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Nice snark, however web apps are still possible, and Android has a very similar feature (Instant - enabled by slices). Did you provide similar feedback when th

Nice snark, however web apps are still possible, and Android has a very similar feature (Instant - enabled by slices). Did you provide similar feedback when that was announced?

lainga 7y ago
Please, have curious conversation; don't cross-examine.
- lowtolerance 7y ago
  I think it’s perfectly reasonable to question the degree to which bias plays a factor in one’s reception to just about anything.
diggan 7y ago
> Did you provide similar feedback when that was announced? I did not, as I'm a lot more bored at this point in time and also have a lot of more free time. But I do feel the same about both of the platforms movement towards "instant apps" that could have been equally solved by making web apps work better on respective platforms, instead of trying to solve the same problem again.
- kllrnohj 7y ago
  > But I do feel the same about both of the platforms movement towards "instant apps" that could have been equally solved by making web apps work better on respective platforms, instead of trying to solve the same problem again. The web ecosystem has been trying to solve this for almost a decade now and has made relatively little progress. There's no reason to believe Apple could suddenly solve it in a few months if they just cared a little harder. Web components & shadow dom are approaching 10 years old and still have issues with framework & browser support. asm.js is 7 years old, yet the ideas birthed from it are still struggling. Effective parallelism is still largely nonexistent. RAM & CPU/GPU efficiency remain a bad joke, made worse by the entire world now running on battery power. A huge number of people are working on making web apps more viable, including people at Apple. It's not from a lack of trying at this point. The foundations are just all terrible & wrong for being an app platform. That's never what it was built or designed to be, and retrofitting that without breaking compatibility is really really difficult. If it turns out the incremental delivery benefits of the web can be retrofitted to an existing app platform more easily than the web can be retrofitted to be an app platform then... well, why not? The cross-platform-ish nature of the web was (and is) a great dream, but why can't that dream be realized by SwiftUI instead? Or Flutter? Or whatever? Why must it be web alone that gets to be that thing?
  - enos_feedler 7y ago
    I think it's worth separating web components and shadow dom from asm.js. The former are trying to improve the browser and the later are taking browser open philosophy everywhere. Browsers have full support for WebAssembly and keep working on optimizations. It's also taking off outside the browser too (WASI, Cloudflare, etc). If WebAssembly succeeds it's precisely because innovations in the browser did not, and we had to break it open.
  - simplify 7y ago
    > There's no reason to believe Apple could suddenly solve it in a few months if they just cared a little harder. No, they really could just solve it. Progressive web apps are so close to being useful. Apple just refuses to make them user-friendly to install. Just look at android for what's possible https://web.dev/progressive-web-apps/ https://web.dev/progressive-web-apps/
    - kllrnohj 7y ago
      > Progressive web apps are so close to being useful PWAs have been pushed since 2015. 5 years of perpetually being "so close to being useful." And that's despite Google's heavy promotion of them, including building an entire OS around them.
      - diggan 7y ago
        PWAs are also actively worked _against_, at least from Apple. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22686602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22686602 for a previous discussion
- dahfizz 7y ago
  Web apps have always sucked and always will suck. With decades of development and thousands of frameworks, it still sucks. Instant apps take the one advantage web apps have (you don't have to install them) and brings that to the native platform. I think that makes a ton of sense, vs "just fixing" something that people have been trying to fix for decades. How often do you go to uber.com to call an uber? If you want to build a product people actually want to use, make it native.
  - nicoburns 7y ago
    I don't use uber.com, but I prefer facebook.com to the facebook app. Web can absolutely be a better experience if the effort is put in to make it one.
    - dahfizz 7y ago
      The web is fantastic for websites. Facebook is much closer to a regular website than to an app. It's just content that you scroll through. And, even so, the Facebook app has many billions of downloads. Clearly some people prefer it.
  - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
    I'm using a ton of apps that have Web and native options and in most cases I prefer the Web version. I'm sure others feel differently and that's fine. But you're forgetting two major advantages of Web apps: They are cross platform und neither users nor publishers need any permissions from some oligopolist middleman.
    - dahfizz 7y ago
      Cross platform web apps are a myth. You have to test a comparability matrix of all the major browsers on all the major platforms because they are all different in subtle ways that actually matter when making complicated apps. Native cross platform toolkits like Qt are no more work but provide a much better user experience. And I agree that the current state of the mobile platform monopolies is a shame. If you care about Android, I encourage you to publish to Fdroid.
cglong 7y ago
Instant Apps on Android are opt-in (provided by a popup the first time you open an enabled link), so I can choose to use web apps if I prefer. I think the important open question is whether Apple will take a similar approach or if a Clips-enabled app will always take priority over a web one.
- djrogers 7y ago
  Perfectly valid question - I too hope for an option to keep this capability disabled or available on a per-use basis rather than a complete replacement for the existing QR URL launcher.

