4 ms·

One thing missing from this discussion is: where is academia? The WWW was created inside academia, and it's because of that that it's still open and competitive

One thing missing from this discussion is: where is academia? The WWW was created inside academia, and it's because of that that it's still open and competitive. The internet itself was created in the military. Where is the equivalent for mobile apps? It's a problematic category that is wholly dominated by 2 actors, one of which isn't even interested in phones. We need a common set of standards for mobile development in order to open up the competition

spideymans 6y ago
I suspect you’d quickly find that consumers don’t have much of an appetite for a third set of standards, unless it offers a substantially better UX than existing offerings.
jldugger 6y ago
>where is academia? Where is the need? The web was invented to expedite publishing journal articles. Unless you're advocating that academics start publishing apps instead of articles, I don't think we can expect some unrelated non-profit sector to solve society's problems.
alerighi 6y ago
Why not use the web as the standard? I mean progressive web apps can do nearly everything that 95% of the apps do, they can present notifications, have a local persistent storage, there are even proposal to let them access bluetooth, USB and other hardware. But of course now Apple is trying to oppose PWA by imposing stupid limitations.
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  they just aren't good enough. even on android, with google supposedly being the patron saint of PWA, native apps just offer a better experience.
  - pier25 6y ago
    OTOH more effort hasn't been put into PWAs (by developers and Google) precisely because these won't work properly in iOS.
    - jpttsn 6y ago
      Did apple remove some functionality? It always sounds like that, but when I look into it it’s more about adding new features that websites didn’t use to have?
    - madeofpalk 6y ago
      What doesn't actually work properly on iOS? Like what are the specific APIs that are missing (because PWA isn't actually a real thing, it's just a collection of APIs), or are buggy? IIRC you can't prompt for "app" "install", and service worker support for background activity is limited (as it should be IMHO). It's funny Apple gets this bad rep, when on the UI front they've actually had some really good APIs much earlier than Chrome. CSS Snap Points, backdrop-filter, and position: sticky on iOS all have been really great at creating more native-like experiences on web. But really, despite being a web developer, I just have very little experience in trying to compete with actual native apps which will always inherently be more capable and performant. This isn't really due to the platform being supposedly hindered by a particular company, but more down to the inherent free for all nature of the web where there's very little _authorised intent_ you can express.
      - pier25 6y ago
        > Like what are the specific APIs that are missing Push notifications and background sync for instance.
Nasrudith 6y ago
It is called "websites" - not being sarcastic, browser code is pretty portable although of course there needs to be efforts to test it for all platforms. Also that wouldn't be Academia's wheelhouse. Standard serting and propagation are set by "industries" in practice. Academia is more theory development which essentially catches on "by accident" at best. There are a few free software phones but they are a niche even by desktop Linux standards.

spideymans 6y ago

I suspect you’d quickly find that consumers don’t have much of an appetite for a third set of standards, unless it offers a substantially better UX than existing offerings.

jldugger 6y ago

>where is academia? Where is the need? The web was invented to expedite publishing journal articles. Unless you're advocating that academics start publishing apps instead of articles, I don't think we can expect some unrelated non-profit sector to solve society's problems.

alerighi 6y ago

Why not use the web as the standard? I mean progressive web apps can do nearly everything that 95% of the apps do, they can present notifications, have a local persistent storage, there are even proposal to let them access bluetooth, USB and other hardware. But of course now Apple is trying to oppose PWA by imposing stupid limitations.

madeofpalk 6y ago
they just aren't good enough. even on android, with google supposedly being the patron saint of PWA, native apps just offer a better experience.
- pier25 6y ago
  OTOH more effort hasn't been put into PWAs (by developers and Google) precisely because these won't work properly in iOS.
  - jpttsn 6y ago
    Did apple remove some functionality? It always sounds like that, but when I look into it it’s more about adding new features that websites didn’t use to have?
  - madeofpalk 6y ago
    What doesn't actually work properly on iOS? Like what are the specific APIs that are missing (because PWA isn't actually a real thing, it's just a collection of APIs), or are buggy? IIRC you can't prompt for "app" "install", and service worker support for background activity is limited (as it should be IMHO). It's funny Apple gets this bad rep, when on the UI front they've actually had some really good APIs much earlier than Chrome. CSS Snap Points, backdrop-filter, and position: sticky on iOS all have been really great at creating more native-like experiences on web. But really, despite being a web developer, I just have very little experience in trying to compete with actual native apps which will always inherently be more capable and performant. This isn't really due to the platform being supposedly hindered by a particular company, but more down to the inherent free for all nature of the web where there's very little _authorised intent_ you can express.
    - pier25 6y ago
      > Like what are the specific APIs that are missing Push notifications and background sync for instance.

Nasrudith 6y ago

It is called "websites" - not being sarcastic, browser code is pretty portable although of course there needs to be efforts to test it for all platforms. Also that wouldn't be Academia's wheelhouse. Standard serting and propagation are set by "industries" in practice. Academia is more theory development which essentially catches on "by accident" at best. There are a few free software phones but they are a niche even by desktop Linux standards.