30 ms·

Why Google and Apple work to snuff out the mobile web

224 points by samwillis 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ryanyl 4y ago
Are there any examples of really a great PWA on mobile? I always find the experience of company's mobile site far worse than its app (such as YouTube or Spotify), and I'm never sure if it's just lack of effort and attention, intentional to push users to the app, or just the ever so slight annoyances like slight tap delay on Safari iOS.
- freedomben 4y ago
  Google's Santa Tracker is a pretty great PWA
  - dylan604 4y ago
    for something where the tracked object is stationary for 364 days out of the year, seems like not a difficult task /s
    - freedomben 4y ago
      I know you're joking (and it was funny), but thinking about it I think it's actually harder in some ways because you go from almost no traffic most of the year to needing to scale really, really fast. And the PWA has a ton of games and other things in it, so not as simple as the old school trackers that don't even need a backend cause all of the "tracking" happens in the browser
      - dylan604 4y ago
        I'm 100% unawares of the Santa Tracker app that you speak, so yes, I was attempting to be funny. However, for that 1 day of the year, is it that hard to have the "tracking" done locally since it's literally just made up data? Just know the localized time and where sunset is, and have the "Santa" moving around in the nighttime areas of the globe. Guessing on efficiency suggests to me rapid movements along the North/South with magical speed roughly equidistant from the terminator at a distance equivalent to midnight.?? Again, since it's 100% make believe, it's not like your browser has to show the exact same location as someone else's. Any other games the app might be included are out side of the scope of the imaginary app in my mind.
- anderber 4y ago
  I think that it really depends on what the PWA is trying to do and its purpose. I think the Twitter, Instagram, and Starbucks apps are both good examples of what can be done. Potentially a lot more could be done with PWAs, if there was more push to make them better. https://appsco.pe/ https://appsco.pe/
  - mostlysimilar 4y ago
    Scrolled around and decided to try the TikTok app. It’s perfectly functional but immediately pops up asking to install the native app for the “full experience”. The first popup was dismissible, so I kept swiping. Within two videos the same popup was back and it was not dismissible. Companies intentionally cripple the web experience.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    People keep bringing up Twitter as an example of a good PWA... But it is objectively horrendously bad. If that's the best example of a PWA, give me a badly implemented native app any day of the week and five times on Sundays.
- doomrobo 4y ago
  Personal experience as a web dev: the mobile Safari PWA experience (and even regular browser experience) is terrible. The browser is riddled with bugs and lacks support for features that have been around for a while. I apologzie for not having examples bc it was a few months ago that I was struggling with this, but hopefully someone else can fill some in. I honestly believe Apple's stranglehold on the mobile browsing experience has been one of the most disempowering things to mobile users in the last decade.
  - ExMachina73 4y ago
    This was an interesting recent development if it ends up being true, specifically Apple opening up iOS browser engine restrictions: https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/13/apple-mulls-opening-browser-engine-nfc-and-more-to-third-party-apps/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/13/apple-mulls-opening-browser-e...
  - lelandfe 4y ago
    Personal experience shipping a big PWA: Safari's PWA experience is not just bad, it's all but undiscoverable: Open the Share sheet, scroll down, tap "Add to Home Screen," fill in the information, tap Add. There are simply no users that do this, and it is not an alternative to having a mobile app in the App Store.
    - CharlesW 4y ago
      > There are simply no users that do this… 100%. PWAs are not a priority for Apple (and shouldn't be for developers) because users don't search for apps in web search engines, they search for them in the App Store.
      - locutous 4y ago
        App store discoverability is very poor. Web discoverability is much easier to manage. It's something you have more control over and can buy easier through marketing via any channel you want. App store pages just don't convert well.
    - 4y ago
- lrem 4y ago
  I thought that a number of first party Google "native" apps is just a packaged PWA, isn't it? Disclaimer: I work for Google, but never paid much attention to that corner of the company.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > I thought that a number of first party Google "native" apps is just a packaged PWA, isn't it? I wonder what those are. Because the apps where they want actual fast responsive apps with smooth animations etc. (and tracking :) ) are all native as far as I can tell.
  - saxomoose 4y ago
    Google Finance would be an example.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Twitter is kind of ok for what I need from it. Also mobile Web is good enough for most forms over data kind of applications. Other than games, where Web 3D APIs are stuck in 2010, many "apps" could be easily done as mobile Web, specially all those that are basically mobile Electron.
- smeagull 4y ago
  I'd like an example of an app that isn't shit compared to just using the mobile browser.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Isn't the main purpose of a native app access to data collection that a browser would not have access? That way they can make money on that data collection? Am I just too cynical here?
  - cokeandpepsi 4y ago
    also avoids adblock
  - aqfamnzc 4y ago
    Many other benefits to the company: (not necessarily for the user) * Persistent shortcut button on device's launcher * Notifications to pull user back into app to consume content, spend money, view ads * Data collection like you say * Uniquely identify user w/ device identifiers * No browser UI and quirks * Persistent storage on user's device
    - cglong 4y ago
      All of those are possible with PWAs except #5, and I'd argue that having completely different SDKs for each platform is much worse :(
      - edgyquant 4y ago
        Notifications are not. Yea the browser technically provides them but no one allows this (nor should they)
        cglong 4y ago
        Lyft has a PWA, which IMO is a really good use case for browser-based notifications.
      - EGreg 4y ago
        Unique identification is no longer possible thanks to the 7 day cap on script writeable storage. Notifications are coming in 2023. But the big one — access to the address book picker - is still behind an Experimental flag !!
- cglong 4y ago
  Starbucks put a lot of effort into their PWA [1] to ensure users of low-end devices were able to get a rich experience. I just found a case study [2] by the team that built it that goes into some interesting details. [1]: https://app.starbucks.com/ https://app.starbucks.com/ [2]: https://formidable.com/work/starbucks-progressive-web-app/ https://formidable.com/work/starbucks-progressive-web-app/
- narrator 4y ago
  Brave Browser on Android is better for youtube because of the ad blocker.
- asdff 4y ago
  i.reddit.com versus their app for example
- geysersam 4y ago
  What's wrong with the YouTube pwa? To me it looks and feels very similar to the app. Edit: just tried the Spotify pwa and it's not bad. Maybe not as good as native, but that's partly because of the big "Get App" button in the bottom right corner.
  - stby 4y ago
    Agreed, both are pretty good. Especially the YouTube PWA runs just as good as the native app on my Android phone, up to the point where I often forget which one I'm currently using.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  The biggest thing hurting PWAs in my opinion is that SPAs and web apps in general is done as a cost-saving measure. This means that while they can be good, they very often aren’t because they aren’t getting the budgets and caliber of engineering talent they’d need to be good, and so it’s much more common that they fall somewhere on the less-great side of mediocre. Users then associate this degraded quality with web apps and disinclines them from using them, even on platforms where PWA installation is promoted (like with Edge/Chrome on Windows and Chrome on Android). Safari’s limitations play a part too but even if Safari vanished tomorrow PWAs would continue to get lukewarm reception so long as companies aren’t putting the same kind of resources they’d put into a flagship native app into their PWAs. At the end of the day, if you cheap out you get a crap experience.
- NoThisIsMe 4y ago
  GitLab
- saxomoose 4y ago
  I had a decent experience with the Qoezion app recently: https://app.qoezion.com https://app.qoezion.com Basic messaging functionality, ...
pjmlp 4y ago
Well, start by having WebGL and WASM catching up with modern hardware, instead of lagging behind native tech for a decade, and this includes desktops, not constrained by the issues described on the posts. WebGPU might finally get released this year, just in time to catch up with where Vulkan, DirectX and Metal were in 8 years ago, while forcing everyone to rewrite all their shaders.
- dekhn 4y ago
  The web (browser) will always trail the desktop, because the web is an inner platform, and no inner platform can develop faster than the platform it runs on. Also, the web has to be compatible across 3 major operating systems, so you need to build wrapper layers. I've come to the conclusion that the browser shoudl have become a virtual machine host where every tab was its own VM. Then at least we could run normal apps on the web without WASM.
  - spankalee 4y ago
    That is not the web - the web is documents and hyperlinks in addition to URLs. Sounds like you might want Fuchsia?
    - dekhn 4y ago
