14 ms·

Browsers are the most likely disruptor of the mobile duopoly

300 points by cdme 3y ago

mpol 3y ago
Sure, the duopoly of app stores and browsers as a disruptor is a big story. But can I take offense of all this "The biggest story"? I see it so often, especially here on HN, and it feels overly dramatic. Maybe even self-centered, like; "this is the truth", where somebody went too far in some kind of cool-aid (of the wrong kind). It is not as awful as conspiracy theories, they are even more awful, but the feeling goes in the same direction.
tallowen 3y ago
I am surprised that part of Mozilla's never introduced an Android launcher for progressive web apps. Given that they already have Firefox on Android and their history with FirefoxOS, I expected this to be a key lever to get app/website developers to consider this as an option. Are there barriers such as performance or API issues (e.g. double click behaviors) that prevent the webmanifest and other approaches from gaining traction here?
- sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago
  Bad leadership + weak board = lost decade.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ProcNetDev 3y ago
  AFAIK, they are refusing to implement BLE in Firefox(https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674737 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674737) saying that, "implementing it is harmful to the web." Pretty hard to have a PWA future, if you can't access standard app APIs. Seems like it would require a big mindset change for Mozilla to get on board with PWAs.
  - ff2400t 3y ago
    Their official position cites security as the reason they haven't implemented it yet. https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - JimDabell 3y ago
      There’s a stack of Blink-only Google specifications that people are pushing as “standard” that are anything but. Both Apple and Mozilla reject them on privacy or security grounds, then get criticised as being “behind” (or in Apple’s case, “deliberately holding back the web”). No, a specification created and implemented unilaterally by Google is not a standard.
      - charcircuit 3y ago
        Most standards start by being implemented by one browser. I would rather a standard exist based off a real implementation than one thrown out of an ivory tower.
        ff2400t 3y ago
        The whole point of standards is that there should be multiple implementations that can support it. Now I do agree with your point on that standards should be based on feedback from implementations but as the above comment said, this is just google making adding features and making standard documents to shift blame on other browser for not implementing them.
        charcircuit 3y ago
        To be fair where are the other browser's proposals for giving apps the capabilities they need? Browsers should be shamed for not making an effort to support common use cases that apps need.
- ff2400t 3y ago
  I am curious what do you mean by Launcher here. Firefox Allows installing app to your android laucher home screen and you can add any website as a shortcut to the homescreen.
njroute22 3y ago
Another angle is - "tech reporters" don't want to touch this because some mysterious blacklisting would result and their digital life would slowly come crumbling down. They're afraid to ruffle feathers.
- dwaite 3y ago
  No real justification for conspiracy theories. We have already seen a company fail when betting on PWA to fill in gaps in native app support for their platform - it was called Windows Phone.
idopmstuff 3y ago
> The implication is clear: browsers unchained can do to mobile what the web did to desktop, where more than 70% of daily "jobs to be done" happen on the web. This was an actual debate in the early days of app stores. Facebook was the most prominent company that decided to go with an HTML5 app instead of a native one. Doing so was one of the biggest strategic mistakes they've ever made. Zuck's words, not mine. (https://www.engadget.com/2012-09-11-zuckerberg-html-5-facebook-mobile-app-mistake.html https://www.engadget.com/2012-09-11-zuckerberg-html-5-facebo...). Web apps were slower, had issues dealing with the various browsers and saw less use. It doesn't seem like the author has done any real research here.
- qgin 3y ago
  There's no technical reason this needs to be true though. It's wild that I can use a full-featured spreadsheet instantly on the web on my laptop, but on my phone someone wants me to download a 100mb binary to order a pizza.
  - EA-3167 3y ago
    I've always assumed it was by design, because you can't use ad blockers or privacy addons in an app.
  - outworlder 3y ago
    These days they will ask you to download 100MB of JS, CSS, HTML and assets to order the same pizza.
    - rezmason 3y ago
      That is a real problem. But if that problem manifests in web and native software alike, then neither the web nor the app stores directly cause it, right?
  - Eridrus 3y ago
    "My highly abstract cross-platform framework must be as fast as native code" is not a sane view on this. A tonne of effort has gone into making spreadsheets work on the web; both in the browsers as well as the spreadsheet apps themselves. The fact that the web works as well as it does is a huge feat of engineering, but in no way indicative of there being no technical reason that native apps can be better.
qgin 3y ago
It's not outside the realm of possibility for web apps to have as good of an experience as binary apps for most use cases. But Apple has no motivation to make "the good stuff" easily available to web developers. Letting a webapp capable webpage have an in-page "install this app" button that added it to the home screen would wipe out 50% of app store usage. But as it is, as an "add to home screen" option on the share menu of a webpage, which very few have noticed or understand the meaning of... it keeps web apps from taking off.
