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> I don't believe this at all. The barrier of entry around building iOS apps is small enough that it pretty much only applies to small developers. What that bar

> I don't believe this at all. The barrier of entry around building iOS apps is small enough that it pretty much only applies to small developers. What that barrier does is it means that fewer 1-2 person Open Source projects offer replacements for those native apps. Well, a lot of sites that probably would spam an app if they had one, don't, because they don't have one, for one thing. Also see every single PWA discussion on here for an endless stream of PWA boosters complaining about how it's too hard and/or expensive to write native apps. Apparently it is an effective barrier, if we believe them. It's the entire reason they want PWAs on iOS—to remove the barriers to deploying apps to iOS. > But any company that has the resources to track you and cares enough to get you to install an app, also has the resources to make one. It's not about tracking, it's about every single site on the web popping yet another annoying prompt nobody wants. That's already awful. Most of the native-app installation ones are spammy crap as it is. 99+% of the PWA prompts would be, and they'd be everywhere. > > Battery life and performance. Except for the ones that shouldn't be apps of any kind > Opinion me, most applications (calendars, email, text editors) are just interactive documents. People have this clear line in their head of the difference between an app and a website, but my alarm clock is not special in the way that Blender is. My alarm clock is an interactive document, it could be a PWA and it wouldn't be a problem at all for my battery life. In theory webtech can make semi-reasonably-slim "apps" for things like this. In practice—input latency, rendering performance, memory use, idle processor use, load time, and battery life, are between noticeably and hilariously worse in practically every case. I'm also a little confused about the alarm clock thing. My phone just... has an alarm clock. As a built-in native app. My Android phones did too, back when I was on Android, though they were disturbingly unreliable (as were the ones on my wife's phones, before I got her to switch)—is that the motivation for the focus on needing 3rd party alarm clock apps? As far as ability to set timers at the system level, sure, a PWA should probably be able to do that, I guess (a web site 1,000% should not). Like, at this point I'd consider a phone without a quite-good built in alarm clock simply defective. And this, I cannot relate to: > My notetaking app on my phone is an interactive document. It thinks it is an app, but it's not -- it's an interactive document that has been made into a native app because it doesn't have reliable offline storage otherwise. My note taking app's... not what you're describing. It's an app. Is has lots of features that an "interactive document" wouldn't, unless that term's so broad that it's just a synonym for "computer program". It also performs a ton better than web note-taking "apps" I've tried, which is part of why I use it instead of a web-based option—that and the features, stability, and lack of jank. Hell, it performs better than most featureful document-editing apps I'm aware of period (unless you dig back into pretty distant computing history), and certainly any webtech-based ones, even if it were in fact just a shell for manipulating an "interactive document"—even if that's true, yes, I absolutely want an "app" for that. > My contention around mobile devices for a while has been that a lot of websites don't need to transmit data off of my device at all, and it would be better for everyone if they didn't have a backend. Whether that makes them a website or app, I don't know, that's semantics to me. Regardless, the point stands that they should have capabilities available to them (alarms, scheduled notifications, pin-to-homescreen, caching resources) that allow them to be used offline. As far as this goes, it's worth noting that native apps on iOS have some important privacy-preserving restrictions that I doubt they'll be able to replicate for PWAs, because they're review-enforced, not enforced (because, not enforceable) by sandboxing or other automated measures. Fingerprinting the device? Prohibited for apps (long prohibited—that goes way back). Basically impossible to enforce without review, though, unless you cut access to features and hardware down to almost nothing (ahem). The cross-app tracking, the prohibition of which has (so very delightfully) made Facebook extremely upset? Unenforceable without review. For that reason I'm pretty leery of giving the Web platform any more space to move around in and spy on me than it's already got, and that includes further hardware or OS-feature access. This situation may differ on Android, where it may indeed be the case that apps are unequivocally worse for privacy than websites/webapps—it is, at a minimum, not so clear this is the case on iOS.