      Browser are the largest individual representative of web technologies (in terms of traffic, users). The three things you listed are all consumed primarily through browsers. And the article we're discussing explicitly is talking about applications- either on the mobile phone, or in the mobile browser. No, I don't want Fuchsia, that's just another OS on top of the 3 we have, with significant restrictions. It was really just a tool for Google to have more power over Android developers and hardware manufacturers.
    - FractalHQ 4y ago
      To be fair, this would be true if you just emerged from a 20 year coma.
- dmitriid 4y ago
KerrAvon 4y ago
> There had been parallel tracks, and prototypes of a truly web-based OS, but they didn't launch. Cocoa was already Plan A when Jobs described the web as a "great application platform" at Moscone. AFAIK, this is completely false. There was never a webOS-type proposal. Where do people come up with this stuff?
- falcolas 4y ago
  There's a lot of "here's the reasoning behind what they did" with nothing backing it up but their word. It's an implicit appeal to their authority, and I personally have no idea who they are. Digging in, it seems like they worked on Chrome for several years before moving over to Edge. That would give them at least some technical insight into what happened at Google, if not the reasons behind those decisions. Even so, it still feels like a lot more speculation than actual facts. But that's me.
  - BuckyBeaver 4y ago
    But it's not ONLY you. Several of the author's core assertions are demonstrably wrong.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    > It's an implicit appeal to their authority, and I personally have no idea who they are. Alex Russel, a developer, team lead and developer advocate for Google for 13 years from 2008 to 2021. He's one of the primary people responsible for the web components mess. He's quite well known in hte web/web-adjacent world. During his work at Google he would: - go out of his way to blame and gaslight Apple for everything - defend and any and all Chrome-only non-standards that Chrome was (and still is) churning out at ever-accelerating rate, completely ignoring any and all standards processes, or other browser vendors' input - be completely silent on "how Google killed mobile web" and only blaming Apple Once he went to work for Microsoft he started bashing Google, too. The amount of grains of salt tyou need to take to read anything he writes that is not strictly technnical would cause world-wide salt deficit for any forseeable future.
- detourdog 4y ago
mozman 4y ago
I really think there needs to be greater engine diversity on mobile and you should also be able to leverage extensions like ublock or tampermonkey for mobile to really be viable
- thewebcount 4y ago
  I use uBlock origin on iOS and macOS via Orion. Works great!
- namrog84 4y ago
  I'm on android and switched to Firefox specifically because they support ublock on mobile and mobile chrome didnt.
barbariangrunge 4y ago
I don’t know why people don’t just create blogs, rather than these 20+ piece Twitter/mastodon post chains. It’s hard to follow and feels disjointed, and fights against an authors motivation to go into detail or explore nuance
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  People can read it natively in the social app they find themselves already in. Also makes it easier for such readers to share, increasing the post/thread's reach.
  - smeagull 4y ago
    I can't. Twitter paywalls after scrolling a little bit.
    - aqfamnzc 4y ago
      In some ways, I'm glad when twitter, reddit, etc. do things like aggressively pushing to the app or to login because it reminds me of the incentives involved and literally, actively discourages me from using their service.
    - jonny_eh 4y ago
      You're not the target audience unfortunately. Without an account, and a curated follow list, you're likely not using the site for content discovery.
    - charcircuit 4y ago
      Requiring a free account is not a paywall. It takes less than a minute to create a twitter account.
      - smeagull 4y ago
        That's a cost I'm not willing to pay.
  - 4y ago
CharlesW 4y ago
On an app-by-app basis it's easy to tell which mobile apps are built on web technologies, but has anyone figured out what percentage of "native" apps are actually web apps in native wrappers?
smcleod 4y ago
As a user - I don't want web based "apps" - I actively avoid anywhere I can. I want native apps - they better align to my operating systems native UI/UX, are more performant, have less (potentially insecure). Yes - Platform APIs absolutely should be made available to varying technologies where security is less of a concern, But I'll take a few high quality apps over a plethora of 'creative' web-apps any day of the week. If you only need a website - just have a website, you don't need an "app" to order a beer at the pub. In my experience a large majority of people that want other people to use web-apps / glorified chrome wrappers are those that write them and often (but not always) have a vested interest promoting getting their product/features out the door over quality, performance and security.
- Analemma_ 4y ago
  Agreed. Web apps are a last resort, to be used grudgingly with gritted teeth if no native apps are available.
- smadge 4y ago
  Forgive me for inferring your reasons, but the reason you actively avoid web based apps is because the web app experience is inferior to native apps because (or at least as the thread claims) Apple and Android actively sabotaged support for web apps favoring improving native features instead of improving and supporting web features.
  - smcleod 4y ago
    No, they're terrible on the desktop where they've unfortunately become ubiquitous.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  As a user, I actively avoid installing apps from restaurants and stores. Web apps are far superior and don't waste flash write cycles updating themselves repeatedly or complaining that they need to be updated if I turn off automatic updates. Also, web apps are easier to modify with extensions than native apps are to modify with Vanced-like patching.
jbombadil 4y ago
I use native apps only when I need the functionality of a native app: particular performance concerns / notifications / peripheral connectivity / etc. But I try my best to not install any apps that I don't consider necessary. I feel everyone wants to push an app for what could be achieved trivially with a website (looking at you Xfinity).
- luckylion 4y ago
  It's strange when I read about what some companies spend on apps (e.g. some crypto prices + news + educational videos) where they could've gotten away with Wordpress, Youtube and some API for the data. Instead of focusing on content, they spend months of multiple developers building an app, struggle with maintaining it on iOS and Android and have won the ability to ... I don't know, I guess you can now use the gyroscope and accelerometer to suggest shit coins to track? Is "being in the appstore" worth that much because it's starting to be the primary thing people search when they're looking for something instead of Google?
  - jstarfish 4y ago
    > I guess you can now use the gyroscope and accelerometer to suggest shit coins to track? No, you build a sizable userbase and sell out to some unscrupulous buyer who backdoors the app in a future update.
    - hgsgm 4y ago
      No you just take money to install unscrupulous libraries.
  - toyg 4y ago
    > and have won the ability to ... ... track you a bit better and get paid a bit more easily (if with a hefty tax), but more importantly, they can be on the Home screen of users, which people will look at a billion times per day. Yes you can bookmark a website - and nobody does, it gets buried in some submenu you don't even know how to bring back up. Yes you can pin a bookmark on the Home screen, but people don't know how - and even if they did, they likely wouldn't get a nice icon, and it would launch an irrelevant browser interface around it, and it would all feel a bit crappy. Whereas, people know very well how to install an app. They'll automatically get a nice big logo on their home screen, and when they tap it the magic will happen as it's supposed to be. The big logo will remind them every other minute that they might want to access the service. Etc etc.
kome 4y ago
[flagged]
aaroninsf 4y ago
Independent of UX, universality, etc., THE killer feature for native apps is that it takes a wide range of security concerns completely off the table.
- Aardwolf 4y ago
  How so? I feel more comfortable viewing a webpage, than installing an app that can access anything to view the same thing
  - fsflover 4y ago
    Especially with NoScript (when possible).
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  On the other hand, it adds a whole bunch of extra security concerns. The browser is a pretty safe, controlled, and locked down environment for executing arbitary code from untrusted parties.
- h0l0cube 4y ago
  But it's not the reason the average user (outside of the tech community) reaches for native apps, most of the time it's because they are forced to. Like menu ordering apps at bars and restaurants. If it was a PWA, they'd use that and skip the installation step.
joenathanone 4y ago
>When Apple was a niche PC maker, it needed the web as a way to help potential customers de-risk the purchase of luxury computers. What does this statement even mean?
- offlinenative 4y ago
  While it enjoyed outsized influence, the Mac never had enough share to create a sufficiently large software ecosystem w/o the web. In this era (~'98-'12), the web provided a bridge over a moat formed by a competitor's proprietary stack winning through momentum and network effects. The web went "over the top" of both Macs and PCs, and while Apple desperately coveted native app builders for the Mac, was at least savvy enough to know that if it could add the universe of great web apps to the Mac experience, it would be a market-reality help at point of sale.
- smadge 4y ago
  The other posts in the chain go into more detail. By improving and pushing the web experience on Mac, Apple gets access to a whole ecosystem of web-based application which make the Mac more valuable to customer, instead of relying solely on 3rd party native Mac application developers.
- svachalek 4y ago
