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Given how bad the mobile web is and how little consideration for mobile performance web developers have, this is a pipe dream. Take even any native app in a we

Given how bad the mobile web is and how little consideration for mobile performance web developers have, this is a pipe dream. Take even any native app in a webview, the performance are abysmal. Not because of the web tech itself, if these apps were written in plain JS/DOM, I'm sure they would run fine, but because developers chose to use complicated technologies with terrible performances on mobile, such as React. React is fine on desktop, React is not fine at all on mobile, unless one has access to $500+ handsets, which already discriminates against a significant audience, but developers won't test performances on low cost handsets at first place.

redbar0n 4y ago
Fortunately there are modern alternatives to React, such as Solid, or Qwik (nearly no JS bundle up front). You can even ‘qwikify’ React components to use them with Qwik, and choose to only execute them on the server/edge, meaning the user doesn’t have to download React at all. But the developer can still tap into the React ecosystem. The future is looking brighter than ever for web apps on mobile. (Now we just have to cross our fingers for Apple delivering PWA push notifications for Safari in iOS 16 next year like they’ve announced. Then PWAs on mobile will be all the rage.)
sublinear 4y ago
I agree the way most implement frontend dev is a mess, but I strongly disagree that this is where the performance hit comes from. Profile any web app and you'll find that most of the slowness is the unnecessary and constant fetching of unoptimized assets and very high latency responses to API calls. Caching is rarely done correctly on the client side of a web app and nobody wants to put in the effort to properly lazy load and unload stuff seamlessly because of how tightly coupled it is with the visual layout and design. Network requests are especially unreliable and slow on mobile devices. On the dev's machine and in the testing environment it's not though. This is really all it is. I'm serious. Why doesn't anyone ever look at the network tab in dev tools and see for themselves? It's disgusting.

redbar0n 4y ago

Fortunately there are modern alternatives to React, such as Solid, or Qwik (nearly no JS bundle up front). You can even ‘qwikify’ React components to use them with Qwik, and choose to only execute them on the server/edge, meaning the user doesn’t have to download React at all. But the developer can still tap into the React ecosystem. The future is looking brighter than ever for web apps on mobile. (Now we just have to cross our fingers for Apple delivering PWA push notifications for Safari in iOS 16 next year like they’ve announced. Then PWAs on mobile will be all the rage.)

sublinear 4y ago

I agree the way most implement frontend dev is a mess, but I strongly disagree that this is where the performance hit comes from. Profile any web app and you'll find that most of the slowness is the unnecessary and constant fetching of unoptimized assets and very high latency responses to API calls. Caching is rarely done correctly on the client side of a web app and nobody wants to put in the effort to properly lazy load and unload stuff seamlessly because of how tightly coupled it is with the visual layout and design. Network requests are especially unreliable and slow on mobile devices. On the dev's machine and in the testing environment it's not though. This is really all it is. I'm serious. Why doesn't anyone ever look at the network tab in dev tools and see for themselves? It's disgusting.