- steve1977 3y ago
  Web apps on Chrome suck compared to native desktop apps on both Windows and macoS, so I don’t see how this is Apple‘s fault really.
  - postalrat 3y ago
    Yet somehow most native apps people use are either: a web browser, something built with a web browser.
    - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
      Looking at Windows, we’ve got MS Office, File Explorer, Photoshop, Visual Studio, System admin/utilities, Notepad, Paint, Audacity, and so on… If all people actually used were just Facebook and Google Docs then Chromebooks would be far outselling Windows laptops; instead they’re just mildly competetive. I won’t deny that “the web”, as a platform (especially Chromium) presents a compelling platform to which a good chunk of those apps could be ported (especially the apps which don’t need low-level or low-latency hardware interfaces - but I think you’re underselling the value, and necessity, of things using Win32+WDM/NTDDK instead of HTML+JS.
    - steve1977 3y ago
      And that is very sad.
- wharvle 3y ago
  > It's not outside the realm of possibility for web apps to have as good of an experience as binary apps for most use cases. But Apple has no motivation to make "the good stuff" easily available to web developers. How’s Apple making web apps bad on literally every platform?
thaumasiotes 3y ago
Well, I can say why I don't expect coverage of this. As far as I know, mobile OSes already allow the user to navigate to whatever web page they want. There's nothing to unblock.
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
Because they want to make sure Microsoft/X gets the priority, so they can pretend we have an "open market" ;)
amadeuspagel 3y ago
> This, in turn, will enable competitors to replace app stores with directories of Progressive Web Apps. > Work is also underway to give competing browsers a chance to facilitate PWAs that can install other PWAs. Web App Stores would then become a real possibility through browsers that support them, and we should expect that regulatory and legislative interventions will facilitate this in the near future. Removed from the need to police security (browsers have that covered) and handle distribution (websites update themselves), PWA app stores like store.app can become honest-to-goodness app management surfaces that can safely facilitate discovery and sync. It's ironic that this article criticises tech media for sleeping on web apps and focusing on app store competition only to envision Web App Stores. There's no need for app stores on the web. We already have discovery (Hacker News) and search (Google). I could imagine a subreddit specifically for web apps, but is even that necessary?
- CharlesW 3y ago
  Additionally, it's not like Big Tech is somehow preventing PWApp Stores from being a thing. They're already a thing. https://store.app/ https://store.app/
  - judah 3y ago
    The author mentions PWA stores like store.app, and some shortcomings: > PWA app stores like Appscope and store.app exist, but they're hobbled by gatekeepers that have denied competing browsers access to APIs that could turn PWA directories into real contenders.
    - CharlesW 3y ago
      The author is simply wrong in this case. To make sure I was giving him the benefit of the doubt, I just went to store.app and added Microsoft Loop to my Home Screen in about 5 seconds. It was easier and faster than installing a native app!
      - postalrat 3y ago
Zetobal 3y ago
Two different mobile oss tried exactly this and they both failed. Three if you count webOS from palm.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Even Apple tried it and they failed and scrambled to launch their own app store after everyone started jailbreaking and using Cydia apps that were so much better than the web apps Apple wanted iPhone users to use :) And in the end Cydia made Apple develop its biggest money maker ever!
- rchaud 3y ago
  "Failure" here means they didn't manage to join the oligopoly themselves, and went bust instead, as network effects are a zero-sum game. By that metric, every flavour of Linux has also failed. Yet Linux is also heavily used and actively developed, serving an important purpose where Windows/Mac were not suitable. It helps that computer/server hardware and components are modular and not as tied to a particular OS as phones are.
  - Zetobal 3y ago
    No failed means that the corporations behind them have gone bust or abandoned these osses.
