11 ms·

The web is not poor man’s native (2015)

89 points by lioeters 4y ago

legrande 4y ago
Progressive web apps suffer from an ergonomic issue where people have to read 2-3 tutorials to figure out how to put a site on their homescreen. If that hurdle vanished and was more intuitive and didn't require reading tutorials, PWAs would gain more traction. This is why people who are developing PWAs need to evangelize for better, more intuitive deployment of PWAs on popular mobile OSes like iOS and Android.
- bob1029 4y ago
  PWA also suffers in the enterprise space. It took me a solid week to figure out how to publish a PWA home screen icon using Azure InTune MDM for iOS devices. Being required to build custom apple XML documents to get this to work seems a bit ridiculous. That said, if you do have a need for this, it does work pretty well - assuming you can figure it out.
  - easrng 4y ago
    Webclips aren't exactly the same as what you get adding a PWA to the homescreen. They don't have all the same metadata for splash screens and such.
- k__ 4y ago
  Either the user creates a bookmark on their home screen or the app asks with a popup if it should be added to the home screen. How much simpler can we make this process?
  - nvrspyx 4y ago
    I think they're referring to iOS specifically, which doesn't support the latter.
    - EGreg 4y ago
      Pretty soon it will support native notifications, which will be far more serious than the home screen icons. Home screen and bookmarks are for pull Notifications are for push What the OS or browser needs to do is manage those far better so it’s working on your behalf (user agent) and safeguarding your attention. Probably notifications should cost something, in fact an auction. Why don’t people earn currency for their attention? It’s a zero-sum game with publishers paying for users’ attention as an investment. Isn’t that what BAT aas supposed to be? Did it work? Click fraud is an issue but then the publishers would require someone like Apple and Google to make available webauthn attestation (web credentials) that this was a real device that was purchsed!
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        > Probably notifications should cost something, in fact an auction. Why don’t people earn currency for their attention? Ah yes, genius! And then just like Brave, Apple/Google can take 30% of the revenue from selling your attention, and then continue to print money like nobodies business! I kid (even though people will try to defend that business model), the real solution is just having well-engineered notification settings. iOS' notifications are years behind the curve, on Android I can stop an app from sending me notifications simply by long-pressing the notification. iOS makes this process substantially harder, so you're right that it would probably turn into a predatory feature. Again though, we should be encouraging Apple to do the right thing here, not rev up their money printers again.
        EGreg 4y ago
        Well, I personally am against closed centralized platforms (app stores, Big Tech platforms) and centralized monetization (patreon, deplatforming). I think Web3,4,5 has a lot of promise to disrupt the gatekeepers, who currently can control our transactiosn and even influence our democracies. This will become even more significant as the next generation will be immersed for hours a day in VR, XR, metaverse with glasses followed by neuralink. I don’t want corporations extracting rents like you described here and managing us like the Borg. But somehow, so many people on HN believe (much like Bitcoin maxis but with Web2) that no new decentralized technology can be good enough to actually adopt or get involved with, they downvote and bury everything that even slightly innovates in this area. Even stuff like FileCoin and MaidSAFE are derided. Watch, here is totally free open source code that took us half a million dollars to produce and people can fork and build on, but if I post the link what will happen: https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications And here is a detailed write-up of what it would be like to own your OWN server and charge people for your attention in your OWN currency: https://qbix.com/ecosystem https://qbix.com/ecosystem … feel free to build upon it. I just coined a word for people who knee-jerk downvote anything on HN that gets away from centralized gatekeepers or uses blockchain: Web2 maximalists
  - favourable 4y ago
    > How much simpler can we make this process? An app store for PWAs would be nice. Users are not aware they can add sites to their home screen and automagically transform a site into an app. Nerdy types may be aware of it, but for the average user they're simply not aware of PWAs.
- onion2k 4y ago
  Progressive web apps suffer from an ergonomic issue where people have to read 2-3 tutorials to figure out how to put a site on their homescreen. I strongly believe that the overwhelming majority of users don't want apps on their homescreen, whether they're PWA or native, unless they're things they use pretty much daily. They definitely don't want to install some crappy app for a business they use a few times a year. Most things should be plain old boring websites.
  - ip26 4y ago
    That’s basically what a PWA is, a boring website that continues to work properly on a terrible datalink. It’s not installed, just properly designed & cached.
    - rchaud 4y ago
      > just properly designed & cached. If only. There's no standardization, no PWA seal of approval. Most website vendors that even bother with a "Add to Home Screen" button on mobile displays aren't interested in anything besides getting a shortcut displayed on their 'desktop'. They certainly aren't doing things like configuring service workers to cache and serve the website offline.
- depressedpanda 4y ago
  > Progressive web apps suffer from an ergonomic issue where people have to read 2-3 tutorials to figure out how to put a site on their homescreen. Only for iPhone, and that's because Apple wants the experience to be bad. This is just one of many reasons why it's a bad thing that users can only either use Safari or reskinned Safari on iOS. On Android (Chrome) you install a PWA with two taps.
