notification. deleted. I don't even have email notifications anymore. Just texts and calls from contacts. Notifications just serve to divert your attention from the task at hand. If I want to sit down and be distracted by reddit or whatever, it will be on my own time by my own choice damnit.
ojr 7y ago
Other things missing: Contacts, Device Identifier, In-app Purchases, and a trustworthy distribution platform with a large base of affluent customers.
hellisothers 7y ago
One thing I feel is overlooked in these discussions is WebView UI performance isn’t as good as native. You’ll always notice a difference scrolling a list natively vs on web. It just _feels_ different, same goes for all the other micro-interactions if pushing/popping views.
- AgloeDreams 7y ago
  This. And if you compare it with the very best say, iOS has to offer in touch interaction it's just different worlds. Look at the multitasking and swipe interaction on an iPad pro at 120Hz. You just can't even think of that world. I have a funny feeling that Apple's next big developer move on the iPhone is to enable those types of smooth, cancelable interactions out of the box in Xcode via new SwiftUI components just for it. When they make it easy and clear, people will use it and then the gap will widen.
troquerre 7y ago
The power of websites is that they run cross-platform. If your website works on chrome on windows it’ll work (for the most part) on Firefox on Mac and safari on iOS. Apple is against this philosophically because it doesn’t take advantage of the unique capabilities their devices provide. It’s the same reason why Apple stopped supporting flash https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
- scarface74 7y ago
  That’s not true. Back in 2007, Adobe claimed that they could get Flash working on the original iPhone if Apple had allowed them. When they finally got it to run on Android years later, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM and it still barely ran and was horrible on battery life. The original iPhone had 128Mb of RAM and a 400Mhz processor. It wasn’t until around 2011 when there was an iPhone that met those specs. Adobe was always late delivering Flash on mobile from Android phones and Palm phones. It was so bad, that the Motorola Xoom was advertised to be able to browse the “real Internet” because it could support Flash. At launch it didn’t. Leaving it in the embarrassing position that you couldn’t browse the Xoom advertising page that required Flash on a Xoom.
  - pier25 7y ago
    This. I developed a number of Air mobile apps back in 2012-2014 and all the blame is on Adobe. Flash was extremely inefficient and Adobe didn't want to invest the necessary resources to properly bring it to the mobile world. Adobe cancelled AS4 (aka Flash Next) which would have made Air a very competitive crossplatform solution. They shifted all its resources into HTML5 to throw a bone to the Flash community and it was a complete failure. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=actionscript-3 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=actionscript-... Don't get me wrong, it probably made economical sense for Adobe but it was a shame.
  - dnh44 7y ago
    Also flash player on the Mac was terrible and consumed a lot of energy. I’m not surprised Apple didn’t want it on iOS.
AgloeDreams 7y ago
> acceptable performance Until your competitor shows up. I think you are honestly right for the most cases, but the expectation on mobile, (esp. since the OS is written in native and 120Hz screens are coming) is so freaking high. The touch response rate expected is just going to make hybrid and web apps just seem like trash to the average consumer when compared directly with native apps. They just don't do it and just don't feel right.
- kllrnohj 7y ago
  > esp. since the OS is written in native and 120Hz screens are coming High-refresh rate mobile displays already happened. There's more 90Hz than 120Hz on the market at the moment. Typically gamer-focused phones like the Asus ROG Phone or the Razer Phone, but non-gamer-focused flagships are also now 90Hz like the Pixel 4. And of course on the iOS side of the ecosystem some iPad models already have 120hz displays, too.
  - AgloeDreams 7y ago
    Of course there are current examples, but in general the scale is not large at all on phones. Less than 1% of sales. Being first doesn't mean anything if it doesn't sell, being the majority of sales is a much different world. I'm referring to the 2020 iPhone Pro and the Galaxy S20 both being rumored to have 120Hz displays, massive changes in the market.
john_alan 7y ago
non-native never feels the same. fuck web apps.
deleted 7y ago
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ridiculous_fish 7y ago
Native controls can afford to be richer (in principal) because knowledge transfers across apps. Websites do not enable such transfer: there's too much of a culture of customizing everything. On mobile the problem is somewhat less noticeable because rich native interaction models haven't really emerged.
- pier25 7y ago
  Good point. In the mobile and desktop world devs are totally fine with using native GUIs that ship with the OS (even encouraged to do so) but in the web world projects are criticized for using libraries like Bootstrap and devs and designers are expected to reinvent the wheel every time. Also don't use a native alert or you will condemned to hell.
xeonoex 7y ago
I hope not. I started using flutter recently and it is by far the best development experience I've had creating anything with a UI. Easy to install (even on windows), build, stateful hot reload, and the code is easy to read and write. No HTML/CSS/JavaScript. I know web devs probably don't agree, but HTML and CSS weren't designed to build responsive, interactive applications, and all that has to be done to make it work makes it a pain in the ass to setup and develop. With stuff like WASM, Flutter, and Blazor, I'm hoping we have viable alternatives to traditional web development.
ENGNR 7y ago
The biggest feature I'd like parity on for mobile web.... is logins. As the tracking war rages, humble little login cookies are becoming a casualty. For example if someone gets a transactional email (say a new booking notification), opens it on their iphone, it opens safari.... in a new context. No login! So frustrating for them. You can send tokens with the links, but they really need to have an expiry date on them, and if the user forwards the email it risks exposing their whole account. So now you have to start playing with an intermediate 'sort of logged in but don't let them do anything too dangerous' state And now browsers are using "AI" to magically work out which cookies to delete. That's great, but.. can we not have an explicit UX for the user to say hey, this is a login cookie, I'm logged in because I want to see my data and be authorized on this website every single time I come here (and an equally special logout function that deletes it without trouble). I'm a pretty heavy user of mobile web and rarely use apps, but logins for power users and tech impaired users is pretty much the main reason we're looking at react-native too
- JamesSwift 7y ago
  Theres native platform support for that now with shared login context between browsers and apps. e.g. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/authenticationservices/aswebauthenticationsession https://developer.apple.com/documentation/authenticationserv...
  - ENGNR 7y ago
    If I’m reading it right that’s for if you control the app though. They still lose login if they follow a link from a mail client or slack app over to a mobile web app, which wouldn’t happen if they were going to an actual app
    - JamesSwift 7y ago
      It should all be shared as long as the sides are using the official cookie storage. I understand it as its essentially an HTTP only cookie stored at the device level (rather than in the brower).
rayiner 7y ago
Users hate web apps, especially on mobile, and it has nothing to do with functionality. Web apps on the App Store invariably provoke angry screeds about how the look and feel is not right. Native apps are even more essential on mobile. On the desktop, web apps just look weird and waste battery life. On mobile, they feel wrong. That difference in feel provokes visceral hatred.
- WA 7y ago
  No. Designers and some devs hate web apps for minuscule reasons your average user doesn’t care about and doesn’t notice at all. If an app helps them to get a task done, it simply doesn’t matter if the thing is native or not. At least, if you use a somewhat reasonable UI approach like Ionic.
  - Zanneth 7y ago
    Users absolutely want their apps to be as fast and fluid as possible. This is why they buy the newest Apple and Android phones every year, because their web apps are getting slower and slower.
- namibj 7y ago
  > Users hate web apps, especially on mobile, and it has nothing to do with functionality. Web apps on the App Store invariably provoke angry screeds about how the look and feel is not right. > Native apps are even more essential on mobile. On the desktop, web apps just look weird and waste battery life. On mobile, they feel wrong. That difference in feel provokes visceral hatred. They don't have to waste battery life. This is mostly due to poor coding/architecture, instead of "web". Especially with WebGl and Wasm.