KaiserPro 3y ago
> This, in turn, will enable competitors to replace app stores with directories of Progressive Web Apps. The time for PWAs was in about 1998, when WAP was a thing. Much as I would love a universal bytecode that would allow mobile phones to achieve this, PWAs are not the route to get there. They are a mess of custom, poorly documented and ever changing layers of web bits. Yes, web assembly exists, yes its about 75% the speed of native. and its not as easy to develop for. I also don't see why phone makers will want to make it that easy. Unless they are forced to provide parity for their APIS, it'll always be second best to native. But, for the end users, they will look at PWAs and think: "fuck, this has got slow, and its eating my battery" you can spot the react native apps when you use them(yes, yes I know its not entirely the same) We have been lucky on desktop/laptop that we have added 5 zeros to the available compute, memory, network and GPU capacity. This allows a browser to run slack at the same speed as MIRC, from 2002. You don't have that luxury on mobile. You are limited by battery capacity, unless we suddenly find a way to 100x battery density, it'll be like that for a while. That being said, the work on breaking the app store dominance is welcome. 25% tax on development is taking the piss. Obviously the "point" of the walled garden was to provide security to the end user, however google fucked that right up, so now its obviously just a cash cow. But, I want a way to side load apps, I want a second market place. I don't want fucking PWAs on my phone.
- fwsgonzo 3y ago
  75% is a stretch. The last time I tested it, it was ~50% of my native program despite my best efforts, with AOT. Which is still good btw, just not as constantly advertised.
  - KaiserPro 3y ago
    My colleague has been doing some stonking work with it, he claims its about 70% as fast, I was rounding up for safety!
    - fwsgonzo 3y ago
      That's pretty good if you ask me! I was using an image encoder that had a WebAssembly SIMD CMake option, which is nice, but it only had half of native performance. I suppose it will continue to improve over time.
aredox 3y ago
PWA are not as good as apps - and not because of OS vendors restricting APIs. Honestly this is one of Doctorow's weakest arguments - PWA are part of the enshittification of tech: poor substitutes to full-fledged performant applications, that you never own, that "phone home" all the time, always dependent on someone else... I can get working binaries of old closed source software of yesteryear; I can't get working "open-source" webpages of five years ago, a maze of calls to different web ressources that the Internet Archive couldn't cache correctly, to display fully and correctly.
- tazu 3y ago
  Agreed, this is why I'm much more excited about the possibility of sideloading native apps.
- vitiral 3y ago
  > Honestly this is one of Doctorow's weakest arguments This isn't Doctorow. I went and searched, here's the article I think you're referencing https://doctorow.medium.com/web-apps-could-de-monopolize-mobile-devices-57e8a2d4bfb2 https://doctorow.medium.com/web-apps-could-de-monopolize-mob...
  - radiospiel 3y ago
    I think they refer to https://archive.org/details/GeneralComputation https://archive.org/details/GeneralComputation
ggm 3y ago
About the only time I can tell some app is a web app is when my password keystore tells me it can fill in my credentials.
- pimlottc 3y ago
  Native iOS apps can work with password managers too: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/password_autofill/about_the_password_autofill_workflow https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/password_...
  - ggm 3y ago
    The web pages for bitwarden about integration with apps on android doesn't explicitly say "it's pwa only" so maybe I misapprehended.
camillomiller 3y ago
Because this is a non story, at most an analysis or opinion piece, based on assumptions that are not founded on report-worthy facts or specific sources. That’s all for “just another guy with a blog on the internet who thinks he knows how journalism works”.
- esprehn 3y ago
  The author is hardly "just another guy": https://infrequently.org/about-me/ https://infrequently.org/about-me/ You don't have to agree with him, but he's certainly qualified to write things like this.
  - camillomiller 3y ago
    If anything, it's the opposite: >> Hi, I'm Alex Russell, a Microsoft Partner PM on the Edge team and Blink API OWNER. It is my professional mission to build a web that works for everyone. Given his conflict of interest, I don't see anyone who would publish this story as more than an educated Op Ed.
softfalcon 3y ago
> Browsers are the most likely disruptor of the mobile duopoly but you'd never know it reading Wired or The Verge. I'm confused, The Verge has several articles about this hubbub of anti-trust this, Epic v Apple lawsuit that, EU forcing browser choice for iOS, and now Epic v Google and the recent win. There has also been tons of discussion about web apps, new app stores, etc in the comments. How exactly are they ignoring this story? It feels like it's been at the forefront of their coverage for months now.
- dingnuts 3y ago
  >I'm confused, The Verge has several articles about this hubbub of anti-trust this, Epic v Apple lawsuit that, and now Epic v Google and the recent win right but none of those articles talk about how the -browser- could disrupt this duopoly >There has been tons of discussion about web apps, new app stores, etc that's what the article is about. these articles tend to talk about new app stores, but not much else. anecdotally I agree with the author's observation about this. the only time I've heard about PWAs it was from other nerds, not the news media.