miohtama 4y ago
> Of course, the web development model also has its own set of challenges. In particular, there is a huge over-indulgence in trackers today, and this can wildly impact responsiveness. I do not think this can be used as an argument. Mobile apps track more heavily than websites. Think location. Also mobile app tracking and ad SDKs create considerable share of the app binary weight.
- MereInterest 4y ago
  This is a large reason why I was really annoyed when Google removed the "Merge Tabs and Apps" option back around 2016. With that feature, a bookmark to a URL could open up a new tab, appear in the list of active applications, and be closed just through that list. Effectively, there was no difference in usability between a bookmarked URL and an app that loaded the webpage in a captive browser, but you got all the sandboxing benefits of the browser. To this day, I cannot fathom why it was removed. Every thread I've looked up boils down to "We removed it as the default setting, and now there's very few users of it, so we're justified in removing the feature altogether.", which is a non-answer with multiple steps.
  - kllrnohj 4y ago
    Just as a different perspective I hated that feature. I use my list of tabs almost as a set of bookmarks and todos. Trying to find them in the recents app switcher sucked. I don't object to the feature existing of course just offering a perspective on why it maybe wasn't universally loved.
    - MereInterest 4y ago
      That makes sense, and I definitely see that neither is a universally applicable setting. Effectively, it's a choice between having one level of organization or two. For me, having two levels of organization was an extra unnecessary step, especially where the majority of interactions required the same choice at the top level. For you, having one level of organization was insufficient. So it makes sense to have it as a setting, but removing it entirely was unnecessary. I suppose it was extra frustrating due to the slow removal of the feature. First, make it no longer be the default setting. Then, move the setting into chrome://flags. Then, periodically break the flag for it, depending on undocumented interactions with other flags, which A/B testing group you're in, locale, and phase of the moon. Finally, remove it altogether by arguing that nobody uses it. It felt like somebody had decided to kill the feature, and only later constructed a reason to kill it.
GRBLDeveloped 4y ago
I tried the Add to Homescreen functionality on my OnePlus. Next update wiped them all away on me
seydor 4y ago
The mobile web does need a rethink. Imo, 'responsive' designs can be a mess that dont fit well to either desktop or mobile. There are really 2 use cases: mobile portrait mode and everything else - screens are big enough now that it doesnt make sense to have a tablet version. Second, we need to start using built-in browser inputs instead of downloading megabytes of JS to render something like a datepicker . There are now input fields for everything, but i rarely see them used (and the less they are used, the less willing will browser vendors be to fix them). The most outstanding issue are notifications and it just feels wrong to me that they all go through apple and google. E-mail could be a better mechanism for the kind of asynchronous, sporadic notifications that most websites need. If only there was a definite way to unsubscribe from a list and to have notification emails that auto-expire.
- bob1029 4y ago
  > There are really 2 use cases: mobile portrait mode and everything else I mostly agree. I am currently tasked with building a brand new mobile/desktop web app from scratch, and this is the path I have chosen as well. The breakpoint I am working with right now is 980px. Seems to be a goldilocks setting in 2022.
  - moron4hire 4y ago
    I've gotten good results from using just the pointer media query, since that is generally the more pressing issue (how easy is it for users to hit buttons): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pointer https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/poin...
    - bob1029 4y ago
      This is interesting. I may blend this query in with the width query I am currently using. The width query is to trigger a layout collapse, but I can see where the pointer query could be useful for controlling things like button and input sizes dynamically.
    - rkeene2 4y ago
dmitriid 4y ago
This is such a bizarre article. "Apps are a hassle, everyone needs to be on the home screen, and it's bad for re-engagement because user isn't ready to sign up yet"... "web is hassle free so we need to make sure we have better ways of installing web apps on the home screen where developers can then engage user with notifications and sign ups". Then the author confuses trackers and over-reliance on frameworks. And then "Re-thinking the web" starts with... "re-engagement features like push notifications being added daily" which is definitely not what a re-thought web should be about.
- jotm 4y ago
  Mobile Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, Facebook, pretty much any poor man's digital crackeine, have it figured out. Yeah, it's a wonderful new Web that makes you apply forehead to brick wall.
thoughtsimple 4y ago
From 2015
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Sujan 4y ago
(2015)
iambateman 4y ago
I’m writing MoneyHabitsHQ.com as a web-app, even though it has a lot of “native” competitors. As a result, I’m very much looking forward to iOS adopting PWA notifications sometime next year. Once native notifications are in place, there will be much less of a divide between native and web. That said, we definitely have a long way to go explaining to people that you can add a web app to your home screen. Right now, it’s technically possible to fire a notification to install a PWA, but the user expectation is under-developed.
ryaniscool 4y ago