- ativzzz 7y ago
  I agree with this. When you are creating a mobile experience for a website, you typically are burdened by the knowledge and existing designs/functionality of the desktop version which was usually built first. When you are designing for a mobile app, you are free from the shackles that bind you to the desktop. Of course, there is nothing stopping you from creating a separate web mobile experience, but human nature makes it harder to do so.
scarface74 7y ago
Seeing that the only apps that make money for either Google or Apple are mostly games with in app purchases, they wouldn’t be appropriate for web apps anyway.
scarface74 7y ago
Mail is the last thing I want as a web app. I don’t use web mail on my PC. I definitely wouldn’t want to use it on my phone. Maps is also much more responsive even on older phones than it is on a web page on a modern PC.
reaperducer 7y ago
Honestly I think the future of mobile will just be... mobile websites. That was Steve Jobs' original vision for the iPhone. The difficulty was that once the App Store launched, people and middle managers thought that if a company didn't have an "app," it wasn't a real company. Now that the web has matured, there are not that many things outside of games that require an app. But there are still many people (including many in my own company) that think an "app" adds credibility to a company, even if that app does less than the web site.
JamesSwift 7y ago
Messenger, Mail, and Teams would be absolutely crippled without background support and notifications. Maps would be somewhat viable, and I'm not familiar with White Noise. Also, 'native parity' is a moving goalpost. At the point you get support for all those things across all platforms, what else has been added to native that you are now missing? This isn't even considering the fact that there is no incentive for apple to play nicely without an anti-trust ruling against them.
- TheAdamAndChe 7y ago
  Progressive web apps can already receive notifications.
  - JamesSwift 7y ago
    iOS supports push notifications in a PWA context? Thats news to me.
pier25 7y ago
Another feature lacking in the mobile web are touch gestures. I'm facing this problem right now and the best option for recognizing gestures seems to be HammerJS which adds 7.5kB gzipped to your app. After that your app still needs to react kinetically (eg: the image moves while dragging it to the left and then the view transitions to the next image). It's a lot of code that needs to be shipped in the JS bundle. BTW if you have a better solution than HammerJS please comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22184079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22184079
hotgeart 7y ago
Ads and Exposure. Ads: Make a native app and a PWA, put a banner at the bottom. You'll get more from the native app. Exposure: I made some stupid apps and without any SEO I get 10K-50K installs, you can't get that with a PWA and Google Search. I'm 100% for PWA because I can't take anymore monopole shit from google play and his rules, but that's the reality.
- worik 7y ago
  Ads are the past. The future is getting paid to make the app that actual is useful Hmmm... What are these "ads"? Says the uBlock kid....
jakub_g 7y ago
Monetization. Native apps provide app & in-app purchases seamlessly integrated in the platform. Web payment solutions are clumsy in comparison. Sure, there are new APIs that ask for CC number, holder etc. to be prefilled but the friction is still not at the same level IMO. You need to pay the cut to Apple/Google but in certain scenarios it's preferable than asking for payment details.
- ryantriangles 7y ago
  Is there a difference now? Websites in Safari ask me to pay with an Apple ID popup that takes my fingerprint and charges me exactly the same way apps do, I don't see any difference in how it appears or is handled.
pier25 7y ago
> Honestly I think the future of mobile will just be... mobile websites. Indeed. A lot of people still think that native is superior than web but the problem is that most websites are bloated pieces of crap. If anyone doubts this check the Missive email client on iOS which was even featured by Apple on the AppStore and runs on Cordova: https://medium.com/missive-app/our-dirty-little-secret-cross-platform-email-client-with-nothing-but-html-aa12fc33bb02 https://medium.com/missive-app/our-dirty-little-secret-cross... (sorry for the Medium link)
- ryanwaggoner 7y ago
  I didn’t have to go any further than the login and signup screens to see that it doesn’t feel native. - No transitions between screens, just jumps - Tapping field brings up keyboard, then whole screen jumps up about 30 pixels instead of smoothly animating - Scrolling while there’s a blinking cursor has cursor detach from field until you lift your finger - Doesn’t respect dark mode - Doesn’t respect dynamic type consistently (text size) - Other weird little display artifacts Not saying it’s terrible, but it’s a good example of why native is still the way to go if you can afford it. It’s just a better user experience.
  - pier25 7y ago
    You think all of those are inherent flaws of using a webview? Some of those are because the developer didn't implement them (transitions, dark mode) and others are because Apple didn't implement them in WKWebView to follow the OS behaviors (cursor, keyboard). Not sure about your comment about the text size or the display artifacts.
    - ryanwaggoner 7y ago
      Not really interested in tracking down who is responsible for what. My point is that literally every single time someone comes along claiming that their hybrid framework or app is indistinguishable from native and I go check it out, it’s obvious within 30 seconds that it’s a poor substitute.
Fr0styMatt88 7y ago
I really like the idea of PWAs, but I've tried a few of them and I always come away being annoyed at the app launch latency. They still feel like they're hitting a remote server when starting up for.... something? My uneducated hunch is that they're over-zealously checking their server for updates. The other issue I have with their implementation is the opaqueness of how offline caching works. How much space do apps get? When does the offline cache get invalidated? I care about that because of that terrible launch latency. I think these issues can be attributed to PWAs being second-class citizens in Android and iOS.
- criddell 7y ago
  Developers love the idea of PWAs. Users are less enthusiastic. I for one personally like that Apple does some rudimentary vetting of apps in their store. I really have no interest in running a web app that could be great today and loaded with malware and trackers tomorrow.
- iaml 7y ago
  This is a solved problem via service workers. They can cache all the app's content and you can choose to cache whatever you like including api responses from any service. They could also be configured to serve cache first and replace the content in background. At this point if the app is slow to start, it's 100% on devs/architecture. The only problem is if you exceed the quota for cache, which is varied by browser/platform, you risk the browser just nuking all your cache/localstorage/indexeddb.
marriedWpt 7y ago
As someone who refuses to give any money to Apple, this is my goal.
asdff 7y ago
With all of your most used apps, you could just switch to using web apps. You can save any mobile site to the home screen of your iphone with safari.
tjpnz 7y ago
>What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality? Some means of preventing users from blocking ads and tracking? Sure, there are ways around this for native apps but they're not nearly as trivial as installing an ad blocker (provided the mobile browser supports extensions).
GrayTextIsTruth 7y ago
I was going to build a mobile web app but I don’t like the way iOS handles button clicks on the bottom of the screen. The first click is ignored and it slides up your bottom menu bar, then you can click the button. You don’t have as much control in the browser.
StreamBright 7y ago
This would be great if HTTP, HTML and co would have been designed as a stateful low-latency application platform and not a distributed encyclopaedia. Retrofitting state and all of the things you listed into it resulted in the Javascript mayhem which is quite pathetic for several reasons including security and energy consumption. I think the future should be native applications that can be optimized for data transfer and latency, have much better security and stateful behaviour by default.
jinglebells 7y ago
And what happens when I don't have any signal? Writing an offline-first mobile website is INCREDIBLY hard. Where are you going to store the data? How are you going to detect the network connectivity without polling and hosing the battery because the radio doesn't timeout? Geo-fencing events?
jakedub4d2 7y ago
Yes! This is something that would greatly benefit the app world.