  It's saying that small market participants benefit from open standards and compatibility. People are buying a different entry point into a massive shared resource, rather than choosing between a massive network and a niche player.
  - joenathanone 4y ago
    That makes sense. 'De-risk the purchase luxury computer' is such a strange phrase. Maybe it should be de-risk the purchase of a specialty computer? Hell an IBM PC could be considered a luxury computer compared to off brand IBM compatibles.
- mywittyname 4y ago
  During that era, MacOS suffered from a severe lack of third-party software. This was the biggest thing keeping customers from purchasing Macs. Computers are only useful if they have software. But lack of software wasn't an issue for websites, since Safari could, in theory, run any website as well as any Windows computer could.
T-zex 4y ago
Youtube without adblocker is a completely different experience. I hope web survives.
- malermeister 4y ago
  There's NewPipe if you want Youtube without ads on a native app :)
  - nickthegreek 4y ago
    There is also YouTube Premium. If you are a heavy YouTube user, it is worth the money.
goodSteveramos 4y ago
So a google employee is defending google for using the exact same anticompetitive app store strategy apple did, and then promotes an attack on apple, the last browser vendor not financially dependent on google. Look, the EU app store regulations are great, but they should be paired with regulations that ban Google from abusing its search monopoly to subsidize its control over platforms like OS, browser and social media.
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  > the last browser vendor not financially dependent on google. Apple takes billions from Google for them to be the default search engine. Unsure if that counts as 'dependant' or not, but it's not an insignificant amount of money, and Apple doesn't seem to be a in a hurry to give that up.
  - goodSteveramos 4y ago
    Yup. Its a strange situation, but basically Apple could fund development of Safari with iPhone sales, and as long as Google isnt too pushy about making web apps threaten the App Store monopoly, apple will gladly take a cool extra billion dollars a year to make Google the default search engine. But Apple is not dependent on Google the way Chrome and Firefox are.
  - BuckyBeaver 4y ago
    And yet Apple has thus bar made it impossible to use Chrome (and its clones) on iOS. I once bemoaned Apple's insistence on WebKit; I now recognize that it's the only thing stopping the total takeover of Chrome on the Web, and a return to the dark ages of "this site works best with..."
    - dylan604 4y ago
      > a return to the dark ages of "this site works best with..." We are there in every way other than the banner/badge being present on the website. I see no difference between today vs then from the point that one browser vendor is making browser specific hooks* that devs use that traps them into their browser. *as in hook-line-sinker not coding hooks
jolux 4y ago
Alex Russell used to work on Chrome, and would write threads on Twitter about why it was best for Chrome to dominate the browser market and claim that “engine monoculture” wasn’t a problem for the web. Make of that what you will.
- benatkin 4y ago
  It doesn't help that the competition doesn't seem to be challenging this, though. Mozilla gets a ton of money from Google. Also their CEO is a lawyer who appears to not be very interested in Web Browsers. I suppose similar could be said about other CEOs though. It seems to just be a stuffy business thing.
  - goodSteveramos 4y ago
    When browser and OS development is libre volunteer and user-funded it will be pro-user. As long as it is funded by advertising and online services it will be pro-advertiser and pro-online service companies. Mozilla is funded by advertising.
    - benatkin 4y ago
      If Mozilla can't get into Mobile and Desktop PWAs maybe someone else in the Linux GUI space will. I sure hope so. I'm excited by https://qutebrowser.org/ https://qutebrowser.org/ It seems very user-driven but it's niche users which doesn't quite include me.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  Two different things can be bad at the same time. If Apple hates a browser monoculture so much, they should have let Mozilla release Firefox (actual firefox) on iOS. There were ports ready to go multiple times but they love their walled garden lockdown too much. It was to their favor back when WebKit dominated the mobile web, but oops, they didn't invest enough in the platform! FWIW I think if Safari had been released as a first-tier Windows browser, they might have been able to hold on and fight off Chrome together with Firefox. But they didn't put the effort in.
tannhaeuser 4y ago
Regarding Chris Coyier's initial post "What does it look like for the web to lose" [1] and his conclusion "Let's ditch the idea of native apps. All web! All web! All web!" I've got to say, that's exactly how it looks like for the web to lose. By the web trailing the capabilities of native apps rather than innovating in what made the web uniquely successful. [1]: https://chriscoyier.net/2023/01/04/what-does-it-look-like-for-the-web-to-lose/ https://chriscoyier.net/2023/01/04/what-does-it-look-like-fo...
nottorp 4y ago
Is it just me, or he's talking like slow bloated web apps are a good thing?
gaucheries 4y ago
Tangentially related: Do Mastodon instances display funny for anyone else's mobile browser? For me, the pages are always scrunched to the left, with a mostly empty side bar taking 10% of the right side of the screen. I'm using a 12 mini though, maybe not a popular surface?
- pohuing 4y ago
  Same on a pixel 4a, not sure why they went with that layout on portrait screens
- _dark_matter_ 4y ago
  Looks fine for me on Firefox on Android.
- aendruk 4y ago
  It’s a recent and controversial change. Ongoing discussion: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19571 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19571
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- steve1977 4y ago
  Maybe you should use a native Mastodon client? SCNR…
Yizahi 4y ago
Speaking about snuffing mobile web, how come it's year 2023 outside, but we are looking at NEW social blogging platform which shows 12 lines of the useful content by 88 columns? And that's 12 lines if I count generously. Depending on the scroll position it can be 7 lines. Seven lines of text, cut into a disjointed spaghetti and surrounded by infojunk in a full screen browser window. Amazing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Cupertino95014 4y ago
Totally. You don't need the Facebook app to use Facebook on your phone, nor the Twitter app to use Twitter, nor the LinkedIn app... you get the idea. Your browser is perfectly capable of getting you on them, and remembering your credentials for next time. And usually all you have to type in the URL bar is the 'f' or 't' or 'l' .
- alkonaut 4y ago
  And yet the apps are almost universally better. I mean using Facebook.com is painful compared to the app. But the same goes for most trivial apps that merely show an embedded browser and almost nothing else.
  - Cupertino95014 4y ago
    Yeah, I believe you're right, but on the other hand, preserving what little privacy I have left is worth it to me. Also not having a bazillion apps on my phone using up storage.
  - jacobsenscott 4y ago
    The few apps people install are a bit better. In general people don't install apps, but if they do they just install facebook, chat, and streaming service apps. Only those companies have the resources to build a good apps. Nearly ever other app is much worse than the web site in a mobile browser because most business just don't have the resources to build good apps.
  - ccouzens 4y ago
    The one time I installed Facebook I found it inferior because it was ironically less native than the website. Through the website photo uploads used my phone's native image picker which integrates with services I've chosen to use. The app used it's own image picker which was limited to photos that were saved to my phone.
  - npteljes 4y ago
    It's what they make it to be. If they make a better app, then the app will be better. If they neglect the app and focus on the website, the website will be better.
gerash 4y ago
As a user I want performant and ephemeral software. That is, software that has performant UI and has access to all the raw hardware and does not need installation/uninstallation and is basically downloaded on demand and garbage collected after a while. Why aren't we there yet?
lucidguppy 4y ago
How does flutter fit into all this? Google doesn't want to have 3x teams for android, ios, and web...
eh9 4y ago
I started in the web and had to move to native when the feature gap between platforms got too great to ignore and customers started demanding native experiences. React Native made this a little easier, but it definitely did not mean “write once, run anywhere”. (It’s more like, write a half that runs everywhere and another half that’s split between your target platforms) After using RN a bunch, I’ve found there are times when it shines and other times when it’s best to defer to the native language, but I keep using RN because it reminds me most of what I love about the web: The best “write it once run anywhere” platform I’ve used to date.
d3nj4l 4y ago
All else aside, this: > When Apple was a niche PC maker, it needed the web as a way to help potential customers de-risk the purchase of luxury computers. While it enjoyed outsized influence, the Mac never had enough share to create a sufficiently large software ecosystem w/o the web. Just doesn’t track to me. The mac was a fairly popular native platform. Many early ios developers started out as mac developers. Macs were extremely viable for most professional users without the web.
PaulHoule 4y ago