  - softfalcon 3y ago
    I see what you mean. To be honest though, both Wired and The Verge are only really playing catch up to the current zeitgeist. If and when PWA's start being a big thing, we'll see articles show up about it. Even then, it'll only be when some major company makes a splash and being a PWA is the killer feature. I don't really see The Verge and Wired pushing stories early. It's not that they're asleep, it's just that they're grabbing the stories from social media, converting it into press format, planning articles about it, then releasing. They're not at the forefront of tech, becoming buddy buddy with the devs, getting that inside scoop. They're just doing broader coverage for the masses interested in tech. Anyone deep into this stuff is already subscribed to various subreddits, reading HN, nerding out in dev Discords, or having arguments on Twitter.
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      What is so up-to-the-minute about PWAs? They were somebody’s side project from 8 years ago which Google inexplicably didn’t kill. Despite controlling the browser, Google never came out with a reliable and sensible scheme to store files so it’s just another own goal like Windows Phone.
PaulHoule 3y ago
Progressive Web Apps? So I can get spammed by spam spamifications? Or so you can attempt to cache some files by building a Rube Goldberg machine on top of a Rube Goldberg machine? It would be one thing if they gave you some policy control over the browser’s caching engine or let you download a ZIP file and then look up any file you want in it. But as it is it is another terrible Google side project like Compute Engine or Kubernetes or OKRs that they tried to foist on the world…. At least this time people had some sense and said “Nein Danke” like they do in Germany. What’s tragic about it is that Google controls a freaking web browser and could have come out with something sensible but not we got a side project API to make a fake web server but no simple and reliable storage mechanism to go with it. … and we got an astroturf campaign second only to TripleByte sponsoring thousands of blog posts on how “hiring is broken” demanding that Apple implement a side-project API on Safari.
etchalon 3y ago
Web applications are only ever capable of being "as good" as native apps could be a handful of years ago. It's a moving target.
kgdiem 3y ago
Here’s something that’s kind of obvious but only occurred to me the other day — if you sell apps for $3 or less, the App Store fee costs about the same or less than anyone else is going to charge under the small business program. Unfortunately my next app is going to cost $9.99
charcircuit 3y ago
It's the opposite. The mobile duopoly disrupted the web platform. Which disrupted the desktop platform which came before it. All of these platforms are still here today and they are competing with each other.
katzgrau 3y ago
> Reporters and editors aren't software engineers, so the potential of browser competition can remain understandably opaque. There you go. As a virtual unknown who has fought the good fight against Google and has tried to help make reporters aware of tech/services they hadn’t considered before - well, some people have a hard time thinking about what they’re not used to or don’t initially understand.
aj7 3y ago
One loser could be Microsoft. I found, almost inadvertently, that when Apple essentially bricked Drive on my 2013 MacBook Pro, I could open a new Chrome window (not actually necessary, but neater workflow) and simply run Drive and Sheets there. This was a big eye opener. Especially when it works perfectly on an iPad in an emergency.
csixty4 3y ago
I just spent a year and a half building and rolling out a web version of a popular native app. We had to make a lot of compromises to get it out the door. Native apps can block screenshots. Apple doesn't always like it, but you can plead your case to the reviewers. Web apps don't have an API to prevent screenshotting or to know when one is about to be taken and hide their contents. This is important to protect privacy (nudes) and people have come to expect it. Know what's interesting? Screenshot protection is available for Encrypted Media Extension (DRM) video if you have Hollywood $$$. Browsers (on desktop) also have dev tools built in. They make it easy to download any image you can see even if we put all the right click prevention scripts and CSS hacks in the world in place. Imagine having to explain to the privacy protection team that you can't disable dev tools for your site when that's not even an issue on native mobile without extra steps. Those are platform wide issues, and I seriously doubt the people setting web standards are going to be on board with new standards that keep information (even very, very personal information) from being free. I've championed the web since 1996. And PWAs may be fine to replace some basic e-commerce and information apps. But the platform needs to make some changes before it can totally replace native apps.
- wilsonnb3 3y ago
  > Native apps can block screenshots > This is important to protect privacy (nudes) and people have come to expect it. Considering you can just, ya know, take a picture of it, this doesn't seem important at all.
  - smelendez 3y ago
    That was my first thought too. My next thoughts were: - it protects the platform, to some extent, by reducing the number of unwanted screenshots - it sets a social norm that taking screenshots is unwanted and makes the screenshot taker look extra creepy if they share the image with anyone - if a platform provides screenshot blocking, and users (who have all seen pictures of one screen taken from another device) value that protection and make decisions about what to post based on it, the company should think long and hard before deploying a version that breaks that assumption
doctornoble 3y ago
So the most like the disruptor of the mobile duopoly of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS are Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari. Got it.