privateSFacct 7y ago

Look at your most used apps - none of them are "responsive pages". That should tell you something. Folks who have tried responsive pages haven't done that well. I am curious - what is the most popular responsive webpage on iphone would people say? I'd like to check out the current leader in this space.

hopia 7y ago
Google?
akmarinov 7y ago
I use Facebook's as I don't want Facebook's grubby hands using private APIs on my phone to get every bit of data they can. At least the browser limits them.
- edgyquant 7y ago
  Plus the facebook app eats battery life. IME my phone battery lasts all day unless I install facebook: then it lasts a few hours.
  - asdff 7y ago
    and for whatever mind boggling reason their stand alone chat client is 300mb.
newfeatureok 7y ago
None of my most used apps are responsive pages because Safari neuters the functionality. - White Noise -> Safari can't play background sounds once closed. - Messenger -> Notification trouble, not to mention Facebook won't let you use the mobile version of Messenger without a lot of effort. - Google Maps -> Close, but a lot of the functionality, like reminders require notifications which isn't up-to-par with just Safari - Teams -> See messenger.
j2bax 7y ago
Apple does some fairly beautiful responsive webpages... Albeit rather heavy! https://www.apple.com/apple-arcade/ https://www.apple.com/apple-arcade/
jayd16 7y ago
Whats the slack app written in?
- jamil7 7y ago
  The iOS app is native UIKit I believe.
- philshem 7y ago
  Desktop apps are (in)famously Electron.js iOS is native: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/931599784137363459?s=20 https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/931599784137363459?s=20 Android is native, too (no source)
aantix 7y ago
Because once a company is invested in the native side, they probably aren't going to look at greenfield solutions anytime soon? If you're considering building a new app, a responsive site with JS is definitely a contender. Take a look at the performance numbers. https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1174802413548474368 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1174802413548474368 And they're only increasing, making it a more viable choice with each year passing.
wpietri 7y ago
I haven't tried it on iOS, but Twitter's web app is quite good on Android/Firefox and Android/Chrome. Not quite as good as native, and prone to developing lag if I don't occasionally restart the browser. But surprisingly good. They talk about the process of building it here: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-source/2017/how-we-built-twitter-lite.html https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-sourc...
- distances 7y ago
  It's unusable on Firefox Focus though. Trying to expand anything completely breaks scrolling on the page.
  - iudqnolq 7y ago
    No just focus. And I've run into issues even if I don't expand anything. Around 40% of pages have a point below which I can't scroll (I'm jumped to the top of the page if I try). And then there's the unspecified error you get on around 60% of page loads that requires a refresh to fix.
- AgloeDreams 7y ago
  I tried it, it's pretty close honestly, but the performance just feels off and it does weird stuff all the time. The iOS app is just better.
- mattacular 7y ago
  I use the web app on iOS. Feature parity is 100% for me because I don't use push notifications at app on Twitter. The performance is a little worse (mostly touch targeting is not as good) but once you get used to it it is not noticeable. This is an acceptable tradeoff to me because it allows me to block almost all promoted tweets with Safari content blockers. I also think the Twitter native app may do devious things that are less likely to be permitted by Safari.

xenihn 7y ago

The fact that Facebook themselves will never be able to replace their native iOS and Android apps with RN implementations says it all imo.