Nice snark, however web apps are still possible, and Android has a very similar feature (Instant - enabled by slices). Did you provide similar feedback when that was announced?

lainga 7y ago

Please, have curious conversation; don't cross-examine.

lowtolerance 7y ago
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to question the degree to which bias plays a factor in one’s reception to just about anything.

diggan 7y ago

> Did you provide similar feedback when that was announced? I did not, as I'm a lot more bored at this point in time and also have a lot of more free time. But I do feel the same about both of the platforms movement towards "instant apps" that could have been equally solved by making web apps work better on respective platforms, instead of trying to solve the same problem again.

kllrnohj 7y ago
> But I do feel the same about both of the platforms movement towards "instant apps" that could have been equally solved by making web apps work better on respective platforms, instead of trying to solve the same problem again. The web ecosystem has been trying to solve this for almost a decade now and has made relatively little progress. There's no reason to believe Apple could suddenly solve it in a few months if they just cared a little harder. Web components & shadow dom are approaching 10 years old and still have issues with framework & browser support. asm.js is 7 years old, yet the ideas birthed from it are still struggling. Effective parallelism is still largely nonexistent. RAM & CPU/GPU efficiency remain a bad joke, made worse by the entire world now running on battery power. A huge number of people are working on making web apps more viable, including people at Apple. It's not from a lack of trying at this point. The foundations are just all terrible & wrong for being an app platform. That's never what it was built or designed to be, and retrofitting that without breaking compatibility is really really difficult. If it turns out the incremental delivery benefits of the web can be retrofitted to an existing app platform more easily than the web can be retrofitted to be an app platform then... well, why not? The cross-platform-ish nature of the web was (and is) a great dream, but why can't that dream be realized by SwiftUI instead? Or Flutter? Or whatever? Why must it be web alone that gets to be that thing?
- enos_feedler 7y ago
  I think it's worth separating web components and shadow dom from asm.js. The former are trying to improve the browser and the later are taking browser open philosophy everywhere. Browsers have full support for WebAssembly and keep working on optimizations. It's also taking off outside the browser too (WASI, Cloudflare, etc). If WebAssembly succeeds it's precisely because innovations in the browser did not, and we had to break it open.
- simplify 7y ago
  > There's no reason to believe Apple could suddenly solve it in a few months if they just cared a little harder. No, they really could just solve it. Progressive web apps are so close to being useful. Apple just refuses to make them user-friendly to install. Just look at android for what's possible https://web.dev/progressive-web-apps/ https://web.dev/progressive-web-apps/
  - kllrnohj 7y ago
    > Progressive web apps are so close to being useful PWAs have been pushed since 2015. 5 years of perpetually being "so close to being useful." And that's despite Google's heavy promotion of them, including building an entire OS around them.
    - diggan 7y ago
      PWAs are also actively worked _against_, at least from Apple. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22686602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22686602 for a previous discussion
dahfizz 7y ago
Web apps have always sucked and always will suck. With decades of development and thousands of frameworks, it still sucks. Instant apps take the one advantage web apps have (you don't have to install them) and brings that to the native platform. I think that makes a ton of sense, vs "just fixing" something that people have been trying to fix for decades. How often do you go to uber.com to call an uber? If you want to build a product people actually want to use, make it native.
- nicoburns 7y ago
  I don't use uber.com, but I prefer facebook.com to the facebook app. Web can absolutely be a better experience if the effort is put in to make it one.
  - dahfizz 7y ago
    The web is fantastic for websites. Facebook is much closer to a regular website than to an app. It's just content that you scroll through. And, even so, the Facebook app has many billions of downloads. Clearly some people prefer it.
- fauigerzigerk 7y ago
  I'm using a ton of apps that have Web and native options and in most cases I prefer the Web version. I'm sure others feel differently and that's fine. But you're forgetting two major advantages of Web apps: They are cross platform und neither users nor publishers need any permissions from some oligopolist middleman.
  - dahfizz 7y ago
    Cross platform web apps are a myth. You have to test a comparability matrix of all the major browsers on all the major platforms because they are all different in subtle ways that actually matter when making complicated apps. Native cross platform toolkits like Qt are no more work but provide a much better user experience. And I agree that the current state of the mobile platform monopolies is a shame. If you care about Android, I encourage you to publish to Fdroid.

cglong 7y ago

Instant Apps on Android are opt-in (provided by a popup the first time you open an enabled link), so I can choose to use web apps if I prefer. I think the important open question is whether Apple will take a similar approach or if a Clips-enabled app will always take priority over a web one.

djrogers 7y ago
Perfectly valid question - I too hope for an option to keep this capability disabled or available on a per-use basis rather than a complete replacement for the existing QR URL launcher.