- mmis1000 3y ago
  It's basically why Apple sabotage safari so hard to the point that 'doing anything more than a static page on safari requires tons of workarounds'. (And also why you can only use webkit on iphone)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
capybara_2020 3y ago
I doubt browsers are coming back. Companies love apps. They get complete control over what you do(No easy way of viewing source, no modifying the frontend etc) and they can suck up all your data. Plus browsers are are lagging in terms of say animations and probably always will with the need to build consensus before a new ideas is added. Then adoption can take years.
vcryan 3y ago
Amazing post
hobobaggins 3y ago
Not if Apple has its way. They've consistently regressed, failed to implement standards, implemented them brokenly, delayed/delayed/delayed, stated that a feature was bad for privacy|security|performance, etc. Just an endless stream of roadblocks. For example: photo and file uploads (yes, really! remember "iOS doesn't have a filesystem, so no uploads" which really damaged craigslist because Browse didn't work on iPhone for many years), webrtc, PWA add-to-home, sticky/fixed positioning, scrolling through notch (it worked, and then it didn't), service workers, push notifications, and so much more than I can't even remember (maybe someone else can list their favorites). Even when eventually we got the features, they were often broken in order to keep pushing people into the App Store. Does the author REALLY believe that Apple won't instantly drop support for any feature that could seriously disrupt the App Store? Not on your life.
- judge2020 3y ago
  > Browse didn't work on iPhone for many years The web API always allowed you to choose photos from your camera roll.
  - hobobaggins 3y ago
    No, it did not, not until iOS 6 (!!) And Steve Jobs ensured that Flash uploaders popular at the time could never work on the iPhone, either. Example: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/4104/is-it-possible-to-upload-files-to-a-website-from-safari-on-iphone https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/4104/is-it-possibl... Ironically, Microsoft had tried to kill the web off with Internet Explorer just a few years before, but no one noticed what Apple was doing, because they did it so well... they got 400,000 and then a million apps in their app store, completely bypassing the web altogether. And as evidenced by your comment on this very technical forum, even now, people still might not have noticed what Apple was doing.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      You’re really complaining about something that was fixed over a decade ago? What next, complaining about 8.3 character filenames on Windows 3.1?
Dwedit 3y ago
The duopoly of Webkit and Gecko?
singlepaynews 3y ago
I've read some tech debates in this thread that are above my pay grade, but I largely agree with the title. Case in point, the same discussions in this thread that are above my pay grade drove the building of our startup as a browser-based PWA, instead of two native apps. Certainly native apps would have been better as a 'perfect solution', and we're still looking at building them in the future, but for delivering a working MVP it didn't make sense to even attempt. I suspect this will apply to many/most app startups going forward, and that means between native apps and PWAs, the browser is the marketplace of first-to-market products.
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
  I think you definitely made the right decision. As a user and a developer I hate native apps with a passion, so I for one can’t wait for the browser supremacy to take off.
neilv 3y ago
I made an HTML5 Offline app years ago, and with much effort got it to do some impressive things, in a cross-platform and update-able way. But it was especially difficult on Safari, and seemed like Apple had intentionally regressed on some standards, for whatever reason. Android seemed to support the standards better. Desktop browsers worked well, but we were mainly interested in a particular tablet, and secondarily in other handhelds. I later made a tricky iOS-specific app for a different purpose with SwiftUI, and it was successful after much effort, but the whole Apple App Store process and distribution was so much headache. The problems were Apple's heavy-handed authoritarianism, the slow iteration with reviews, and surprisingly inconsistent quality/correctness of the developer account site and TestFlight. I'm not a huge fan of Web technologies lately, but at least they can mean being relatively free of the app store tyrants. And maybe there's a way to hold the device platform vendors accountable for supporting open standards properly. It might have to be with legislation or government purchasing pressure (since we techies collectively have dropped the ball on that accountability, such as with adoption and professionalism).