EugeneOZ 7y ago
It just says that web apps can't steal enough data from your phone.
- xenihn 7y ago
  But RN apps are not web apps...?
  - bonestamp2 7y ago
    Tricky question. They start as web apps since they're built with mostly web technologies, but then they're compiled as native apps with native components and they don't run in the browser. So, I'd lean towards "no" -- they're not web apps at runtime.
    - robertoandred 7y ago
      React Native apps do not use web technologies.
      - solarkraft 7y ago
        That depends on what you include in your definition of web technologies. React and Javascript at this point mostly fall under mine.
      - bonestamp2 7y ago
        I guess we can agree to disagree -- I consider JavaScript a web technology.
htormey 7y ago
React Native is widely used in both Instagram and the main Facebook app (market places). It’s also used in a number of other apps they make (oculus, ads manager).

rajasimon 7y ago

I thought this too. You know recent TWA with PWA makes the website accessible with anything on the system level. Like the location and other information.

duxup 7y ago
I just wish with PWAs ... there was some more love as far as how they're handled. Last time I looked at them it was really wonky to install a PWA from Chrome. Developer advocacy at the time from Google was big on PWAs, but they were second class citizens everywhere in Google land....
- untog 7y ago
  You can now wrap a PWA up as a TWA (Trusted Web Activity) and publish it to the Play Store, which should make a huge difference.
  - duxup 7y ago
    OH TIL that. That's good, showing up on the Play Store was kinda random benchmark I was looking for.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  They are first class on UWP since Microsoft decided to drop WinJS in favour of PWAs. It is also one of the ways they are pushing for cross platform development on their upcoming foldable devices (Other being React Native and Xamarin, depending where one is coming from).
  - duxup 7y ago
    Yeah I really liked MS's support that way.

ricketycricket 7y ago

> What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality? The desire to build web apps instead of mobile apps. > Literally all of them could be implemented as responsive pages with acceptable performance. Exactly. It's not a technical issue as much as an issue of focus/interest. Unfortunately, this has been a losing battle since 2008.

newfeatureok 7y ago
> Exactly. It's not a technical issue as much as an issue of focus/interest. Unfortunately, this has been a losing battle since 2008. This is true, but there are a lot of features missing from a responsive site that apps have. Of course, I'd argue that all of the missing functionality can easily be added to Safari and Chrome (to name the big two mobile browsers).

deepGem 7y ago

I feel quite the opposite, most of the phone apps will likely to be thick client variants of the web apps, given that the hosts have so much power and storage available. Privacy concerns are gonna force this model where almost every activity having minimal network overhead. We are going back to the desktop app era, is what I feel.

na85 7y ago
> We are going back to the desktop app era, is what I feel. Can't wait, to be honest. This era of everything as a service is great for developer convenience but is incredibly user-hostile in that it enables and encourages surveillance capitalism and the erosion of privacy.

tempsy 7y ago

No mobile website has match the performance of native though

The_rationalist 7y ago
No 2D renderer has matched the rendering engine of chromium aka skia. Show benchmarcks otherwise, instead of hearsay evidence.

lazyier 7y ago

> Honestly I think the future of mobile will just be... mobile websites. This. Having to install software on my phone to use a service is cringy as hell and is a huge red flag for me. Like when trying to order food from a restaurant or shop somewhere. It's almost always going to be a automatic no. I just don't trust them. They always want permissions to access things on my phone, which is just pure nonsense. It's going to take a while for businesses to realize that in order to get a wide audience for the software they are paying for the last thing they want to do is force people to jump through hoops in order to use it. For every one of 'google maps' there is going to be ten thousand other apps that simply have no benefit from being 'native'.

seemack 7y ago
I agree with the overall points, less so the pointless vitriol. Installing software is cringey as hell now? The main issue here isn't native apps. It's the existing framework for installing them. For instance, would it be that far-fetched to be able to open an app in a single click? Current extended process: 1) Click link that takes me to app store page 2) Find and click install button 3) wait 4) Click "open app" button Streamlined process that accomplishes the same: 1) click link 2) wait 3) app opens up (download/install hidden behind spinner) Even if you have to add a pop-up in there to display permission requests, it's still a much smoother experience. You'd have to worry about app sizes but that's a solveable problem as well.
- tadfisher 7y ago
  https://developer.android.com/topic/google-play-instant https://developer.android.com/topic/google-play-instant
- Udik 7y ago
  > Installing software is cringey as hell now? When you know that the features you're interested in can be made easily available by a simple web app.
  - seemack 7y ago

cletus 7y ago

Apps are dominant on web because, well, the web sucks. We can gloss over this on desktop because of raw processing power but still, layout if html is just plain terrible. Of course mobile processors will continue to improve but on mobile you’re making a trade off between performance and battery life and battery life will probably never be not a concern.

pier25 7y ago
The mobile web sucks because of ads and bloated websites not because some inherent technological flaw.
- angry_cactus 7y ago
  And because of the "separate sites" approach to mobile web development. Good for some media-focused applications, but usually the separate mobile site has an oversimplified interface that can't be zoomed in or out.

rolltiide 7y ago

I thought that native mobile would be out 4 years ago and not much has changed, my only conclusion now is that I don't want to do android/ios apps for startups, but I'll do it for large organizations that are actually leveraging all the technology.

_hl_ 7y ago

> What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality? Performance. But we're beginning to approach performance parity - not by the web becoming an faster, mind you, but by apps becoming slower. It used to be only cheap/poor-quality apps that felt like glorified web pages, but now even many high-profile apps are just parts of a web stack embedded into an app.

weberc2 7y ago
Absolutely this. Native apps are just so much smoother, and I say this as someone who really wants the web to win, and who used web apps almost exclusively because my 16GB iPhone 6 had very little space for apps. Also, the quality of native apps was much higher (e.g., Twitter feed doesn’t abruptly jump all over on mobile) although this could just be due to more budget allocation into native apps for whatever reason.
- gargs 7y ago
  Not just smoother, native apps done right are interactive at the visual element level.
  - weberc2 7y ago
    Can you elaborate on this? I’m not following.
    - sciprojguy 7y ago
      Native iOS developer here (10 years). Knowing how to leverage UIKit and CoreAnimation properly can give a very smooth UX. SwiftUI has significantly upped the ante on iOS13 and future versions; it's reactive without the middleware layers, and it lets you get your app done (with live view previews) and not have to drag in a pant-load of external frameworks.
pjmlp 7y ago
It depends pretty much on what the app is all about. CRUD mobile apps can be made pretty fast when not doing an SPA bigger than Quake just for displaying text. SSR, pure CSS3, caching, server workers, mobile first, can go a long way. Naturally there are other kind of apps where native wins hands down, e.g. WebGL vs GL ES 3.2/Vulkan/Metal/DX.