This article is all over the place. The debate is over. The web won. You can see that by the way popular websites will try and force you to install their apps. That’s because their web experience is perfectly competent to scratch the users itch. They are forced to artificially cripple their mobile web experience to drive app installs. There is a strong niche left to native. I’m thinking of things like creative tools. Photo editors, development environments, etc. you don’t typically do these things on mobile though. Another sign the web is winning: This niche is slowly shrinking as well. The big software companies are building web versions of the most popular products like photoshop, office etc.
- Supermancho 4y ago
  > The web won. I don't think so. Either way the statements are rife with soft terminology, but I'll use raw traffic as my metric for dominance in the functional space. https://www.perficient.com/insights/research-hub/mobile-vs-desktop-usage#:~:text=Desktops%20drove%2028.9%25%20of%20visits,versus%20desktop%20usage%20in%202020 https://www.perficient.com/insights/research-hub/mobile-vs-d.... The majority of traffic is mobile and apps still rule that platform due to both a superior experience and better interfaces. The trend is clear and ongoing, so I'm not sure why people think the web is still the king. The reasons websites ask you to install the app is because the phone makes that simple when using a phone browser, not because they are implying it will be a better experience for a desktop user. As you mentioned, content creation tools are almost exclusively PC and so the individuals who are creators (like anyone on this forum) are unconsciously biased toward PCs. I really hate trying to use my phone for anything, because of this bias. My wife and most of my family (excepting my dad) has the opposite experience.
  - theK 4y ago
    If I’m reading this correctly this survey only focuses on web usage. They even go to the point where their no. 1 takeaway at the end is „design your mobile web site first“. So I guess the web really did win, even on mobile.
    - 4y ago
rchaud 4y ago
Article should be suffixed with "(2015)". A lot has changed in the past 7 years. People don't install new apps anymore. They have their go-to apps for entertainment, work and logistics (IG, TW, Netflix, Google Docs, Bank, Uber), a couple of games maybe and that's it. For everything else, it makes less and less sense to have to install yet another app.
- leephillips 4y ago
  Also, each app increases your attack surface and reduces your security. I only install apps that when I need the functionality and can’t get it from a website. For everything else, I prefer working through the browser, which already has defined permissions and can apply a certain amount of sandboxing.
  - makapuf 4y ago
    It's high time we have native local sandboxed and easy to install apps again. Maybe through browser for ui api if we don't know anything else, maybe using a store. I'm not sure somebody has to watch everything I do on a pc.
    - ukulele 4y ago
      I don't think you're being sarcastic, but this is where web applications are already. You can do this with the browser as the sandbox.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  I still install apps for frequently used products/services if only because juggling tabs with browser UI is always going to be more cumbersome than managing apps with the OS task manager. It's also often useful to have alternative UI implementations easily available – there's been many occasions where something is broken in the web UI but works fine in the native app UI or vice versa, and it's nice to be able to instantly flip between implementations as needed while waiting on bug fixes.
armchairhacker 4y ago
Sorry, but web, webview wrappers, and JavaScript (+ TypeScript) is pretty much objectively the poor man’s native. There’s just no other platform which targets nearly every device, is super easy for beginners, has nearly as flexible layout, has huge community support and tooling, and looks “normal”. Nothing remotely compares to JavaScript and web ubiquitousness. What are you going to do? Write your cross-platform app in C++ and Rust? Write your own macOS and Windows and Linux and iOS and Android bindings, or use some shoddy low-level buggy third-party libraries? Reimplement of flexbox and/or struggle with layout and alignment issues? Use third party dependencies for style, network, lifecycle, and everything else you just get automatically in modern browsers? What if you’re an entry-level developer or startup hiring entry-level developers? You can’t expect a beginner to deal with these gripes and edgecases alone, let alone on top of the gripes and edgecases of a low-level language. And, more beginners already have experience in web dev vs in C. Or maybe you decide to use Java. Except Java doesn’t target mobile. Well it does with RoboVM, but then you’re stuck with Java 7 and other limitations. And you have to ship the JVM, and your UI is basically guaranteed to look like garbage (unless you’re JetBrains), and you have to deal with Maven or Gradle. But if you used JavaScript, everyone has a working web browser. Or maybe you use Kotlin or Scala or GHCjs or another framework which claims to target all platforms. Except last time I checked, these just do not work good and have much support for truly every platform. In fact they have most of the same issues as Java. Targeting 5 platforms is hard and tedious, writing a half-functional universal adapter for 5 platforms is nearly impossible. Now if you do go through with something other than web and manage to target all platforms, you get a faster app, and the code probably is nicer and easier to extend. Except you don’t really care about speed or long-term extensibility. You care about making an app as fast as possible, targeting the widest audience possible, and making people want it (and people usually choose good looks, which is really web-styled looks, which your app doesn’t have). And you care about marketing, so you have to learn web design and make a website anyways. And no matter what tool you use, when you sell your app, people have to spend a whole 10 seconds downloading and installing it, and many people are too impatient to wait 10 seconds. Meanwhile you could’ve wrote up some garbage using nextjs and PWAs and Firebase and maybe Electron and garbage JavaScript in like 5 days, it “just works” out of the box (issues come up a few months later), it loads in 2 seconds after clicking a single link, and you get the website for free. Yeah, I hate JavaScript and targeting browsers as much as the next guy, and I much prefer to (and do) write stuff in other platforms. I wish there was a good alternative. But like it or not, web right now is absolutely the “poor man’s native” and beats everything else out of the water. Write your app for a specific platform, write a non-native (like with Java UI), or invest years into your cross-platform truly native product, but “poor man’s native” is web.