Web > Mobile Web > App in that order. On my iPad the "web" just works, any "m." site just adds even more whitespace than web developers seem compelled to force on viewers and raises the font size to 3x bigger than the large type books at the public library. Web sites (say Reddit) have some banner that says it is better if you download the app, log in and all that bs, but you know it is not better for you it is better for them collecting data on you. But really how bad it is it? I spend as little time as possible with apps on my iPad, mostly i have 6 different apps so I can occasionally do something with the "internet of things". My take is that the web works just fine on mobile, it is PWA and push notifications which no users asked for, anyway. I mean, push notifications, does anybody really want to get more spam? The one thing I know is that everybody and his brother and his sister and all their cousins and their cousin's schoolteachers and on and on wants to send me more spam than I can handle so if Apple is saying "no spam please" isn't that fighting the good fight?
- dmonitor 4y ago
  http://i.reddit.com http://i.reddit.com still exists, thankfully, and is a million times better than the new one.
KingLancelot 4y ago
[dead]
amelius 4y ago
I'm waiting for the moment when you can just run an Android or iOS emulator inside the browser (through WASM, probably), and run any app you want on any platform, and safely.
open-source-ux 4y ago
Firefox released a mobile OS (Firefox OS) in 2013. The aim was to encourage app developers use open technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, open web APIs). Development of Firefox OS stopped in 2015. At the time I thought that Firefox was wasting resources on development on Firefox OS. But now I think I was wrong. Firefox could see the promise of a PWA (Progressive Web Apps) mobile future, but the tech was clumsy and immature. Perhaps Firefox OS was too early for the technology? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  They were wasting resources not because the technology didn't make sense but because the business model didn't make sense. There was no way they were going to get distribution when Android was also free and had revenue share to boot.
rvz 4y ago
We have waited years for alternatives like FirefoxOS, Ubuntu Phone, etc, and the other Linux phones to compete against the duopoly. Instead, these alternatives have decided to throw in the towel and gave up all by themselves with their vapourware (Ubuntu Phone) weak product offerings (Firefox OS) and the market just moved on and chose the duopoly instead. Perhaps they weren't competitive enough to be interesting to users which is why we have this situation in the first place. These alternatives tried and failed. The only functioning alternative that is still alive is SailfishOS by Jolla which even that is almost no where to be seen anywhere. It's almost as if they are not trying hard enough. The real winner here is Google which will go in the same route as Apple when they deploy Fuchsia on Chromebooks and Android phones which Chrome will essentially further dominate the web. Alternatives like Firefox have little to no chance at competing even with EU DMA which that just further entrenches Chrome's dominance.
- fsflover 4y ago
  > The only functioning alternative that is still alive is SailfishOS by Jolla As a happy owner of Librem 5 and Pinephone, I respectfully disagree.
BuckyBeaver 4y ago
"As soon as the Apple App Store (for iOS) became a thing, developers asked: why not web apps? Why go proprietary? Back in 2008, for that iPhone 3G launch with the App Store, it could have been argued that the web just wasn’t ready for it." I don't know where this guy was when the iPhone came out, but this is backward. Steve Jobs reportedly did not want true third-party applications on the iPhone, and Apple pushed Web apps hard. They argued strenuously that Web apps were just fine. Now... whether Jobs was convinced later, or the fact was that the tooling for native app development just wasn't ready... we all know where it ended up. But the author's revisionist history is bogus.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  The web really wasn't ready though. I was doing web platform work at the time and it simply was not capable of doing the stuff native could do, which is why the App Store was an inevitability.
  - BuckyBeaver 4y ago
    I agree. That's why the author's assertions are completely bogus. Developers were saying "why not NATIVE," whereas he claims the opposite. Apple was saying "Web apps all the way!"
- jshier 4y ago
  Jobs didn't want apps at all but he was eventually convinced they were needed, late in the iPhone development cycle. So rather than announce the native tools early (they wouldn't ship for another year) they tried to sell web apps in the meantime. Typical Apple release process, even though it's detrimental to them and their users.
  - BuckyBeaver 4y ago
    Yep. Thus my assertion that the author's claims are wrong. While I do resent a lot of Apple's lies and anti-user, anti-developer actions, I would give them a pass in this instance because they were inventing an industry-changing development ecosystem and they did so very, very well.
agentultra 4y ago
> If you want to build a native app across platforms, you’re either: > - Writing it as many times as platforms you want to support > - Using some middle-man software to write-once-compile-everywhere Weeeeeeeell, there's also a third option that a lot of game developers/engines use: write most of your code in cross-platform C/C++ as an object file and write platform-specific loaders that do the OS-specific bits to start your program, load your object file, and call your main entry point. It's not that bad. It's really the OS's that get nasty about adding more and more layers between our programs and the hardware they run on. Some of that is for good reason: ie security or debugging. But some aren't: vendor lock in, user tracking, backdoors.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mwcampbell 4y ago
  A good UI that everyone can use isn't as simple as just directly drawing to the screen and handling input. You also have to handle things like accessibility that require heavy interaction with the OS.
  - agentultra 4y ago
    Sure. There are OS APIs for these things and other toolkits for it. Browsers are fine and all but I don’t think they’re the only reasonable option in town for cross platform development.
skybrian 4y ago
"Snuff out" seems like clickbait. There's no way mobile browsers are going away. That's not the issue. Meanwhile, I've never used a Twitter, Mastodon, or Reddit mobile app, for example. Also, Android keeps disabling permissions on mobile apps I haven't used for months. There are a few mobile apps I use frequently. (Mostly from Google.) For everyone else, I'm not going to install your app.
dukoid 4y ago
While there are certainly political aspects, there are still technical issues that are hard to overcome. Palm has tried the "pure" Web-only approach and one of the main issues there was the inability to cache compiled code in a straightforward way -- the V8 compilation result is hard to untangle from the current context, partially due to the dynamic nature of the language -- leading to long app startup times. I hope that WebASM will finally fix this problem.
- esprehn 4y ago
  Modern v8 does on disk byte code caching, things have come a long way since Palm. In many cases PWAs have faster startup than native apps (also the on disk size of a PWA is usually an order of magnitude smaller than a similar native app.) https://v8.dev/blog/code-caching-for-devs https://v8.dev/blog/code-caching-for-devs https://github.com/thlorenz/v8-perf/blob/master/snapshots%2Bcode-caching.md#chromes-use-of-code-caching https://github.com/thlorenz/v8-perf/blob/master/snapshots%2B...
PaulHoule 4y ago
PWA should have been killed by Google long ago like Stadia, OnHub, YouTube Go, Android things, etc. It is fun to write a demo in a service worker where you draw a PNG of the Mandelbrot set but for the use case where a web application caches aggressively, preloads, works offline you'd need a framework running in the web browser to implement the cache and store the documents in the web browser -- the persistent storage options are not that great. I wish they'd provided some way to hook into the cache mechanism of the browser directly. With a good framework, application is going to tell the framework how it wants to handle loading and maintenance. Back in the day Netscape 4 was bundled with Netscape Netcaster https://money.cnn.com/1997/04/15/technology/netscape_netcaster/ https://money.cnn.com/1997/04/15/technology/netscape_netcast... which was supposed to spool an updating static news web site to your cache based on declarative configuration. They should bring it back! I'm not against what they are trying to do, but the implementation is lacking. From the privacy point of view service workers are yet another way you can be tracked, or by which a web application can be run "in the matrix".
jaytag 4y ago
I'd be more concerned about the mobile web if the web weren't such hostile ground for end users to host themselves. Web solutions are by and large difficult for end users to stand up, and just as difficult to compose thanks to the proliferation of standards that "just" require certain responses at certain well known paths, specific markup, and the like.
rocket_surgeron 4y ago
Mobile web designers are doing a much better job than Apple or Google could ever dream of when it comes to creating horrifically unusable mobile web sites and applications. It’s almost like they’re in cahoots. When they are so bad, either maliciously or not, that one would rather download an app or wait until a desktop browser is available, one has to wonder.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jhanschoo 4y ago
On an extreme tangent; it's, its follows the punctuation rules for singular 3rd person pronouns it's is a contraction of it+is; e.g. it's good = it is good, c.f. he's good = he is good, she's good = she is good. its is the possessive; e.g. its mouth is open, c.f. his mouth is open, her mouth is open. (ours, yours, theirs) The consistent misuse of punctuation had been pretty jarring.
lawgimenez 4y ago
Author do realized that more than half of the world's population are still using outdated low cost Android phones thus using web technologies is just not possible. For example, I had a project last year where the app will communicate via Bluetooth to a portable printer to be used for the factory workers. I'm not sure if the web technologies can handle this.