alexashka 7y ago

You're viewing it through the lens of a developer. The user wants the best experience. Because software costs 0$ to distribute, the best user experience will always win out. The future of all software is faster, better software. Websites are shitty, arcane technology - the opposite of the future.

rchaud 7y ago
If a website is popular and does the basics well, it doesn't matter how 'shitty' the technology is. Amazon.com has easily the most hideously designed product pages out there. Because sellers can "customize" the product page, you get their content (usually hero images with tiny text) mixed in with text-only product details, "users also bought" carousels, Q&A and Reviews all jammed together. And they're still doing better than most large ecommerce stores (Walmart, Best Buy etc.) because the stuff that matters (pricing, delivery time) is better than the competition. Switching to the Amazon app doesn't fix any of these problems because it's primarily a content and UX issue.
- solarkraft 7y ago
  Of course if a store is just plain cheaper and over all quality wise better, it it's not that important that it looks hideous and abandoned. But to some people it matters. And if two stores provide the same product at the same price, I think I'll prefer the one that looks nicer. It doesn't decide everything, but it's pretty certainly a factor (although Amazon must have determined that it's a small one to them, as they are still micro-optimizing for other page-related aspects like loading speed).
hombre_fatal 7y ago
I don't know, I get to use uBlock when I use web apps and I have some control over the client even on my phone. Native apps can basically do whatever they want and users are waking up to this. I would like all of my applications to be sandboxed by a browser I have control over.
carierx1 7y ago
The web is truly a horrible user experience. Thankfully the its dying and native apps will prosper.

jszymborski 7y ago

It's times like this where it becomes painfully clear that FirefoxOS was (1) ahead of its time and (2) woefully poorly managed.

pjmlp 7y ago
Actually Symbian Web Runtime and WebOS were ahead of their time.

NickBusey 7y ago

I was really impressed recently by Wealthfront's mobile site. It's so good and fast, they don't even push you to download their native app. You just don't need it when the website works that well on mobile.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

phreack 7y ago

It can't be overstated how many apps are absolutely dependent on working push notifications (all chat for example) and can't be replicated as websites. And that's not yet implemented for iOS so we're all at Apple's mercy until it is, which may never be.

jonny_eh 7y ago
There's no reason why a web app can't work with push notifications. Won't? ya. Can't? no.
Random_Person 7y ago
The sites I build at work have proper push notifications. This problem has already been solved.
- berns 7y ago
  How did you solve the lack of push notifications on iOS?
  - xyby 7y ago
    For iOS, can't you just wrap your web application in a thin native app layer that provides the push functionality?
    - berns 7y ago
      From the app store guidelines: 4.2 Minimum Functionality Your app should include features, content, and UI that elevate it beyond a repackaged website. If your app is not particularly useful, unique, or “app-like,” it doesn’t belong on the App Store.
      - cma 7y ago
        Perhaps the main distinguishing app-like thing is distracting notifications.

carierx1 7y ago

Running a UI within a virtual machine is the stupidest idea ever.

kitsunesoba 7y ago

Only if mobile web can jump the hurdle of feel. Even the best mobile web apps still feel kinda clunky/laggy in subtle ways that the average native app doesn’t. It’s actually pretty comparable to the situation with desktop Linux where the gaps between the layers are subtly perceptible, which leads to a sort of slipshod/duct tape impression that isn’t great.

partiallypro 7y ago
A lot of native apps feel clunky because they are poorly coded and thought out. As OP said, 90% of cases are where companies don't need native apps, because they simply don't require that performance level or permission set.
wayne_skylar 7y ago
This is the right answer. You've got the web paradigm of the nav bar showing up when you scroll up (among other oddities). I think it would be very easy to have a mobile browser extension to show pages full screen in a special interactivity mode to make most mobile apps work on the web.

wpietri 7y ago

I'd believe you for some of those apps. But definitely not for Google Maps. Even on their own OS and their own hardware, they are clearly pushing performance limits for the Google Maps app. And have been for years. I think you're definitely right about gatekeeping, though. Apple's app store gross revenue is ~$50 billion/year. That's an incredible incentive to make sure that web apps will never be as good.

pastor_elm 7y ago

Shopify's growth model relies on bringing people into an app dependent ecosystem. They're not looking to be a one app company. They want users to locked into having many Shopify apps. When people are using mobile sites, the sense of dependency just isn't there. Not to mention it feels terribly inconvenient and the tracking can be stymied.

avip 7y ago

Offline is still a thing.

partiallypro 7y ago
But website can be packed up and saved as PWAs, also "offline sites" have been a thing since the 90s.
- asdff 7y ago
  pwa are one thing, but safari based web apps are nothing more than a bookmark that happens to sit on your home screen. should they and could they be catched? absolutely. does apple care enough about us nerds with our web apps to implement a 30 year old feature? not at all.

