5 ms·

At some point the industry needs to have an honest discussion with itself about the state of the UX of the open web. I feel like we keep telling ourselves the m

At some point the industry needs to have an honest discussion with itself about the state of the UX of the open web. I feel like we keep telling ourselves the mobile web is fine because we have PWAs and all these other native-like gizmos, but truth be told the UX pales in comparison to native apps.

smoldesu 4y ago
> but truth be told the UX pales in comparison to native apps. I mean, Apple has every opportunity to improve their webapp experience. There's a number of PWAs I use on Android that really do "disappear into the background" when using them full-screen, I bet the experience would be just as nice on iOS if Apple was faster at adopting PWA tech and cared about making Safari an enjoyable experience.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
I think there's a hard ceiling in terms of PWA UX quality that can't be shattered until browsers start bundling better UI building blocks. There's just too much that's too easy to screw up with the "bring your own everything" approach.
- spideymans 4y ago
  I agree completely. Native iOS and Android apps are fantastic in that, as long as you're willing to follow Apple's/Google's guidelines, it's pretty easy to create great user experiences and highly maintainable software. Until the web can match that relative ease, it'll always be second-fiddle to native on mobile. The problem with the web right now is that the tooling is a complete mess compared to native development. It feels like you end up spending 80 to 120 percent of the effort you'd put in to build two native apps, and even then the web apps would never feel as good as native. My company strongly considered building web apps, as we move away from MVP to a more mature product, but the web tooling just isn't at the level it needs to be. The only value proposition for web was that it's easier to hire web devs.

5 ms·

At some point the industry needs to have an honest discussion with itself about the state of the UX of the open web. I feel like we keep telling ourselves the m

by spideymans 4y ago

smoldesu 4y ago
> but truth be told the UX pales in comparison to native apps. I mean, Apple has every opportunity to improve their webapp experience. There's a number of PWAs I use on Android that really do "disappear into the background" when using them full-screen, I bet the experience would be just as nice on iOS if Apple was faster at adopting PWA tech and cared about making Safari an enjoyable experience.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
I think there's a hard ceiling in terms of PWA UX quality that can't be shattered until browsers start bundling better UI building blocks. There's just too much that's too easy to screw up with the "bring your own everything" approach.
- spideymans 4y ago
  I agree completely. Native iOS and Android apps are fantastic in that, as long as you're willing to follow Apple's/Google's guidelines, it's pretty easy to create great user experiences and highly maintainable software. Until the web can match that relative ease, it'll always be second-fiddle to native on mobile. The problem with the web right now is that the tooling is a complete mess compared to native development. It feels like you end up spending 80 to 120 percent of the effort you'd put in to build two native apps, and even then the web apps would never feel as good as native. My company strongly considered building web apps, as we move away from MVP to a more mature product, but the web tooling just isn't at the level it needs to be. The only value proposition for web was that it's easier to hire web devs.