hoc 3y ago
Reading something like that from a Microsoft guy seems so ironic. The tone and framing is also unnecessary aggressive, the framing single-sided. So the question remains: What the actual agenda here? If it was just about PWAs, I'd be happy. It's not like Apple's first approach to iOS apps wasn't "PWA-only" and webOS on Palm didn't try that. I also remember MS installing all kind of crap on my systems with their own browser monopoly and ActiveX and what not tricks, reaching deep into system function where/when the user just expected safe content browsing in their... browser. That also was the main "backdoor" for many of the cheaper hacks during that era. And while I don't wan't to go all FUD here, I don't want to go there again either. Especially not if some MS guy is demanding that is some extreme and stoking fashion. For the rest: There are much more ways to extend the basic browser engines with native functionality. So if it's just about PW "apps", there is no real reason to not wrap them in your own extended native app wrapper. If you want to break the barrier between browsing and installing stuff though, you'll need that MS-proposed approach. Just not sure if that's a good idea, given what they did last time with it when they were the monopolists with the freedom to act "freely".
bob1029 3y ago
We've been off our iOS native app for almost 3 years now (B2B/Enterprise distribution). We use a plain web app with some basic PWA config to make the experience mostly the same for the legacy native users. Our latest generation web app doesn't even use websockets - it can get nearly 100% of the job done with multipart form posts. The only thing that absolutely had to be otherwise was submitting high res photos via AJAX because of a ~twelve year old bug in Safari that blows out memory utilization. We use a bit of javascript to bandaid where Apple refuses. We stopped letting it bother us after a while. Momentum does wonders for morale. The hardest part of the transition for us was dealing with iOS hardware features from Safari, specifically the camera. Getting high resolution image/video out of the correct camera consistently was a huge nightmare up until not very long ago. Maybe we were just holding it wrong, but I feel like something changed in the last 18 months to make it not so terrible. Today, you can constrain for ~2k@30fps video and mostly expect everything to "just work". My mood regarding Apple ecosystem has waffled 4-5 times over the course of the last ~decade. Today, I strongly recommend their hardware because I no longer have to worry about the App Store extortion + PKI certificate circus + weird dev ecosystem hellscape that we were trapped in for the prior half-decade. If you are building some sort of document/imaging solution, I don't know how you can beat the quality of the iPad camera. If you can make your product work flawlessly on iOS/Safari, I think you are among the freest of people. The only thing the App Store does for you beyond this point is marketing/PR. I'd argue that if your business is heavily dependent upon App Store presence + gimmicks to generate revenue, then I don't think you have a business worth investing in.
konaraddi 3y ago
The web could help new mobile operating systems succeed specifically because the web handles the catch-22 of kickstarting a new dual-sided marketplace (to get users you need app developers creating apps but to get app developers you need users). Building a new marketplace is a significant challenge and prevent(ed) new mobile operating systems from succeeding (e.g. Firefox OS, Windows Phone, Ubuntu Touch) among other reasons. Calling this out because it's alluded to in the post but doesn't seem to be explicitly stated. I wrote a brief blurb about it in 2019 - https://konaraddi.com/writing/2019/2019-01-06-pwas-could-help-new-mobile-OSes-succeed/ https://konaraddi.com/writing/2019/2019-01-06-pwas-could-hel...
gumballindie 3y ago
Legislation is the disruptor of duopoly.
jxdxbx 3y ago
I don’t agree with the idea that web apps should supplant native software. I’d rather the web were mostly just hyperlinked text. Going to a web page should not download and run software on my computer.
bgdkbtv 3y ago
I'd choose using a native app over a web app or PWA Especially lately with the mess that is modern web app development, native is currently the king
Multicomp 3y ago
I hope this article is true, because in that case, web apps like [1] and friends can start being treated like I'm used to treating programs, as binary files or otherwise fungible functions that you can call and get outputs, and if you don't like what one version of the function/binary/program/application does, you can substitute your own or a previous version. Being able to sideload (back in my day it was called installing) applications on mobile devices pushes the power towards the user more, and anything that fights for the users like that is something I can get behind [1] https://webxdc.org/ https://webxdc.org/ because i must shill for deltachat and simplex chat and other applications i love the idea of that i know will very scarcely break through the network lock in effects
- curtisblaine 3y ago
  webxdc looks very good, but I see that delta-chat doesn't really work with the biggest cloud mail providers without technical knowledge (all of them in the PREPARE state) :(
- Vinnl 3y ago
  > [installing] applications on mobile devices pushes the power towards the user more On the other hand, on a website I can relatively easily block trackers and suspicious network requests, or ensure that links open in my preferred browser, rather than an app-specific browser that tracks everything I do. I get the attraction of being able to keep and use old versions. But websites give me way more control over what they actually do on my device. (And in practice, in many cases I don't expect the code that runs locally to be the barrier to longevity. As soon as server-side APIs change, having access to an older version of the client code doesn't bring you much.)
quickthrower2 3y ago
Nah - the mobile browsers are heavily locked down. I think the way out is a new breakthrough phone manufacturer, using a truly open OS (not tied to Google / Apple). Maybe just Debian/Linux with a phone skin or similar. The breakthrough could be price, e.g. $100 for a great phone, or the new gimmick that sells lots of phones.