EthanHeilman 7y ago

>Literally all of them could be implemented as responsive pages with acceptable performance. Speaking personally I like the division between highly sandboxed websites (no GPS access, no notifications, etc...) and trusted apps.

brlewis 7y ago
This is only because the trust given to apps is insane. No distinction between foreground GPS and background GPS? Sure, I wouldn't want web sites to work that way either. But if permissions were sane there would be no reason not to have native apps and web apps ask for the same permissions in the same way.
- EthanHeilman 7y ago
  I don't ever want to give a website access to microphone because someone could turn it on via an XSS. Websites on the whole seem to be far more vulnerable than mobile apps because: 1. their code is refreshed on every load, 2. their software is often updated on a daily if not hourly basis, 3. they will often pull code from remote sources on every page load, 4. they don't even have to pass the minimal review and code signing of an app store, 5. and it is very likely that they are written in javascript. I agree with your general point that better permissions would improve the situation. For instance asking each time it wants to use the microphone, rather than an approve once model.
- scarface74 7y ago
  There has been a distinction between the two on iOS for at least two years.

solarkraft 7y ago

> What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality? Performance. > Literally all of them could be implemented as responsive pages with acceptable performance But not with great performance. A user feels the slight stutters, glitches and slow-downs.

ohadron 7y ago

Technically, and from user experience point of view, this makes perfect sense. Native apps are rarely actually needed. However, Apple is making a huge pile of money out of app store sales, and it has huge leverage as long as the 'app' model lives on. They are strong enough to prevent this from happening. Ever ask yourself why mobile iOS web doesn't support push notifications like Android does? It's because that will be a shift in the wrong direction from Apple's standpoint.

scarface74 7y ago
As I asked before, which apps have you paid for, that would have been better as a web app, and that needed push notifications?

divbzero 7y ago

Ten years ago Facebook fought this battle and lost. [1] [2] [3] [1]: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/using-html5-today/438532093919 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/using-ht... "Using HTML5 Today" [2]: https://appleinsider.com/articles/12/09/11/facebook_admits_html5_not_competitive_with_cocoa_touch https://appleinsider.com/articles/12/09/11/facebook_admits_h... "Facebook admits HTML5 not competitive with Cocoa Touch" [3]: https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/13/facebook-android-faster/ "Facebook Speeds Up Android App By Ditching HTML5 And Rebuilding It Natively Just Like The iOS Version" I have always rooted for mobile web apps, but the lack of feature parity and distribution challenge (“Add to Home Screen”) puts them at a constant disadvantage and companies who control mobile OS’s have little incentive to change this.

carlosdp 7y ago
In re: distribution challenge, PWAs can already be published to the Google Play store.
- marvindanig 7y ago
  Yeah, and those are called TWAs-as in Trusted Web Activities. As much as I dislike Google in general, they have been good at bringing web development and native apps closer than ever.
  - rbrtl 7y ago
    I think this is only another reason to dislike them. Google created the PWA as a way to encapsulate the market on their terms. As my other comments will belie me, I do not disapprove of this behaviour necessarily -- Apple do it too -- but they have the polar opposite attitude to my privacy and data protection.
jollins 7y ago
As you said yourself though, this was 10 years ago.
7y ago

api 7y ago

I'm convinced that the long-term future of all UI development is web based, at least at the rendering layer. WASM may free us from JavaScript.

goatlover 7y ago
IS WASM canvas-based or HTML/CSS? Because canvas is not what comes to mind when thinking in terms of Web UI.
- api 7y ago
  WASM can access the DOM. Check out this: https://github.com/gopherjs/vecty https://github.com/gopherjs/vecty Like React but in Go. Not quite mature yet but getting there.

thespace12 7y ago

Actually the future of the application UI is React.

buboard 7y ago

I m a web fanatic and use only the browser. My other apps are dropbox and skype , a decibel meter and strava, so things that cant exist on the web anyway. I use multiple gmail accounts so webmail is better Since most content apps use browser links at some point it doesn’t even make sense to e.g. have a twitter app Now, i wish we could have a better api than web push notifications though

asdff 7y ago
I'm kind of done with notifications on my phone. Plenty of apps turn approving legitimate notifications into an excuse to push ads or attempts at engagement through os notifications. The most recent offender on my phone was the moovit app, that sent something inane with emojis in the notification. deleted. I don't even have email notifications anymore. Just texts and calls from contacts. Notifications just serve to divert your attention from the task at hand. If I want to sit down and be distracted by reddit or whatever, it will be on my own time by my own choice damnit.

ojr 7y ago

Other things missing: Contacts, Device Identifier, In-app Purchases, and a trustworthy distribution platform with a large base of affluent customers.

hellisothers 7y ago

One thing I feel is overlooked in these discussions is WebView UI performance isn’t as good as native. You’ll always notice a difference scrolling a list natively vs on web. It just _feels_ different, same goes for all the other micro-interactions if pushing/popping views.

AgloeDreams 7y ago
This. And if you compare it with the very best say, iOS has to offer in touch interaction it's just different worlds. Look at the multitasking and swipe interaction on an iPad pro at 120Hz. You just can't even think of that world. I have a funny feeling that Apple's next big developer move on the iPhone is to enable those types of smooth, cancelable interactions out of the box in Xcode via new SwiftUI components just for it. When they make it easy and clear, people will use it and then the gap will widen.

troquerre 7y ago

The power of websites is that they run cross-platform. If your website works on chrome on windows it’ll work (for the most part) on Firefox on Mac and safari on iOS. Apple is against this philosophically because it doesn’t take advantage of the unique capabilities their devices provide. It’s the same reason why Apple stopped supporting flash https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

scarface74 7y ago
That’s not true. Back in 2007, Adobe claimed that they could get Flash working on the original iPhone if Apple had allowed them. When they finally got it to run on Android years later, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM and it still barely ran and was horrible on battery life. The original iPhone had 128Mb of RAM and a 400Mhz processor. It wasn’t until around 2011 when there was an iPhone that met those specs. Adobe was always late delivering Flash on mobile from Android phones and Palm phones. It was so bad, that the Motorola Xoom was advertised to be able to browse the “real Internet” because it could support Flash. At launch it didn’t. Leaving it in the embarrassing position that you couldn’t browse the Xoom advertising page that required Flash on a Xoom.
- pier25 7y ago
  This. I developed a number of Air mobile apps back in 2012-2014 and all the blame is on Adobe. Flash was extremely inefficient and Adobe didn't want to invest the necessary resources to properly bring it to the mobile world. Adobe cancelled AS4 (aka Flash Next) which would have made Air a very competitive crossplatform solution. They shifted all its resources into HTML5 to throw a bone to the Flash community and it was a complete failure. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=actionscript-3 https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=actionscript-... Don't get me wrong, it probably made economical sense for Adobe but it was a shame.
- dnh44 7y ago
  Also flash player on the Mac was terrible and consumed a lot of energy. I’m not surprised Apple didn’t want it on iOS.