ianbutler 4y ago
Platforms, cough apple, cough just need to stop fighting progressive web apps. Then the debate will be completely settled as you’ll get native functionality in the browser.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  As TFA notes: There will always be reasons to build native applications. It's quicker to innovate platform APIs when you don’t have to go through standardization and browser implementation. Exposing new "bedrock" APIs can be done more quickly. As Jeremy aptly summed up, "The price we pay for that incredible cross-platform reach is that features on the web will always be lagging behind."
tomrod 4y ago
No, SaaS requires funds. It's the rentier's class native. This leaves a bimodal distribution in wealth of folks that use their own metal.
psyc 4y ago
It is in almost all the ways I care about. Title doth protest too much. It smacks of wanting to have your cake and eat it too. Hooray, no installs and no files. We’ve been hearing the evangelism for 25 years. Keep patting yourselves on the back for the next hundred - maybe WebAssembly will have achieved something by then. You dropped the ball on the rest of UX, performance, and especially the developer experience. You can’t sweep it under the rug. Just take your little win and shut up. The web could have been as good as native. There are too many people in the standards bodies and more so the browser vendors for them to ever get their shit together in a timely manner. I use the web for nothing other than this web site and occasionally when I want to watch something on a bigger screen, which is almost never. I easily spend 95% off my computing time in native apps. The Internet is a miracle. The Web is still a fiasco and always will be, no matter how many trillions are made for a few people by selling ads, selling ads, and lest we forget… selling ads.
- abxytg 4y ago
  HN myopic streak never fails
- easrng 4y ago
  If you think the web's developer experience is bad then you are doing things very wrong. In a few days I can go from nothing to a usable website that looks good, works on almost every device that's not super old, works without me having to pay Apple $99 a year, allows me to interactively make changes to the styles that are immediately reflected with no reload, and doesn't need a build step.
spideymans 4y ago
We’ve been hearing about web being the future of mobile apps for at least 15 years now. Yet alas, mobile users still spend the vast majority of their time in native apps. What’s going wrong here? I feel like we’re spinning our tires in the mud.
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  Just wait until the year of the Linux desktop, no one will even think of using the web on their phones.
- kllrnohj 4y ago
  Well, a kinda big thing is the web still hasn't gotten any faster. DOM manipulation is still miserably slow. You can try to rebuild the stack on top of canvas, but that has a huge amount of issues as well. WebWorkers still have insane overhead, severely limiting their usefulness. The end result is web apps on mobile still have that pervasive chug to them. You still get laggy text input when a page is first loading. You still get chunky animations. All the problems of 15 years ago still exist in the completely identical way.
- depressedpanda 4y ago
  > Yet alas, mobile users still spend the vast majority of their time in native apps. What’s going wrong here? Easy: - Apple only allows one browser -- their own -- on iOS - Apple uses this control to cripple PWAs on iOS - Apple's iPhone market share is significant enough that if Safari/iOS doesn't support something, businesses won't spend time on using it E.g.: chat/communication apps cannot be written as PWAs, since Safari on iOS still doesn't support notifications.
  - pixel_tracing 4y ago
    Apple does not only allow one browser you can download Chrome or Firebox from the App Store
    - depressedpanda 4y ago
superkuh 4y ago
> with re-engagement features like push notifications being added daily, the web is now a viable platform for engaging user experiences. Websites are at least supposedly are sandboxed so they are not as much of a risk as running native binaries. But this is getting worse and worse though as browsers expose more and more of their host operating system's functionality. The benefits of using a website instead of a native app are quickly disappearing, while the drawbacks have only been somewhat mitigated. We're getting to the point where browsers are worthy of the decades old criticism Emacs has received. They have eventually become an OS with many fine features - simply lacking a good web browser.
deleted 4y ago
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alexalx666 4y ago
I predict that Apple will reinvent personal computing with their XR product ( XROS replacing macOS, faster and better pro and consumer user experience via virtual screens and controls), google/samsung will imitate. I can see Apple allowing WASM apps to be sold. Ultimately the best user experience wins and in general it was iPhone/iPad so far
cutler 4y ago
This article, written in 2015, is so out of date. Platform apps have changed the game with native mobile outpacing web internet access. Many users in China, for example, do nearly everything through a couple of apps such as TaoBao and WeChat. Platforms such as these create a sub-web within the web gated by a native app. Game over, though I personally prefer the web model.