danShumway 4y ago
> Well, a lot of sites that probably would spam an app if they had one, don't, because they don't have one, for one thing. This is my contention; the apps that want to spam you about this have resources to build apps. The people who don't are the people you see complaining on HN -- they're not companies. > It's not about tracking, it's about every single site on the web popping yet another annoying prompt nobody wants. Then I don't get the problem, because this only applies to PWAs you install. If you're worried about prompts asking you to install a PWA, then... that also is a UX problem, it has nothing to do with capabilities. Both Android and iOS I believe include mechanisms to block websites from over-spamming about PWA installation. The mechanisms could be better, but that's down to the fact that both Android and iOS have kind of a bad starting model for how permissions should work; apps shouldn't really be able to ask for anything without user prompting. ---- > In practice—input latency, rendering performance, memory use, idle processor use, load time, and battery life, are between noticeably and hilariously worse in practically every case. If you say so? My feeling is that most overhead for most apps is the result of background logic. I'm not sure that how quickly you can render a DOM list matters much for battery life on average. Which is part of why background scheduling is so important, so you can get stuff to stop running in the background. I'll also point out that most of the native apps on most people's iPhones include webviews already; they're good enough performance to use natively. Yes there are apps where you might really care about this, yes there are apps that I don't want running in a webview. But again, think of some examples here. Is it really a problem for you that Wordle isn't a native app? Do you think that's impacting your battery to any noticeable degree? Do you boot up Wordle and get frustrated by the input latency? I don't know that I would use a webapp to replace Emacs (although I'll point out that Emacs also suffers quite a lot of latency problems because of its threading/rendering model and because of how it handles syntax highlighting, so I'm not sure it is actually competitive with web performance). But the point is, that's an environment where I'm doing programming on a keyboard. For a notetaking app on a phone? Is keyboard latency even going to be noticeable to you if you're using a swipe keyboard that sends input word-by-word? ---- > I'm also a little confused about the alarm clock thing. My phone just... has an alarm clock. Maybe iOS's native alarm is better, but the native alarm clock on Android is significantly less powerful than I would like. It lacks the ability to: - Schedule alarms more than a week in advance (no, I don't want to use a calendar for that) - Delete alarms immediately after they go off - Snooze alarms for variable rates of time per-alarm (there's just a global setting) - Select music/sounds randomly from a list (very helpful for ADHD, consistent sounds get filtered out, so I have to constantly vary what my alarms sound like). - And a couple of other things, including the ability to easily export/import alarms, etc... Again, maybe iOS is a lot more powerful in that regard, I don't know. ---- > The cross-app tracking, the prohibition of which has (so very delightfully) made Facebook extremely upset? Unenforceable without review. It's funny you bring this up, because this is absolutely enforceable in a browser and is already enforced in Safari. Firefox also has fantastic support for domain separation (Chrome as usual is the exception). Facebook was upset that Apple was bringing the native app up to vaguely similar standards to what Safari already has. Seriously, the reason why Facebook tries to get you to install a native app is because native apps are easier to track and insert advertising into. If the web was easier to track, Facebook would offer you a PWA. I don't understand where people get this idea that the web is easier to track than native, I don't think that's ever been the case at any point, including on iOS. The best argument I can make on this is that making PWAs impossible to use on iOS means that Apple can personally vet all of the code that runs on your device, and that's just not a good security model. It doesn't scale well, as much as Apple would like to say that it does. Yes, Apple can't manually go after web apps that fingerprint you (well, they could, it just would be very obviously tempting antitrust attacks). But even so, I want to make this very clear -- even if you are on iOS, do not install Facebook. Don't install Twitter. Use their mobile website through iOS Safari. And install an adblocker; I don't think Safari's adblocker API is powerful enough to block ads/trackers on Facebook in specific, but it will work on a number of other webapps that you use. And bonus points, when apps are annoying you on the web, you can do something about it. You can intercept and block/modify app behavior. Sites like Facebook will make that hard, but... I mean ostensibly you're worried about spam from ordinary sites, and anti-annoyance blocklists work fine on them. Look, I like the privacy stuff that iOS is doing. I like that notifications here require you to install the PWA, that's a good decision. And I love that iOS is adding more permission structures; better file portals are great, more app separation is great, I love the work they're doing around permission prompts. But iOS is catching up to where the web is, it is not surpassing it. The web is a terrible minefield of tracking, and native ecosystems are worse, and iOS is now very notably and very impressively catching up to where the web is. But if you think a company wants to track you (Twitter/Facebook/whatever) even if you're on iOS, you should not treat the native app as safer than the website.