AgloeDreams 7y ago

> acceptable performance Until your competitor shows up. I think you are honestly right for the most cases, but the expectation on mobile, (esp. since the OS is written in native and 120Hz screens are coming) is so freaking high. The touch response rate expected is just going to make hybrid and web apps just seem like trash to the average consumer when compared directly with native apps. They just don't do it and just don't feel right.

kllrnohj 7y ago
> esp. since the OS is written in native and 120Hz screens are coming High-refresh rate mobile displays already happened. There's more 90Hz than 120Hz on the market at the moment. Typically gamer-focused phones like the Asus ROG Phone or the Razer Phone, but non-gamer-focused flagships are also now 90Hz like the Pixel 4. And of course on the iOS side of the ecosystem some iPad models already have 120hz displays, too.
- AgloeDreams 7y ago
  Of course there are current examples, but in general the scale is not large at all on phones. Less than 1% of sales. Being first doesn't mean anything if it doesn't sell, being the majority of sales is a much different world. I'm referring to the 2020 iPhone Pro and the Galaxy S20 both being rumored to have 120Hz displays, massive changes in the market.

john_alan 7y ago

non-native never feels the same. fuck web apps.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

ridiculous_fish 7y ago

Native controls can afford to be richer (in principal) because knowledge transfers across apps. Websites do not enable such transfer: there's too much of a culture of customizing everything. On mobile the problem is somewhat less noticeable because rich native interaction models haven't really emerged.

pier25 7y ago
Good point. In the mobile and desktop world devs are totally fine with using native GUIs that ship with the OS (even encouraged to do so) but in the web world projects are criticized for using libraries like Bootstrap and devs and designers are expected to reinvent the wheel every time. Also don't use a native alert or you will condemned to hell.

xeonoex 7y ago

I hope not. I started using flutter recently and it is by far the best development experience I've had creating anything with a UI. Easy to install (even on windows), build, stateful hot reload, and the code is easy to read and write. No HTML/CSS/JavaScript. I know web devs probably don't agree, but HTML and CSS weren't designed to build responsive, interactive applications, and all that has to be done to make it work makes it a pain in the ass to setup and develop. With stuff like WASM, Flutter, and Blazor, I'm hoping we have viable alternatives to traditional web development.

ENGNR 7y ago

The biggest feature I'd like parity on for mobile web.... is logins. As the tracking war rages, humble little login cookies are becoming a casualty. For example if someone gets a transactional email (say a new booking notification), opens it on their iphone, it opens safari.... in a new context. No login! So frustrating for them. You can send tokens with the links, but they really need to have an expiry date on them, and if the user forwards the email it risks exposing their whole account. So now you have to start playing with an intermediate 'sort of logged in but don't let them do anything too dangerous' state And now browsers are using "AI" to magically work out which cookies to delete. That's great, but.. can we not have an explicit UX for the user to say hey, this is a login cookie, I'm logged in because I want to see my data and be authorized on this website every single time I come here (and an equally special logout function that deletes it without trouble). I'm a pretty heavy user of mobile web and rarely use apps, but logins for power users and tech impaired users is pretty much the main reason we're looking at react-native too

JamesSwift 7y ago
Theres native platform support for that now with shared login context between browsers and apps. e.g. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/authenticationservices/aswebauthenticationsession https://developer.apple.com/documentation/authenticationserv...
- ENGNR 7y ago
  If I’m reading it right that’s for if you control the app though. They still lose login if they follow a link from a mail client or slack app over to a mobile web app, which wouldn’t happen if they were going to an actual app
  - JamesSwift 7y ago
    It should all be shared as long as the sides are using the official cookie storage. I understand it as its essentially an HTTP only cookie stored at the device level (rather than in the brower).

rayiner 7y ago

Users hate web apps, especially on mobile, and it has nothing to do with functionality. Web apps on the App Store invariably provoke angry screeds about how the look and feel is not right. Native apps are even more essential on mobile. On the desktop, web apps just look weird and waste battery life. On mobile, they feel wrong. That difference in feel provokes visceral hatred.

WA 7y ago
No. Designers and some devs hate web apps for minuscule reasons your average user doesn’t care about and doesn’t notice at all. If an app helps them to get a task done, it simply doesn’t matter if the thing is native or not. At least, if you use a somewhat reasonable UI approach like Ionic.
- Zanneth 7y ago
  Users absolutely want their apps to be as fast and fluid as possible. This is why they buy the newest Apple and Android phones every year, because their web apps are getting slower and slower.
namibj 7y ago
> Users hate web apps, especially on mobile, and it has nothing to do with functionality. Web apps on the App Store invariably provoke angry screeds about how the look and feel is not right. > Native apps are even more essential on mobile. On the desktop, web apps just look weird and waste battery life. On mobile, they feel wrong. That difference in feel provokes visceral hatred. They don't have to waste battery life. This is mostly due to poor coding/architecture, instead of "web". Especially with WebGl and Wasm.
ativzzz 7y ago
I agree with this. When you are creating a mobile experience for a website, you typically are burdened by the knowledge and existing designs/functionality of the desktop version which was usually built first. When you are designing for a mobile app, you are free from the shackles that bind you to the desktop. Of course, there is nothing stopping you from creating a separate web mobile experience, but human nature makes it harder to do so.

scarface74 7y ago

Seeing that the only apps that make money for either Google or Apple are mostly games with in app purchases, they wouldn’t be appropriate for web apps anyway.

scarface74 7y ago

Mail is the last thing I want as a web app. I don’t use web mail on my PC. I definitely wouldn’t want to use it on my phone. Maps is also much more responsive even on older phones than it is on a web page on a modern PC.

reaperducer 7y ago

Honestly I think the future of mobile will just be... mobile websites. That was Steve Jobs' original vision for the iPhone. The difficulty was that once the App Store launched, people and middle managers thought that if a company didn't have an "app," it wasn't a real company. Now that the web has matured, there are not that many things outside of games that require an app. But there are still many people (including many in my own company) that think an "app" adds credibility to a company, even if that app does less than the web site.

