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In theory I agree with you. In practice, poorly ported web apps often fail in various ways. Things like content covered by the keyboard, or the layout breaking

In theory I agree with you. In practice, poorly ported web apps often fail in various ways. Things like content covered by the keyboard, or the layout breaking when you rotate the device, or random other stuff that results from a lack of testing. It's what happens when developers don't use the device they're targeting.

deleted 3y ago
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derefr 3y ago
The funny thing is that "no porting" is often a better experience than "half-assed porting." Which is to say, if all you do is wrap some late-90s/early-2000s never-been-mobile-optimized .html in Cordova — then when you open the app, you just get a regular webview, that shows you the same old webpage. It probably starts out too small, because it was laid out for PCs; but you can still pinch-to-zoom, rotate to change the viewport, or whatever else you do to regular websites on a mobile web browser. By default, all those web-supporting browser features are there, in every webview. Or, to put that another way: by default, Cordova's webview is just showing a webpage using the same logic a browser does; and by default, browsers show webpages as webpages, rather than as pseudo-apps. It's only when someone has started down the mobile optimization journey, and starts embedding meta viewport user-scalable=no et al, that you start to see these wrapped apps suffering from all the UX jank you're talking about. If you've got an HTML4 webpage, you don't need to test it specifically wrapped in Cordova, to know what it will look like when Cordova attempts to render that HTML4 webpage. It'll look like it looks — and work like it works — when a web browser on the same OS loads that webpage. And you can test that just by loading the same webpage in one of those browsers (or through one of the many SaaS sites that do so by proxy.) Or even forego testing entirely, if you know that people were already successfully using that HTML4 webpage from the browsers on their phones. A "raw" port won't change anything about that experience. If you do decide to start down the road of trying to mobile-optimize the webpage, though — then yeah, you're gonna see a lot of jank, and will want some heavyweight local simulators to debug that jank.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

derefr 3y ago

The funny thing is that "no porting" is often a better experience than "half-assed porting." Which is to say, if all you do is wrap some late-90s/early-2000s never-been-mobile-optimized .html in Cordova — then when you open the app, you just get a regular webview, that shows you the same old webpage. It probably starts out too small, because it was laid out for PCs; but you can still pinch-to-zoom, rotate to change the viewport, or whatever else you do to regular websites on a mobile web browser. By default, all those web-supporting browser features are there, in every webview. Or, to put that another way: by default, Cordova's webview is just showing a webpage using the same logic a browser does; and by default, browsers show webpages as webpages, rather than as pseudo-apps. It's only when someone has started down the mobile optimization journey, and starts embedding meta viewport user-scalable=no et al, that you start to see these wrapped apps suffering from all the UX jank you're talking about. If you've got an HTML4 webpage, you don't need to test it specifically wrapped in Cordova, to know what it will look like when Cordova attempts to render that HTML4 webpage. It'll look like it looks — and work like it works — when a web browser on the same OS loads that webpage. And you can test that just by loading the same webpage in one of those browsers (or through one of the many SaaS sites that do so by proxy.) Or even forego testing entirely, if you know that people were already successfully using that HTML4 webpage from the browsers on their phones. A "raw" port won't change anything about that experience. If you do decide to start down the road of trying to mobile-optimize the webpage, though — then yeah, you're gonna see a lot of jank, and will want some heavyweight local simulators to debug that jank.