danShumway 4y ago

> Well, a lot of sites that probably would spam an app if they had one, don't, because they don't have one, for one thing. This is my contention; the apps that want to spam you about this have resources to build apps. The people who don't are the people you see complaining on HN -- they're not companies. > It's not about tracking, it's about every single site on the web popping yet another annoying prompt nobody wants. Then I don't get the problem, because this only applies to PWAs you install. If you're worried about prompts asking you to install a PWA, then... that also is a UX problem, it has nothing to do with capabilities. Both Android and iOS I believe include mechanisms to block websites from over-spamming about PWA installation. The mechanisms could be better, but that's down to the fact that both Android and iOS have kind of a bad starting model for how permissions should work; apps shouldn't really be able to ask for anything without user prompting. ---- > In practice—input latency, rendering performance, memory use, idle processor use, load time, and battery life, are between noticeably and hilariously worse in practically every case. If you say so? My feeling is that most overhead for most apps is the result of background logic. I'm not sure that how quickly you can render a DOM list matters much for battery life on average. Which is part of why background scheduling is so important, so you can get stuff to stop running in the background. I'll also point out that most of the native apps on most people's iPhones include webviews already; they're good enough performance to use natively. Yes there are apps where you might really care about this, yes there are apps that I don't want running in a webview. But again, think of some examples here. Is it really a problem for you that Wordle isn't a native app? Do you think that's impacting your battery to any noticeable degree? Do you boot up Wordle and get frustrated by the input latency? I don't know that I would use a webapp to replace Emacs (although I'll point out that Emacs also suffers quite a lot of latency problems because of its threading/rendering model and because of how it handles syntax highlighting, so I'm not sure it is actually competitive with web performance). But the point is, that's an environment where I'm doing programming on a keyboard. For a notetaking app on a phone? Is keyboard latency even going to be noticeable to you if you're using a swipe keyboard that sends input word-by-word? ---- > I'm also a little confused about the alarm clock thing. My phone just... has an alarm clock. Maybe iOS's native alarm is better, but the native alarm clock on Android is significantly less powerful than I would like. It lacks the ability to: - Schedule alarms more than a week in advance (no, I don't want to use a calendar for that) - Delete alarms immediately after they go off - Snooze alarms for variable rates of time per-alarm (there's just a global setting) - Select music/sounds randomly from a list (very helpful for ADHD, consistent sounds get filtered out, so I have to constantly vary what my alarms sound like). - And a couple of other things, including the ability to easily export/import alarms, etc... Again, maybe iOS is a lot more powerful in that regard, I don't know. ---- > The cross-app tracking, the prohibition of which has (so very delightfully) made Facebook extremely upset? Unenforceable without review. It's funny you bring this up, because this is absolutely enforceable in a browser and is already enforced in Safari. Firefox also has fantastic support for domain separation (Chrome as usual is the exception). Facebook was upset that Apple was bringing the native app up to vaguely similar standards to what Safari already has. Seriously, the reason why Facebook tries to get you to install a native app is because native apps are easier to track and insert advertising into. If the web was easier to track, Facebook would offer you a PWA. I don't understand where people get this idea that the web is easier to track than native, I don't think that's ever been the case at any point, including on iOS. The best argument I can make on this is that making PWAs impossible to use on iOS means that Apple can personally vet all of the code that runs on your device, and that's just not a good security model. It doesn't scale well, as much as Apple would like to say that it does. Yes, Apple can't manually go after web apps that fingerprint you (well, they could, it just would be very obviously tempting antitrust attacks). But even so, I want to make this very clear -- even if you are on iOS, do not install Facebook. Don't install Twitter. Use their mobile website through iOS Safari. And install an adblocker; I don't think Safari's adblocker API is powerful enough to block ads/trackers on Facebook in specific, but it will work on a number of other webapps that you use. And bonus points, when apps are annoying you on the web, you can do something about it. You can intercept and block/modify app behavior. Sites like Facebook will make that hard, but... I mean ostensibly you're worried about spam from ordinary sites, and anti-annoyance blocklists work fine on them. Look, I like the privacy stuff that iOS is doing. I like that notifications here require you to install the PWA, that's a good decision. And I love that iOS is adding more permission structures; better file portals are great, more app separation is great, I love the work they're doing around permission prompts. But iOS is catching up to where the web is, it is not surpassing it. The web is a terrible minefield of tracking, and native ecosystems are worse, and iOS is now very notably and very impressively catching up to where the web is. But if you think a company wants to track you (Twitter/Facebook/whatever) even if you're on iOS, you should not treat the native app as safer than the website.