- kaba0 3y ago
  You can’t just ignore the many thousands of work hours by experts that went into ios/android to make it usable on a battery-powered device. I will happily take a laptop first that manages to not die on standby in a couple of hours running linux, let’s not get carried away. You can see the “state of the art” with pinephones though, but take a deep breath first.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    That is a very good point!
paul7986 3y ago
After using CHATgpt i want a phone whose interface is built around using CHATgpt. It can still have icons like an iPhone, but it's UI and focus is using Chat GPT (tho i use the PI app a bit more) to accomplish 50 to 70 percent of the things we already do on a phone via a text field or a voice assistant. It's responses would be via voice, text and graphical resprentations of the data and or task you requested. I've been using it while driving and it's light years ahead of Siri & Google search result.. like drivng to get food I ask how much cholesterol in XYZ's chicken nuggets. It then proceeds to have a conversation with me about my health. Maybe Microsoft is making such a phone now. I'd be the first to buy it.
shmerl 3y ago
> On the technology side, Apple has been enormously successful at denying essential capabilities to the web through a strategy of compelled monoculture combined with strategic foot-dragging Yes, it's mind boggling Apple to this day is not punished for this violation of competition law and brazenly gets away with this garbage for years.
deleted 3y ago
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throwaway0x4 3y ago
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RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
This will end up benefiting Google the most. Developers will target Chrome, especially if the government forces Apple to allow other browser engines on iOS. In addition, since the only real way to monetize web apps is via advertising, they will use Google ads.
galaxyLogic 3y ago
> keeping the web from contesting the role of app stores. The purpose of app-stores is to sell apps. How would the 'web" take on that role, of selling access to an app in return for a price.
ksec 3y ago
What would it take to have a third Mobile Platform is one question I had in my mind at least since 2017. ( The moment when I think Apple has really changed ) And the immediate answer to that was almost always, you cant, because you dont have an App ecosystem. A la Windows Mobile. I knew Apps were important, and I sometimes look up the most popular Apps on the two platform. But it never occur to me to check my own App usage or at least it wasn't obvious how to check it. Until all of a sudden I remember you could look at battery usage of Apps in the past 10 days on iOS. It turns out 60% of my usage was between a Game I played, and Safari, both being 30% each. The others were Youtube, Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter, News/ forum App. These few apps together were 35%. The other 5% was a long tail of other things, but mostly Uber, Food Delivery, and Banking Apps. Not only were the amount of Apps I used much much smaller than I thought. Most of them could be a Web App, and do offer an Online, Web version. I am not the usual one to be optimistic on HN. The task is still easily tens of billions of investment. But may be, just may be it isn't as impossible as it seems. At least Microsoft could take a shot. Not saying they will simply because the strategic vision of Nadella is laser focus on Cloud.
dreamcompiler 3y ago
Back when the iPhone app store first happened many developers (including me) asked Apple why they needed to gatekeep software installs. Of course now we know it was because Apple wanted that 30% revenue stream, but at the time Apple said -- repeatedly -- that it was because they needed to "protect the integrity of the cell phone networks." Some developers knew this was horseshit because they knew the baseband processor was a separate chip that was easily isolatable from the main CPU. We complained but there were not enough of us to rattle Apple's cage sufficiently. Here's the proof that Apple was lying about this: The iPod Touch (remember that thing?) had exactly the same App Store lockdown mechanism and it didn't have a baseband processor at all. IOW it wasn't protecting the cell phone networks because it couldn't even participate in the cell phone networks. The iPod touch was just a plain desktop computer that happened to fit in your pocket, but we let Apple become the arbiter of what software we could install on it. And now Apple wants very much to make this true on the Mac as well. I can't believe we fell for this shit. It's not too late to stop it.
hawski 3y ago
I see now the thirst in this community to break browser engine practical monopoly and theoretical duopoly. Posts about new or alternative browser engines get much more attention and excitement than posts about new programming languages. I see this in myself. I wanted to make my own programming language in the past, but for a few years I want to make my own browser.
Roark66 3y ago
Yeah, right, and who owns these "browsers the most likely disruptor"?