89 points by lioeters 4y ago

Progressive web apps suffer from an ergonomic issue where people have to read 2-3 tutorials to figure out how to put a site on their homescreen. If that hurdle vanished and was more intuitive and didn't require reading tutorials, PWAs would gain more traction. This is why people who are developing PWAs need to evangelize for better, more intuitive deployment of PWAs on popular mobile OSes like iOS and Android.

bob1029 4y ago
PWA also suffers in the enterprise space. It took me a solid week to figure out how to publish a PWA home screen icon using Azure InTune MDM for iOS devices. Being required to build custom apple XML documents to get this to work seems a bit ridiculous. That said, if you do have a need for this, it does work pretty well - assuming you can figure it out.
- easrng 4y ago
  Webclips aren't exactly the same as what you get adding a PWA to the homescreen. They don't have all the same metadata for splash screens and such.
k__ 4y ago
Either the user creates a bookmark on their home screen or the app asks with a popup if it should be added to the home screen. How much simpler can we make this process?
- nvrspyx 4y ago
  I think they're referring to iOS specifically, which doesn't support the latter.
  - EGreg 4y ago
    Pretty soon it will support native notifications, which will be far more serious than the home screen icons. Home screen and bookmarks are for pull Notifications are for push What the OS or browser needs to do is manage those far better so it’s working on your behalf (user agent) and safeguarding your attention. Probably notifications should cost something, in fact an auction. Why don’t people earn currency for their attention? It’s a zero-sum game with publishers paying for users’ attention as an investment. Isn’t that what BAT aas supposed to be? Did it work? Click fraud is an issue but then the publishers would require someone like Apple and Google to make available webauthn attestation (web credentials) that this was a real device that was purchsed!
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      > Probably notifications should cost something, in fact an auction. Why don’t people earn currency for their attention? Ah yes, genius! And then just like Brave, Apple/Google can take 30% of the revenue from selling your attention, and then continue to print money like nobodies business! I kid (even though people will try to defend that business model), the real solution is just having well-engineered notification settings. iOS' notifications are years behind the curve, on Android I can stop an app from sending me notifications simply by long-pressing the notification. iOS makes this process substantially harder, so you're right that it would probably turn into a predatory feature. Again though, we should be encouraging Apple to do the right thing here, not rev up their money printers again.
      - EGreg 4y ago
        Well, I personally am against closed centralized platforms (app stores, Big Tech platforms) and centralized monetization (patreon, deplatforming). I think Web3,4,5 has a lot of promise to disrupt the gatekeepers, who currently can control our transactiosn and even influence our democracies. This will become even more significant as the next generation will be immersed for hours a day in VR, XR, metaverse with glasses followed by neuralink. I don’t want corporations extracting rents like you described here and managing us like the Borg. But somehow, so many people on HN believe (much like Bitcoin maxis but with Web2) that no new decentralized technology can be good enough to actually adopt or get involved with, they downvote and bury everything that even slightly innovates in this area. Even stuff like FileCoin and MaidSAFE are derided. Watch, here is totally free open source code that took us half a million dollars to produce and people can fork and build on, but if I post the link what will happen: https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications And here is a detailed write-up of what it would be like to own your OWN server and charge people for your attention in your OWN currency: https://qbix.com/ecosystem https://qbix.com/ecosystem … feel free to build upon it. I just coined a word for people who knee-jerk downvote anything on HN that gets away from centralized gatekeepers or uses blockchain: Web2 maximalists
- favourable 4y ago
  > How much simpler can we make this process? An app store for PWAs would be nice. Users are not aware they can add sites to their home screen and automagically transform a site into an app. Nerdy types may be aware of it, but for the average user they're simply not aware of PWAs.
onion2k 4y ago
Progressive web apps suffer from an ergonomic issue where people have to read 2-3 tutorials to figure out how to put a site on their homescreen. I strongly believe that the overwhelming majority of users don't want apps on their homescreen, whether they're PWA or native, unless they're things they use pretty much daily. They definitely don't want to install some crappy app for a business they use a few times a year. Most things should be plain old boring websites.
- ip26 4y ago
  That’s basically what a PWA is, a boring website that continues to work properly on a terrible datalink. It’s not installed, just properly designed & cached.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    > just properly designed & cached. If only. There's no standardization, no PWA seal of approval. Most website vendors that even bother with a "Add to Home Screen" button on mobile displays aren't interested in anything besides getting a shortcut displayed on their 'desktop'. They certainly aren't doing things like configuring service workers to cache and serve the website offline.
depressedpanda 4y ago
> Progressive web apps suffer from an ergonomic issue where people have to read 2-3 tutorials to figure out how to put a site on their homescreen. Only for iPhone, and that's because Apple wants the experience to be bad. This is just one of many reasons why it's a bad thing that users can only either use Safari or reskinned Safari on iOS. On Android (Chrome) you install a PWA with two taps.

miohtama 4y ago

> Of course, the web development model also has its own set of challenges. In particular, there is a huge over-indulgence in trackers today, and this can wildly impact responsiveness. I do not think this can be used as an argument. Mobile apps track more heavily than websites. Think location. Also mobile app tracking and ad SDKs create considerable share of the app binary weight.