224 points by samwillis 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Are there any examples of really a great PWA on mobile? I always find the experience of company's mobile site far worse than its app (such as YouTube or Spotify), and I'm never sure if it's just lack of effort and attention, intentional to push users to the app, or just the ever so slight annoyances like slight tap delay on Safari iOS.

freedomben 4y ago
Google's Santa Tracker is a pretty great PWA
- dylan604 4y ago
  for something where the tracked object is stationary for 364 days out of the year, seems like not a difficult task /s
  - freedomben 4y ago
    I know you're joking (and it was funny), but thinking about it I think it's actually harder in some ways because you go from almost no traffic most of the year to needing to scale really, really fast. And the PWA has a ton of games and other things in it, so not as simple as the old school trackers that don't even need a backend cause all of the "tracking" happens in the browser
    - dylan604 4y ago
      I'm 100% unawares of the Santa Tracker app that you speak, so yes, I was attempting to be funny. However, for that 1 day of the year, is it that hard to have the "tracking" done locally since it's literally just made up data? Just know the localized time and where sunset is, and have the "Santa" moving around in the nighttime areas of the globe. Guessing on efficiency suggests to me rapid movements along the North/South with magical speed roughly equidistant from the terminator at a distance equivalent to midnight.?? Again, since it's 100% make believe, it's not like your browser has to show the exact same location as someone else's. Any other games the app might be included are out side of the scope of the imaginary app in my mind.
anderber 4y ago
I think that it really depends on what the PWA is trying to do and its purpose. I think the Twitter, Instagram, and Starbucks apps are both good examples of what can be done. Potentially a lot more could be done with PWAs, if there was more push to make them better. https://appsco.pe/ https://appsco.pe/
- mostlysimilar 4y ago
  Scrolled around and decided to try the TikTok app. It’s perfectly functional but immediately pops up asking to install the native app for the “full experience”. The first popup was dismissible, so I kept swiping. Within two videos the same popup was back and it was not dismissible. Companies intentionally cripple the web experience.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  People keep bringing up Twitter as an example of a good PWA... But it is objectively horrendously bad. If that's the best example of a PWA, give me a badly implemented native app any day of the week and five times on Sundays.
doomrobo 4y ago
Personal experience as a web dev: the mobile Safari PWA experience (and even regular browser experience) is terrible. The browser is riddled with bugs and lacks support for features that have been around for a while. I apologzie for not having examples bc it was a few months ago that I was struggling with this, but hopefully someone else can fill some in. I honestly believe Apple's stranglehold on the mobile browsing experience has been one of the most disempowering things to mobile users in the last decade.
- ExMachina73 4y ago
  This was an interesting recent development if it ends up being true, specifically Apple opening up iOS browser engine restrictions: https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/13/apple-mulls-opening-browser-engine-nfc-and-more-to-third-party-apps/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/13/apple-mulls-opening-browser-e...
- lelandfe 4y ago
  Personal experience shipping a big PWA: Safari's PWA experience is not just bad, it's all but undiscoverable: Open the Share sheet, scroll down, tap "Add to Home Screen," fill in the information, tap Add. There are simply no users that do this, and it is not an alternative to having a mobile app in the App Store.
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    > There are simply no users that do this… 100%. PWAs are not a priority for Apple (and shouldn't be for developers) because users don't search for apps in web search engines, they search for them in the App Store.
    - locutous 4y ago
      App store discoverability is very poor. Web discoverability is much easier to manage. It's something you have more control over and can buy easier through marketing via any channel you want. App store pages just don't convert well.
  - 4y ago
lrem 4y ago
I thought that a number of first party Google "native" apps is just a packaged PWA, isn't it? Disclaimer: I work for Google, but never paid much attention to that corner of the company.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > I thought that a number of first party Google "native" apps is just a packaged PWA, isn't it? I wonder what those are. Because the apps where they want actual fast responsive apps with smooth animations etc. (and tracking :) ) are all native as far as I can tell.
- saxomoose 4y ago
  Google Finance would be an example.
pjmlp 4y ago
Twitter is kind of ok for what I need from it. Also mobile Web is good enough for most forms over data kind of applications. Other than games, where Web 3D APIs are stuck in 2010, many "apps" could be easily done as mobile Web, specially all those that are basically mobile Electron.
smeagull 4y ago
I'd like an example of an app that isn't shit compared to just using the mobile browser.
dylan604 4y ago
Isn't the main purpose of a native app access to data collection that a browser would not have access? That way they can make money on that data collection? Am I just too cynical here?
- cokeandpepsi 4y ago
  also avoids adblock
- aqfamnzc 4y ago
  Many other benefits to the company: (not necessarily for the user) * Persistent shortcut button on device's launcher * Notifications to pull user back into app to consume content, spend money, view ads * Data collection like you say * Uniquely identify user w/ device identifiers * No browser UI and quirks * Persistent storage on user's device
  - cglong 4y ago
    All of those are possible with PWAs except #5, and I'd argue that having completely different SDKs for each platform is much worse :(
    - edgyquant 4y ago
      Notifications are not. Yea the browser technically provides them but no one allows this (nor should they)
      - cglong 4y ago
        Lyft has a PWA, which IMO is a really good use case for browser-based notifications.
    - EGreg 4y ago
      Unique identification is no longer possible thanks to the 7 day cap on script writeable storage. Notifications are coming in 2023. But the big one — access to the address book picker - is still behind an Experimental flag !!
cglong 4y ago
Starbucks put a lot of effort into their PWA [1] to ensure users of low-end devices were able to get a rich experience. I just found a case study [2] by the team that built it that goes into some interesting details. [1]: https://app.starbucks.com/ https://app.starbucks.com/ [2]: https://formidable.com/work/starbucks-progressive-web-app/ https://formidable.com/work/starbucks-progressive-web-app/
narrator 4y ago
Brave Browser on Android is better for youtube because of the ad blocker.
asdff 4y ago
i.reddit.com versus their app for example
geysersam 4y ago
What's wrong with the YouTube pwa? To me it looks and feels very similar to the app. Edit: just tried the Spotify pwa and it's not bad. Maybe not as good as native, but that's partly because of the big "Get App" button in the bottom right corner.
- stby 4y ago
  Agreed, both are pretty good. Especially the YouTube PWA runs just as good as the native app on my Android phone, up to the point where I often forget which one I'm currently using.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
The biggest thing hurting PWAs in my opinion is that SPAs and web apps in general is done as a cost-saving measure. This means that while they can be good, they very often aren’t because they aren’t getting the budgets and caliber of engineering talent they’d need to be good, and so it’s much more common that they fall somewhere on the less-great side of mediocre. Users then associate this degraded quality with web apps and disinclines them from using them, even on platforms where PWA installation is promoted (like with Edge/Chrome on Windows and Chrome on Android). Safari’s limitations play a part too but even if Safari vanished tomorrow PWAs would continue to get lukewarm reception so long as companies aren’t putting the same kind of resources they’d put into a flagship native app into their PWAs. At the end of the day, if you cheap out you get a crap experience.
NoThisIsMe 4y ago
GitLab
saxomoose 4y ago
I had a decent experience with the Qoezion app recently: https://app.qoezion.com https://app.qoezion.com Basic messaging functionality, ...

pjmlp 4y ago

Well, start by having WebGL and WASM catching up with modern hardware, instead of lagging behind native tech for a decade, and this includes desktops, not constrained by the issues described on the posts. WebGPU might finally get released this year, just in time to catch up with where Vulkan, DirectX and Metal were in 8 years ago, while forcing everyone to rewrite all their shaders.

dekhn 4y ago
The web (browser) will always trail the desktop, because the web is an inner platform, and no inner platform can develop faster than the platform it runs on. Also, the web has to be compatible across 3 major operating systems, so you need to build wrapper layers. I've come to the conclusion that the browser shoudl have become a virtual machine host where every tab was its own VM. Then at least we could run normal apps on the web without WASM.
- spankalee 4y ago
  That is not the web - the web is documents and hyperlinks in addition to URLs. Sounds like you might want Fuchsia?
  - dekhn 4y ago
    Browser are the largest individual representative of web technologies (in terms of traffic, users). The three things you listed are all consumed primarily through browsers. And the article we're discussing explicitly is talking about applications- either on the mobile phone, or in the mobile browser. No, I don't want Fuchsia, that's just another OS on top of the 3 we have, with significant restrictions. It was really just a tool for Google to have more power over Android developers and hardware manufacturers.
  - FractalHQ 4y ago
    To be fair, this would be true if you just emerged from a 20 year coma.
dmitriid 4y ago