JamesSwift 7y ago

Messenger, Mail, and Teams would be absolutely crippled without background support and notifications. Maps would be somewhat viable, and I'm not familiar with White Noise. Also, 'native parity' is a moving goalpost. At the point you get support for all those things across all platforms, what else has been added to native that you are now missing? This isn't even considering the fact that there is no incentive for apple to play nicely without an anti-trust ruling against them.

TheAdamAndChe 7y ago
Progressive web apps can already receive notifications.
- JamesSwift 7y ago
  iOS supports push notifications in a PWA context? Thats news to me.

pier25 7y ago

Another feature lacking in the mobile web are touch gestures. I'm facing this problem right now and the best option for recognizing gestures seems to be HammerJS which adds 7.5kB gzipped to your app. After that your app still needs to react kinetically (eg: the image moves while dragging it to the left and then the view transitions to the next image). It's a lot of code that needs to be shipped in the JS bundle. BTW if you have a better solution than HammerJS please comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22184079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22184079

hotgeart 7y ago

Ads and Exposure. Ads: Make a native app and a PWA, put a banner at the bottom. You'll get more from the native app. Exposure: I made some stupid apps and without any SEO I get 10K-50K installs, you can't get that with a PWA and Google Search. I'm 100% for PWA because I can't take anymore monopole shit from google play and his rules, but that's the reality.

worik 7y ago
Ads are the past. The future is getting paid to make the app that actual is useful Hmmm... What are these "ads"? Says the uBlock kid....

jakub_g 7y ago

Monetization. Native apps provide app & in-app purchases seamlessly integrated in the platform. Web payment solutions are clumsy in comparison. Sure, there are new APIs that ask for CC number, holder etc. to be prefilled but the friction is still not at the same level IMO. You need to pay the cut to Apple/Google but in certain scenarios it's preferable than asking for payment details.

ryantriangles 7y ago
Is there a difference now? Websites in Safari ask me to pay with an Apple ID popup that takes my fingerprint and charges me exactly the same way apps do, I don't see any difference in how it appears or is handled.

pier25 7y ago

> Honestly I think the future of mobile will just be... mobile websites. Indeed. A lot of people still think that native is superior than web but the problem is that most websites are bloated pieces of crap. If anyone doubts this check the Missive email client on iOS which was even featured by Apple on the AppStore and runs on Cordova: https://medium.com/missive-app/our-dirty-little-secret-cross-platform-email-client-with-nothing-but-html-aa12fc33bb02 https://medium.com/missive-app/our-dirty-little-secret-cross... (sorry for the Medium link)

ryanwaggoner 7y ago
I didn’t have to go any further than the login and signup screens to see that it doesn’t feel native. - No transitions between screens, just jumps - Tapping field brings up keyboard, then whole screen jumps up about 30 pixels instead of smoothly animating - Scrolling while there’s a blinking cursor has cursor detach from field until you lift your finger - Doesn’t respect dark mode - Doesn’t respect dynamic type consistently (text size) - Other weird little display artifacts Not saying it’s terrible, but it’s a good example of why native is still the way to go if you can afford it. It’s just a better user experience.
- pier25 7y ago
  You think all of those are inherent flaws of using a webview? Some of those are because the developer didn't implement them (transitions, dark mode) and others are because Apple didn't implement them in WKWebView to follow the OS behaviors (cursor, keyboard). Not sure about your comment about the text size or the display artifacts.
  - ryanwaggoner 7y ago
    Not really interested in tracking down who is responsible for what. My point is that literally every single time someone comes along claiming that their hybrid framework or app is indistinguishable from native and I go check it out, it’s obvious within 30 seconds that it’s a poor substitute.

Fr0styMatt88 7y ago

I really like the idea of PWAs, but I've tried a few of them and I always come away being annoyed at the app launch latency. They still feel like they're hitting a remote server when starting up for.... something? My uneducated hunch is that they're over-zealously checking their server for updates. The other issue I have with their implementation is the opaqueness of how offline caching works. How much space do apps get? When does the offline cache get invalidated? I care about that because of that terrible launch latency. I think these issues can be attributed to PWAs being second-class citizens in Android and iOS.

criddell 7y ago
Developers love the idea of PWAs. Users are less enthusiastic. I for one personally like that Apple does some rudimentary vetting of apps in their store. I really have no interest in running a web app that could be great today and loaded with malware and trackers tomorrow.
iaml 7y ago
This is a solved problem via service workers. They can cache all the app's content and you can choose to cache whatever you like including api responses from any service. They could also be configured to serve cache first and replace the content in background. At this point if the app is slow to start, it's 100% on devs/architecture. The only problem is if you exceed the quota for cache, which is varied by browser/platform, you risk the browser just nuking all your cache/localstorage/indexeddb.

marriedWpt 7y ago

As someone who refuses to give any money to Apple, this is my goal.

asdff 7y ago

With all of your most used apps, you could just switch to using web apps. You can save any mobile site to the home screen of your iphone with safari.

tjpnz 7y ago

>What's missing until regular websites have parity with mobile apps in functionality? Some means of preventing users from blocking ads and tracking? Sure, there are ways around this for native apps but they're not nearly as trivial as installing an ad blocker (provided the mobile browser supports extensions).

GrayTextIsTruth 7y ago

I was going to build a mobile web app but I don’t like the way iOS handles button clicks on the bottom of the screen. The first click is ignored and it slides up your bottom menu bar, then you can click the button. You don’t have as much control in the browser.

StreamBright 7y ago

This would be great if HTTP, HTML and co would have been designed as a stateful low-latency application platform and not a distributed encyclopaedia. Retrofitting state and all of the things you listed into it resulted in the Javascript mayhem which is quite pathetic for several reasons including security and energy consumption. I think the future should be native applications that can be optimized for data transfer and latency, have much better security and stateful behaviour by default.

jinglebells 7y ago

And what happens when I don't have any signal? Writing an offline-first mobile website is INCREDIBLY hard. Where are you going to store the data? How are you going to detect the network connectivity without polling and hosing the battery because the radio doesn't timeout? Geo-fencing events?

jakedub4d2 7y ago

Yes! This is something that would greatly benefit the app world.