MereInterest 4y ago
This is a large reason why I was really annoyed when Google removed the "Merge Tabs and Apps" option back around 2016. With that feature, a bookmark to a URL could open up a new tab, appear in the list of active applications, and be closed just through that list. Effectively, there was no difference in usability between a bookmarked URL and an app that loaded the webpage in a captive browser, but you got all the sandboxing benefits of the browser. To this day, I cannot fathom why it was removed. Every thread I've looked up boils down to "We removed it as the default setting, and now there's very few users of it, so we're justified in removing the feature altogether.", which is a non-answer with multiple steps.
- kllrnohj 4y ago
  Just as a different perspective I hated that feature. I use my list of tabs almost as a set of bookmarks and todos. Trying to find them in the recents app switcher sucked. I don't object to the feature existing of course just offering a perspective on why it maybe wasn't universally loved.
  - MereInterest 4y ago
    That makes sense, and I definitely see that neither is a universally applicable setting. Effectively, it's a choice between having one level of organization or two. For me, having two levels of organization was an extra unnecessary step, especially where the majority of interactions required the same choice at the top level. For you, having one level of organization was insufficient. So it makes sense to have it as a setting, but removing it entirely was unnecessary. I suppose it was extra frustrating due to the slow removal of the feature. First, make it no longer be the default setting. Then, move the setting into chrome://flags. Then, periodically break the flag for it, depending on undocumented interactions with other flags, which A/B testing group you're in, locale, and phase of the moon. Finally, remove it altogether by arguing that nobody uses it. It felt like somebody had decided to kill the feature, and only later constructed a reason to kill it.

GRBLDeveloped 4y ago

I tried the Add to Homescreen functionality on my OnePlus. Next update wiped them all away on me

seydor 4y ago

The mobile web does need a rethink. Imo, 'responsive' designs can be a mess that dont fit well to either desktop or mobile. There are really 2 use cases: mobile portrait mode and everything else - screens are big enough now that it doesnt make sense to have a tablet version. Second, we need to start using built-in browser inputs instead of downloading megabytes of JS to render something like a datepicker . There are now input fields for everything, but i rarely see them used (and the less they are used, the less willing will browser vendors be to fix them). The most outstanding issue are notifications and it just feels wrong to me that they all go through apple and google. E-mail could be a better mechanism for the kind of asynchronous, sporadic notifications that most websites need. If only there was a definite way to unsubscribe from a list and to have notification emails that auto-expire.

bob1029 4y ago
> There are really 2 use cases: mobile portrait mode and everything else I mostly agree. I am currently tasked with building a brand new mobile/desktop web app from scratch, and this is the path I have chosen as well. The breakpoint I am working with right now is 980px. Seems to be a goldilocks setting in 2022.
- moron4hire 4y ago
  I've gotten good results from using just the pointer media query, since that is generally the more pressing issue (how easy is it for users to hit buttons): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pointer https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/poin...
  - bob1029 4y ago
    This is interesting. I may blend this query in with the width query I am currently using. The width query is to trigger a layout collapse, but I can see where the pointer query could be useful for controlling things like button and input sizes dynamically.
  - rkeene2 4y ago

dmitriid 4y ago

This is such a bizarre article. "Apps are a hassle, everyone needs to be on the home screen, and it's bad for re-engagement because user isn't ready to sign up yet"... "web is hassle free so we need to make sure we have better ways of installing web apps on the home screen where developers can then engage user with notifications and sign ups". Then the author confuses trackers and over-reliance on frameworks. And then "Re-thinking the web" starts with... "re-engagement features like push notifications being added daily" which is definitely not what a re-thought web should be about.

jotm 4y ago
Mobile Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, Facebook, pretty much any poor man's digital crackeine, have it figured out. Yeah, it's a wonderful new Web that makes you apply forehead to brick wall.

thoughtsimple 4y ago

From 2015

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Sujan 4y ago

(2015)

iambateman 4y ago

I’m writing MoneyHabitsHQ.com as a web-app, even though it has a lot of “native” competitors. As a result, I’m very much looking forward to iOS adopting PWA notifications sometime next year. Once native notifications are in place, there will be much less of a divide between native and web. That said, we definitely have a long way to go explaining to people that you can add a web app to your home screen. Right now, it’s technically possible to fire a notification to install a PWA, but the user expectation is under-developed.

ryaniscool 4y ago

This article is all over the place. The debate is over. The web won. You can see that by the way popular websites will try and force you to install their apps. That’s because their web experience is perfectly competent to scratch the users itch. They are forced to artificially cripple their mobile web experience to drive app installs. There is a strong niche left to native. I’m thinking of things like creative tools. Photo editors, development environments, etc. you don’t typically do these things on mobile though. Another sign the web is winning: This niche is slowly shrinking as well. The big software companies are building web versions of the most popular products like photoshop, office etc.