KerrAvon 4y ago

> There had been parallel tracks, and prototypes of a truly web-based OS, but they didn't launch. Cocoa was already Plan A when Jobs described the web as a "great application platform" at Moscone. AFAIK, this is completely false. There was never a webOS-type proposal. Where do people come up with this stuff?

falcolas 4y ago
There's a lot of "here's the reasoning behind what they did" with nothing backing it up but their word. It's an implicit appeal to their authority, and I personally have no idea who they are. Digging in, it seems like they worked on Chrome for several years before moving over to Edge. That would give them at least some technical insight into what happened at Google, if not the reasons behind those decisions. Even so, it still feels like a lot more speculation than actual facts. But that's me.
- BuckyBeaver 4y ago
  But it's not ONLY you. Several of the author's core assertions are demonstrably wrong.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > It's an implicit appeal to their authority, and I personally have no idea who they are. Alex Russel, a developer, team lead and developer advocate for Google for 13 years from 2008 to 2021. He's one of the primary people responsible for the web components mess. He's quite well known in hte web/web-adjacent world. During his work at Google he would: - go out of his way to blame and gaslight Apple for everything - defend and any and all Chrome-only non-standards that Chrome was (and still is) churning out at ever-accelerating rate, completely ignoring any and all standards processes, or other browser vendors' input - be completely silent on "how Google killed mobile web" and only blaming Apple Once he went to work for Microsoft he started bashing Google, too. The amount of grains of salt tyou need to take to read anything he writes that is not strictly technnical would cause world-wide salt deficit for any forseeable future.
detourdog 4y ago

mozman 4y ago

I really think there needs to be greater engine diversity on mobile and you should also be able to leverage extensions like ublock or tampermonkey for mobile to really be viable

thewebcount 4y ago
I use uBlock origin on iOS and macOS via Orion. Works great!
namrog84 4y ago
I'm on android and switched to Firefox specifically because they support ublock on mobile and mobile chrome didnt.

barbariangrunge 4y ago

I don’t know why people don’t just create blogs, rather than these 20+ piece Twitter/mastodon post chains. It’s hard to follow and feels disjointed, and fights against an authors motivation to go into detail or explore nuance

jonny_eh 4y ago
People can read it natively in the social app they find themselves already in. Also makes it easier for such readers to share, increasing the post/thread's reach.
- smeagull 4y ago
  I can't. Twitter paywalls after scrolling a little bit.
  - aqfamnzc 4y ago
    In some ways, I'm glad when twitter, reddit, etc. do things like aggressively pushing to the app or to login because it reminds me of the incentives involved and literally, actively discourages me from using their service.
  - jonny_eh 4y ago
    You're not the target audience unfortunately. Without an account, and a curated follow list, you're likely not using the site for content discovery.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    Requiring a free account is not a paywall. It takes less than a minute to create a twitter account.
    - smeagull 4y ago
      That's a cost I'm not willing to pay.
- 4y ago

CharlesW 4y ago

On an app-by-app basis it's easy to tell which mobile apps are built on web technologies, but has anyone figured out what percentage of "native" apps are actually web apps in native wrappers?

smcleod 4y ago

As a user - I don't want web based "apps" - I actively avoid anywhere I can. I want native apps - they better align to my operating systems native UI/UX, are more performant, have less (potentially insecure). Yes - Platform APIs absolutely should be made available to varying technologies where security is less of a concern, But I'll take a few high quality apps over a plethora of 'creative' web-apps any day of the week. If you only need a website - just have a website, you don't need an "app" to order a beer at the pub. In my experience a large majority of people that want other people to use web-apps / glorified chrome wrappers are those that write them and often (but not always) have a vested interest promoting getting their product/features out the door over quality, performance and security.

Analemma_ 4y ago
Agreed. Web apps are a last resort, to be used grudgingly with gritted teeth if no native apps are available.
smadge 4y ago
Forgive me for inferring your reasons, but the reason you actively avoid web based apps is because the web app experience is inferior to native apps because (or at least as the thread claims) Apple and Android actively sabotaged support for web apps favoring improving native features instead of improving and supporting web features.
- smcleod 4y ago
  No, they're terrible on the desktop where they've unfortunately become ubiquitous.
lern_too_spel 4y ago
As a user, I actively avoid installing apps from restaurants and stores. Web apps are far superior and don't waste flash write cycles updating themselves repeatedly or complaining that they need to be updated if I turn off automatic updates. Also, web apps are easier to modify with extensions than native apps are to modify with Vanced-like patching.

jbombadil 4y ago

I use native apps only when I need the functionality of a native app: particular performance concerns / notifications / peripheral connectivity / etc. But I try my best to not install any apps that I don't consider necessary. I feel everyone wants to push an app for what could be achieved trivially with a website (looking at you Xfinity).

luckylion 4y ago
It's strange when I read about what some companies spend on apps (e.g. some crypto prices + news + educational videos) where they could've gotten away with Wordpress, Youtube and some API for the data. Instead of focusing on content, they spend months of multiple developers building an app, struggle with maintaining it on iOS and Android and have won the ability to ... I don't know, I guess you can now use the gyroscope and accelerometer to suggest shit coins to track? Is "being in the appstore" worth that much because it's starting to be the primary thing people search when they're looking for something instead of Google?
- jstarfish 4y ago
  > I guess you can now use the gyroscope and accelerometer to suggest shit coins to track? No, you build a sizable userbase and sell out to some unscrupulous buyer who backdoors the app in a future update.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    No you just take money to install unscrupulous libraries.
- toyg 4y ago
  > and have won the ability to ... ... track you a bit better and get paid a bit more easily (if with a hefty tax), but more importantly, they can be on the Home screen of users, which people will look at a billion times per day. Yes you can bookmark a website - and nobody does, it gets buried in some submenu you don't even know how to bring back up. Yes you can pin a bookmark on the Home screen, but people don't know how - and even if they did, they likely wouldn't get a nice icon, and it would launch an irrelevant browser interface around it, and it would all feel a bit crappy. Whereas, people know very well how to install an app. They'll automatically get a nice big logo on their home screen, and when they tap it the magic will happen as it's supposed to be. The big logo will remind them every other minute that they might want to access the service. Etc etc.

kome 4y ago

[flagged]

aaroninsf 4y ago

Independent of UX, universality, etc., THE killer feature for native apps is that it takes a wide range of security concerns completely off the table.

Aardwolf 4y ago
How so? I feel more comfortable viewing a webpage, than installing an app that can access anything to view the same thing
- fsflover 4y ago
  Especially with NoScript (when possible).
madeofpalk 4y ago
On the other hand, it adds a whole bunch of extra security concerns. The browser is a pretty safe, controlled, and locked down environment for executing arbitary code from untrusted parties.
h0l0cube 4y ago
But it's not the reason the average user (outside of the tech community) reaches for native apps, most of the time it's because they are forced to. Like menu ordering apps at bars and restaurants. If it was a PWA, they'd use that and skip the installation step.

joenathanone 4y ago

>When Apple was a niche PC maker, it needed the web as a way to help potential customers de-risk the purchase of luxury computers. What does this statement even mean?

offlinenative 4y ago
While it enjoyed outsized influence, the Mac never had enough share to create a sufficiently large software ecosystem w/o the web. In this era (~'98-'12), the web provided a bridge over a moat formed by a competitor's proprietary stack winning through momentum and network effects. The web went "over the top" of both Macs and PCs, and while Apple desperately coveted native app builders for the Mac, was at least savvy enough to know that if it could add the universe of great web apps to the Mac experience, it would be a market-reality help at point of sale.
smadge 4y ago
The other posts in the chain go into more detail. By improving and pushing the web experience on Mac, Apple gets access to a whole ecosystem of web-based application which make the Mac more valuable to customer, instead of relying solely on 3rd party native Mac application developers.
svachalek 4y ago
It's saying that small market participants benefit from open standards and compatibility. People are buying a different entry point into a massive shared resource, rather than choosing between a massive network and a niche player.
- joenathanone 4y ago
  That makes sense. 'De-risk the purchase luxury computer' is such a strange phrase. Maybe it should be de-risk the purchase of a specialty computer? Hell an IBM PC could be considered a luxury computer compared to off brand IBM compatibles.
mywittyname 4y ago
During that era, MacOS suffered from a severe lack of third-party software. This was the biggest thing keeping customers from purchasing Macs. Computers are only useful if they have software. But lack of software wasn't an issue for websites, since Safari could, in theory, run any website as well as any Windows computer could.

T-zex 4y ago

Youtube without adblocker is a completely different experience. I hope web survives.

malermeister 4y ago
There's NewPipe if you want Youtube without ads on a native app :)
- nickthegreek 4y ago
  There is also YouTube Premium. If you are a heavy YouTube user, it is worth the money.

goodSteveramos 4y ago

So a google employee is defending google for using the exact same anticompetitive app store strategy apple did, and then promotes an attack on apple, the last browser vendor not financially dependent on google. Look, the EU app store regulations are great, but they should be paired with regulations that ban Google from abusing its search monopoly to subsidize its control over platforms like OS, browser and social media.

madeofpalk 4y ago
> the last browser vendor not financially dependent on google. Apple takes billions from Google for them to be the default search engine. Unsure if that counts as 'dependant' or not, but it's not an insignificant amount of money, and Apple doesn't seem to be a in a hurry to give that up.
- goodSteveramos 4y ago
  Yup. Its a strange situation, but basically Apple could fund development of Safari with iPhone sales, and as long as Google isnt too pushy about making web apps threaten the App Store monopoly, apple will gladly take a cool extra billion dollars a year to make Google the default search engine. But Apple is not dependent on Google the way Chrome and Firefox are.
- BuckyBeaver 4y ago
  And yet Apple has thus bar made it impossible to use Chrome (and its clones) on iOS. I once bemoaned Apple's insistence on WebKit; I now recognize that it's the only thing stopping the total takeover of Chrome on the Web, and a return to the dark ages of "this site works best with..."
  - dylan604 4y ago
    > a return to the dark ages of "this site works best with..." We are there in every way other than the banner/badge being present on the website. I see no difference between today vs then from the point that one browser vendor is making browser specific hooks* that devs use that traps them into their browser. *as in hook-line-sinker not coding hooks

jolux 4y ago

Alex Russell used to work on Chrome, and would write threads on Twitter about why it was best for Chrome to dominate the browser market and claim that “engine monoculture” wasn’t a problem for the web. Make of that what you will.

benatkin 4y ago
It doesn't help that the competition doesn't seem to be challenging this, though. Mozilla gets a ton of money from Google. Also their CEO is a lawyer who appears to not be very interested in Web Browsers. I suppose similar could be said about other CEOs though. It seems to just be a stuffy business thing.
- goodSteveramos 4y ago
  When browser and OS development is libre volunteer and user-funded it will be pro-user. As long as it is funded by advertising and online services it will be pro-advertiser and pro-online service companies. Mozilla is funded by advertising.
  - benatkin 4y ago
    If Mozilla can't get into Mobile and Desktop PWAs maybe someone else in the Linux GUI space will. I sure hope so. I'm excited by https://qutebrowser.org/ https://qutebrowser.org/ It seems very user-driven but it's niche users which doesn't quite include me.
kevingadd 4y ago
Two different things can be bad at the same time. If Apple hates a browser monoculture so much, they should have let Mozilla release Firefox (actual firefox) on iOS. There were ports ready to go multiple times but they love their walled garden lockdown too much. It was to their favor back when WebKit dominated the mobile web, but oops, they didn't invest enough in the platform! FWIW I think if Safari had been released as a first-tier Windows browser, they might have been able to hold on and fight off Chrome together with Firefox. But they didn't put the effort in.

tannhaeuser 4y ago

Regarding Chris Coyier's initial post "What does it look like for the web to lose" [1] and his conclusion "Let's ditch the idea of native apps. All web! All web! All web!" I've got to say, that's exactly how it looks like for the web to lose. By the web trailing the capabilities of native apps rather than innovating in what made the web uniquely successful. [1]: https://chriscoyier.net/2023/01/04/what-does-it-look-like-for-the-web-to-lose/ https://chriscoyier.net/2023/01/04/what-does-it-look-like-fo...

nottorp 4y ago

Is it just me, or he's talking like slow bloated web apps are a good thing?

gaucheries 4y ago

Tangentially related: Do Mastodon instances display funny for anyone else's mobile browser? For me, the pages are always scrunched to the left, with a mostly empty side bar taking 10% of the right side of the screen. I'm using a 12 mini though, maybe not a popular surface?

pohuing 4y ago
Same on a pixel 4a, not sure why they went with that layout on portrait screens
_dark_matter_ 4y ago
Looks fine for me on Firefox on Android.
aendruk 4y ago
It’s a recent and controversial change. Ongoing discussion: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19571 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19571
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
steve1977 4y ago
Maybe you should use a native Mastodon client? SCNR…

Yizahi 4y ago

Speaking about snuffing mobile web, how come it's year 2023 outside, but we are looking at NEW social blogging platform which shows 12 lines of the useful content by 88 columns? And that's 12 lines if I count generously. Depending on the scroll position it can be 7 lines. Seven lines of text, cut into a disjointed spaghetti and surrounded by infojunk in a full screen browser window. Amazing.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Cupertino95014 4y ago

Totally. You don't need the Facebook app to use Facebook on your phone, nor the Twitter app to use Twitter, nor the LinkedIn app... you get the idea. Your browser is perfectly capable of getting you on them, and remembering your credentials for next time. And usually all you have to type in the URL bar is the 'f' or 't' or 'l' .

alkonaut 4y ago
And yet the apps are almost universally better. I mean using Facebook.com is painful compared to the app. But the same goes for most trivial apps that merely show an embedded browser and almost nothing else.
- Cupertino95014 4y ago
  Yeah, I believe you're right, but on the other hand, preserving what little privacy I have left is worth it to me. Also not having a bazillion apps on my phone using up storage.
- jacobsenscott 4y ago
  The few apps people install are a bit better. In general people don't install apps, but if they do they just install facebook, chat, and streaming service apps. Only those companies have the resources to build a good apps. Nearly ever other app is much worse than the web site in a mobile browser because most business just don't have the resources to build good apps.
- ccouzens 4y ago
  The one time I installed Facebook I found it inferior because it was ironically less native than the website. Through the website photo uploads used my phone's native image picker which integrates with services I've chosen to use. The app used it's own image picker which was limited to photos that were saved to my phone.
- npteljes 4y ago
  It's what they make it to be. If they make a better app, then the app will be better. If they neglect the app and focus on the website, the website will be better.

gerash 4y ago

As a user I want performant and ephemeral software. That is, software that has performant UI and has access to all the raw hardware and does not need installation/uninstallation and is basically downloaded on demand and garbage collected after a while. Why aren't we there yet?

lucidguppy 4y ago

How does flutter fit into all this? Google doesn't want to have 3x teams for android, ios, and web...

eh9 4y ago

I started in the web and had to move to native when the feature gap between platforms got too great to ignore and customers started demanding native experiences. React Native made this a little easier, but it definitely did not mean “write once, run anywhere”. (It’s more like, write a half that runs everywhere and another half that’s split between your target platforms) After using RN a bunch, I’ve found there are times when it shines and other times when it’s best to defer to the native language, but I keep using RN because it reminds me most of what I love about the web: The best “write it once run anywhere” platform I’ve used to date.

d3nj4l 4y ago

All else aside, this: > When Apple was a niche PC maker, it needed the web as a way to help potential customers de-risk the purchase of luxury computers. While it enjoyed outsized influence, the Mac never had enough share to create a sufficiently large software ecosystem w/o the web. Just doesn’t track to me. The mac was a fairly popular native platform. Many early ios developers started out as mac developers. Macs were extremely viable for most professional users without the web.