Supermancho 4y ago
> The web won. I don't think so. Either way the statements are rife with soft terminology, but I'll use raw traffic as my metric for dominance in the functional space. https://www.perficient.com/insights/research-hub/mobile-vs-desktop-usage#:~:text=Desktops%20drove%2028.9%25%20of%20visits,versus%20desktop%20usage%20in%202020 https://www.perficient.com/insights/research-hub/mobile-vs-d.... The majority of traffic is mobile and apps still rule that platform due to both a superior experience and better interfaces. The trend is clear and ongoing, so I'm not sure why people think the web is still the king. The reasons websites ask you to install the app is because the phone makes that simple when using a phone browser, not because they are implying it will be a better experience for a desktop user. As you mentioned, content creation tools are almost exclusively PC and so the individuals who are creators (like anyone on this forum) are unconsciously biased toward PCs. I really hate trying to use my phone for anything, because of this bias. My wife and most of my family (excepting my dad) has the opposite experience.
- theK 4y ago
  If I’m reading this correctly this survey only focuses on web usage. They even go to the point where their no. 1 takeaway at the end is „design your mobile web site first“. So I guess the web really did win, even on mobile.
  - 4y ago

rchaud 4y ago

Article should be suffixed with "(2015)". A lot has changed in the past 7 years. People don't install new apps anymore. They have their go-to apps for entertainment, work and logistics (IG, TW, Netflix, Google Docs, Bank, Uber), a couple of games maybe and that's it. For everything else, it makes less and less sense to have to install yet another app.

leephillips 4y ago
Also, each app increases your attack surface and reduces your security. I only install apps that when I need the functionality and can’t get it from a website. For everything else, I prefer working through the browser, which already has defined permissions and can apply a certain amount of sandboxing.
- makapuf 4y ago
  It's high time we have native local sandboxed and easy to install apps again. Maybe through browser for ui api if we don't know anything else, maybe using a store. I'm not sure somebody has to watch everything I do on a pc.
  - ukulele 4y ago
    I don't think you're being sarcastic, but this is where web applications are already. You can do this with the browser as the sandbox.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
I still install apps for frequently used products/services if only because juggling tabs with browser UI is always going to be more cumbersome than managing apps with the OS task manager. It's also often useful to have alternative UI implementations easily available – there's been many occasions where something is broken in the web UI but works fine in the native app UI or vice versa, and it's nice to be able to instantly flip between implementations as needed while waiting on bug fixes.

armchairhacker 4y ago

Sorry, but web, webview wrappers, and JavaScript (+ TypeScript) is pretty much objectively the poor man’s native. There’s just no other platform which targets nearly every device, is super easy for beginners, has nearly as flexible layout, has huge community support and tooling, and looks “normal”. Nothing remotely compares to JavaScript and web ubiquitousness. What are you going to do? Write your cross-platform app in C++ and Rust? Write your own macOS and Windows and Linux and iOS and Android bindings, or use some shoddy low-level buggy third-party libraries? Reimplement of flexbox and/or struggle with layout and alignment issues? Use third party dependencies for style, network, lifecycle, and everything else you just get automatically in modern browsers? What if you’re an entry-level developer or startup hiring entry-level developers? You can’t expect a beginner to deal with these gripes and edgecases alone, let alone on top of the gripes and edgecases of a low-level language. And, more beginners already have experience in web dev vs in C. Or maybe you decide to use Java. Except Java doesn’t target mobile. Well it does with RoboVM, but then you’re stuck with Java 7 and other limitations. And you have to ship the JVM, and your UI is basically guaranteed to look like garbage (unless you’re JetBrains), and you have to deal with Maven or Gradle. But if you used JavaScript, everyone has a working web browser. Or maybe you use Kotlin or Scala or GHCjs or another framework which claims to target all platforms. Except last time I checked, these just do not work good and have much support for truly every platform. In fact they have most of the same issues as Java. Targeting 5 platforms is hard and tedious, writing a half-functional universal adapter for 5 platforms is nearly impossible. Now if you do go through with something other than web and manage to target all platforms, you get a faster app, and the code probably is nicer and easier to extend. Except you don’t really care about speed or long-term extensibility. You care about making an app as fast as possible, targeting the widest audience possible, and making people want it (and people usually choose good looks, which is really web-styled looks, which your app doesn’t have). And you care about marketing, so you have to learn web design and make a website anyways. And no matter what tool you use, when you sell your app, people have to spend a whole 10 seconds downloading and installing it, and many people are too impatient to wait 10 seconds. Meanwhile you could’ve wrote up some garbage using nextjs and PWAs and Firebase and maybe Electron and garbage JavaScript in like 5 days, it “just works” out of the box (issues come up a few months later), it loads in 2 seconds after clicking a single link, and you get the website for free. Yeah, I hate JavaScript and targeting browsers as much as the next guy, and I much prefer to (and do) write stuff in other platforms. I wish there was a good alternative. But like it or not, web right now is absolutely the “poor man’s native” and beats everything else out of the water. Write your app for a specific platform, write a non-native (like with Java UI), or invest years into your cross-platform truly native product, but “poor man’s native” is web.

ianbutler 4y ago

Platforms, cough apple, cough just need to stop fighting progressive web apps. Then the debate will be completely settled as you’ll get native functionality in the browser.