PaulHoule 4y ago

Web > Mobile Web > App in that order. On my iPad the "web" just works, any "m." site just adds even more whitespace than web developers seem compelled to force on viewers and raises the font size to 3x bigger than the large type books at the public library. Web sites (say Reddit) have some banner that says it is better if you download the app, log in and all that bs, but you know it is not better for you it is better for them collecting data on you. But really how bad it is it? I spend as little time as possible with apps on my iPad, mostly i have 6 different apps so I can occasionally do something with the "internet of things". My take is that the web works just fine on mobile, it is PWA and push notifications which no users asked for, anyway. I mean, push notifications, does anybody really want to get more spam? The one thing I know is that everybody and his brother and his sister and all their cousins and their cousin's schoolteachers and on and on wants to send me more spam than I can handle so if Apple is saying "no spam please" isn't that fighting the good fight?

dmonitor 4y ago
http://i.reddit.com http://i.reddit.com still exists, thankfully, and is a million times better than the new one.

KingLancelot 4y ago

[dead]

amelius 4y ago

I'm waiting for the moment when you can just run an Android or iOS emulator inside the browser (through WASM, probably), and run any app you want on any platform, and safely.

open-source-ux 4y ago

Firefox released a mobile OS (Firefox OS) in 2013. The aim was to encourage app developers use open technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, open web APIs). Development of Firefox OS stopped in 2015. At the time I thought that Firefox was wasting resources on development on Firefox OS. But now I think I was wrong. Firefox could see the promise of a PWA (Progressive Web Apps) mobile future, but the tech was clumsy and immature. Perhaps Firefox OS was too early for the technology? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS

lern_too_spel 4y ago
They were wasting resources not because the technology didn't make sense but because the business model didn't make sense. There was no way they were going to get distribution when Android was also free and had revenue share to boot.

rvz 4y ago

We have waited years for alternatives like FirefoxOS, Ubuntu Phone, etc, and the other Linux phones to compete against the duopoly. Instead, these alternatives have decided to throw in the towel and gave up all by themselves with their vapourware (Ubuntu Phone) weak product offerings (Firefox OS) and the market just moved on and chose the duopoly instead. Perhaps they weren't competitive enough to be interesting to users which is why we have this situation in the first place. These alternatives tried and failed. The only functioning alternative that is still alive is SailfishOS by Jolla which even that is almost no where to be seen anywhere. It's almost as if they are not trying hard enough. The real winner here is Google which will go in the same route as Apple when they deploy Fuchsia on Chromebooks and Android phones which Chrome will essentially further dominate the web. Alternatives like Firefox have little to no chance at competing even with EU DMA which that just further entrenches Chrome's dominance.

fsflover 4y ago
> The only functioning alternative that is still alive is SailfishOS by Jolla As a happy owner of Librem 5 and Pinephone, I respectfully disagree.

BuckyBeaver 4y ago

"As soon as the Apple App Store (for iOS) became a thing, developers asked: why not web apps? Why go proprietary? Back in 2008, for that iPhone 3G launch with the App Store, it could have been argued that the web just wasn’t ready for it." I don't know where this guy was when the iPhone came out, but this is backward. Steve Jobs reportedly did not want true third-party applications on the iPhone, and Apple pushed Web apps hard. They argued strenuously that Web apps were just fine. Now... whether Jobs was convinced later, or the fact was that the tooling for native app development just wasn't ready... we all know where it ended up. But the author's revisionist history is bogus.

kevingadd 4y ago
The web really wasn't ready though. I was doing web platform work at the time and it simply was not capable of doing the stuff native could do, which is why the App Store was an inevitability.
- BuckyBeaver 4y ago
  I agree. That's why the author's assertions are completely bogus. Developers were saying "why not NATIVE," whereas he claims the opposite. Apple was saying "Web apps all the way!"
jshier 4y ago
Jobs didn't want apps at all but he was eventually convinced they were needed, late in the iPhone development cycle. So rather than announce the native tools early (they wouldn't ship for another year) they tried to sell web apps in the meantime. Typical Apple release process, even though it's detrimental to them and their users.
- BuckyBeaver 4y ago
  Yep. Thus my assertion that the author's claims are wrong. While I do resent a lot of Apple's lies and anti-user, anti-developer actions, I would give them a pass in this instance because they were inventing an industry-changing development ecosystem and they did so very, very well.

agentultra 4y ago

> If you want to build a native app across platforms, you’re either: > - Writing it as many times as platforms you want to support > - Using some middle-man software to write-once-compile-everywhere Weeeeeeeell, there's also a third option that a lot of game developers/engines use: write most of your code in cross-platform C/C++ as an object file and write platform-specific loaders that do the OS-specific bits to start your program, load your object file, and call your main entry point. It's not that bad. It's really the OS's that get nasty about adding more and more layers between our programs and the hardware they run on. Some of that is for good reason: ie security or debugging. But some aren't: vendor lock in, user tracking, backdoors.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mwcampbell 4y ago
A good UI that everyone can use isn't as simple as just directly drawing to the screen and handling input. You also have to handle things like accessibility that require heavy interaction with the OS.
- agentultra 4y ago
  Sure. There are OS APIs for these things and other toolkits for it. Browsers are fine and all but I don’t think they’re the only reasonable option in town for cross platform development.

skybrian 4y ago

"Snuff out" seems like clickbait. There's no way mobile browsers are going away. That's not the issue. Meanwhile, I've never used a Twitter, Mastodon, or Reddit mobile app, for example. Also, Android keeps disabling permissions on mobile apps I haven't used for months. There are a few mobile apps I use frequently. (Mostly from Google.) For everyone else, I'm not going to install your app.

dukoid 4y ago

While there are certainly political aspects, there are still technical issues that are hard to overcome. Palm has tried the "pure" Web-only approach and one of the main issues there was the inability to cache compiled code in a straightforward way -- the V8 compilation result is hard to untangle from the current context, partially due to the dynamic nature of the language -- leading to long app startup times. I hope that WebASM will finally fix this problem.

esprehn 4y ago
Modern v8 does on disk byte code caching, things have come a long way since Palm. In many cases PWAs have faster startup than native apps (also the on disk size of a PWA is usually an order of magnitude smaller than a similar native app.) https://v8.dev/blog/code-caching-for-devs https://v8.dev/blog/code-caching-for-devs https://github.com/thlorenz/v8-perf/blob/master/snapshots%2Bcode-caching.md#chromes-use-of-code-caching https://github.com/thlorenz/v8-perf/blob/master/snapshots%2B...

PaulHoule 4y ago

PWA should have been killed by Google long ago like Stadia, OnHub, YouTube Go, Android things, etc. It is fun to write a demo in a service worker where you draw a PNG of the Mandelbrot set but for the use case where a web application caches aggressively, preloads, works offline you'd need a framework running in the web browser to implement the cache and store the documents in the web browser -- the persistent storage options are not that great. I wish they'd provided some way to hook into the cache mechanism of the browser directly. With a good framework, application is going to tell the framework how it wants to handle loading and maintenance. Back in the day Netscape 4 was bundled with Netscape Netcaster https://money.cnn.com/1997/04/15/technology/netscape_netcaster/ https://money.cnn.com/1997/04/15/technology/netscape_netcast... which was supposed to spool an updating static news web site to your cache based on declarative configuration. They should bring it back! I'm not against what they are trying to do, but the implementation is lacking. From the privacy point of view service workers are yet another way you can be tracked, or by which a web application can be run "in the matrix".

jaytag 4y ago

I'd be more concerned about the mobile web if the web weren't such hostile ground for end users to host themselves. Web solutions are by and large difficult for end users to stand up, and just as difficult to compose thanks to the proliferation of standards that "just" require certain responses at certain well known paths, specific markup, and the like.

rocket_surgeron 4y ago

Mobile web designers are doing a much better job than Apple or Google could ever dream of when it comes to creating horrifically unusable mobile web sites and applications. It’s almost like they’re in cahoots. When they are so bad, either maliciously or not, that one would rather download an app or wait until a desktop browser is available, one has to wonder.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jhanschoo 4y ago

On an extreme tangent; it's, its follows the punctuation rules for singular 3rd person pronouns it's is a contraction of it+is; e.g. it's good = it is good, c.f. he's good = he is good, she's good = she is good. its is the possessive; e.g. its mouth is open, c.f. his mouth is open, her mouth is open. (ours, yours, theirs) The consistent misuse of punctuation had been pretty jarring.

lawgimenez 4y ago

Author do realized that more than half of the world's population are still using outdated low cost Android phones thus using web technologies is just not possible. For example, I had a project last year where the app will communicate via Bluetooth to a portable printer to be used for the factory workers. I'm not sure if the web technologies can handle this.