CharlesW 4y ago
As TFA notes: There will always be reasons to build native applications. It's quicker to innovate platform APIs when you don’t have to go through standardization and browser implementation. Exposing new "bedrock" APIs can be done more quickly. As Jeremy aptly summed up, "The price we pay for that incredible cross-platform reach is that features on the web will always be lagging behind."

tomrod 4y ago

No, SaaS requires funds. It's the rentier's class native. This leaves a bimodal distribution in wealth of folks that use their own metal.

psyc 4y ago

It is in almost all the ways I care about. Title doth protest too much. It smacks of wanting to have your cake and eat it too. Hooray, no installs and no files. We’ve been hearing the evangelism for 25 years. Keep patting yourselves on the back for the next hundred - maybe WebAssembly will have achieved something by then. You dropped the ball on the rest of UX, performance, and especially the developer experience. You can’t sweep it under the rug. Just take your little win and shut up. The web could have been as good as native. There are too many people in the standards bodies and more so the browser vendors for them to ever get their shit together in a timely manner. I use the web for nothing other than this web site and occasionally when I want to watch something on a bigger screen, which is almost never. I easily spend 95% off my computing time in native apps. The Internet is a miracle. The Web is still a fiasco and always will be, no matter how many trillions are made for a few people by selling ads, selling ads, and lest we forget… selling ads.

abxytg 4y ago
HN myopic streak never fails
easrng 4y ago
If you think the web's developer experience is bad then you are doing things very wrong. In a few days I can go from nothing to a usable website that looks good, works on almost every device that's not super old, works without me having to pay Apple $99 a year, allows me to interactively make changes to the styles that are immediately reflected with no reload, and doesn't need a build step.

spideymans 4y ago

We’ve been hearing about web being the future of mobile apps for at least 15 years now. Yet alas, mobile users still spend the vast majority of their time in native apps. What’s going wrong here? I feel like we’re spinning our tires in the mud.

birdyrooster 4y ago
Just wait until the year of the Linux desktop, no one will even think of using the web on their phones.
kllrnohj 4y ago
Well, a kinda big thing is the web still hasn't gotten any faster. DOM manipulation is still miserably slow. You can try to rebuild the stack on top of canvas, but that has a huge amount of issues as well. WebWorkers still have insane overhead, severely limiting their usefulness. The end result is web apps on mobile still have that pervasive chug to them. You still get laggy text input when a page is first loading. You still get chunky animations. All the problems of 15 years ago still exist in the completely identical way.
depressedpanda 4y ago
> Yet alas, mobile users still spend the vast majority of their time in native apps. What’s going wrong here? Easy: - Apple only allows one browser -- their own -- on iOS - Apple uses this control to cripple PWAs on iOS - Apple's iPhone market share is significant enough that if Safari/iOS doesn't support something, businesses won't spend time on using it E.g.: chat/communication apps cannot be written as PWAs, since Safari on iOS still doesn't support notifications.
- pixel_tracing 4y ago
  Apple does not only allow one browser you can download Chrome or Firebox from the App Store
  - depressedpanda 4y ago

superkuh 4y ago

> with re-engagement features like push notifications being added daily, the web is now a viable platform for engaging user experiences. Websites are at least supposedly are sandboxed so they are not as much of a risk as running native binaries. But this is getting worse and worse though as browsers expose more and more of their host operating system's functionality. The benefits of using a website instead of a native app are quickly disappearing, while the drawbacks have only been somewhat mitigated. We're getting to the point where browsers are worthy of the decades old criticism Emacs has received. They have eventually become an OS with many fine features - simply lacking a good web browser.

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alexalx666 4y ago

I predict that Apple will reinvent personal computing with their XR product ( XROS replacing macOS, faster and better pro and consumer user experience via virtual screens and controls), google/samsung will imitate. I can see Apple allowing WASM apps to be sold. Ultimately the best user experience wins and in general it was iPhone/iPad so far

cutler 4y ago

This article, written in 2015, is so out of date. Platform apps have changed the game with native mobile outpacing web internet access. Many users in China, for example, do nearly everything through a couple of apps such as TaoBao and WeChat. Platforms such as these create a sub-web within the web gated by a native app. Game over, though I personally prefer the web model.