- criddell 3y ago
  They said “browsers” but in reality only Chrome matters. We will go from a duopoly to monopoly.
puchatek 3y ago
I hope PWMs will have more to offer than push notifications, which I disable every time they're on offer, just like non-essential cookies.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
There are two camps here: - it will change, it must change, we want it to change, etc. - nothing ever changes, because nothing ever changes Just paraphrasing here. But the second camp is almost always right until it is not and everything changes anyway. Nothing stays the same forever. The duopoly has existed for quite long already. Something is going to change eventually. Maybe sooner rather than later. In the case of Apple and Google enjoying full control over mobile, this cannot continue for much longer because of the following reasons: - It no longer is a duopoly. Places like China and Russia are cutting loose from Californian oversight on their mobile networks. So there are a lot of phones with Android but without Google's flavor of it and Apple has withdrawn from the Russian market. In short, Chinese manufacturers are no longer that dependent on Google or Apple to lead the way. Other countries are pushing back as well. And the Chinese are happy to sell to all of them. - Regulatory oversight in both the EU and the US is putting pressure on both Apple and Google to open their app stores and reduce anti-competitive behavior exercised via those app stores. This includes competing unfairly with things in the app store, keeping competitors out of the app store, and squeezing app store developers for billions of revenue, etc. And in the case of Google, paying Mozilla and Apple for the privilege of being the default search engine on their browsers to the extent of many billions. They have been under a lot of scrutiny for years. For Apple that means their blanket ban on anything not using Safari as its web component might have to go. As soon as it does, there will be other browsers on the platform and they'll compete on quality and features. Like they caved in and added USB-C to the iphone, it might soon have a proper version of Chrome and Firefox running on it. - Smart phones as the dominant way to consume content might not last. We have other modalities coming up now, including VR and AR, voice only applications, AI apps. Apple and Google will try to "own" this space. But it is not a given that they will succeed in that. For example, most VR content so far comes via the Steam store. Not the Play store. And neither Google nor Apple has made much of an impact with their AI efforts so far. It's OpenAI and MS that are in the lead there. - There are a growing number of cross platform app development frameworks. Flutter is popular. React-native still is widely used. Jetbrains is positioning Compose as a cross platform option with IOS, Android, and Desktop support. Additionally, PWAs aren't that bad these days and they are about to become a lot more capable via WASM. Some widely used apps are PWAs these days and most of the rest contain quite a bit of web views. - Networks are changing. We have satellite networks like Starlink and various competitors now starting to offer connectivity everywhere. Mobile operators and phone calls as a use case are a side show for that. The whole point of a smart phone is that it is a phone that connects to the phone network, which until recently was the only way to get connectivity in a lot of places without WIFI. The phone operators control the network, and Apple and Google pretend that phone numbers and sim cards still matter and everybody gets their proprietary firmware from Qualcomm (another nice monopoly). That's the deal for the last fifteen years. That might stop being true soon.
MrDresden 3y ago
I'm sure the tech is there, but until web developers themselves start supporting mobile better then I don't see PWAs taking over. Seriously, to this day I open pages that scale horribly on mobile (2x just this morning) and even don't function properly on desktop. And I am supposed to believe that the same crowd will replace native applications with all that this entails (accessibility, i18n, offline functionality etc)? Sure, there are plenty of horrible mobile applications as well that do not fulfill these requirements either. But the difference is that those apps never get any usage whereas some of the webpages I have issues with are from big domains that serve massive amounts of content (news, video etc). If those aren't doing a proper job, then the capabilities of the tech stach won't matter. PWAs will be DoA.
renegat0x0 3y ago
Reminds me of 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...
fidotron 3y ago
The problems are not technical and they aren't Apple[1], they are structural. The whole reason the App Stores succeeded (past tense) is they enabled developers to make money. Monetizing the web directly is practically impossible, certainly without resorting to intrusive ads (which are often blocked) and the attention span of people is incredibly short, so they will bounce. In order to survive you need a compelling reason for people to keep coming back and some source of revenue which is not the web site itself. The fun part is those problems are now almost as true for apps as well, which is why so many of them rely on external realities to get people to install them, before performing a bait and switch. Additionally the rules around App Stores have quietly become far more restrictive in recent years. This isn't to say the web is technically appropriate either, because it's not. CSS in particular is essentially broken. [1] I did https://www.luduxia.com/reversi/ https://www.luduxia.com/reversi/ partly as an experiment to validate my thoughts about this. iOS Safari was actually one of the easier targets, certainly far easier than Chrome on Android.
- oblio 3y ago
  I'm sorry for the snark, but: > The whole reason the App Stores succeeded (past tense) is they enabled developers to make money. How will the internet, the biggest money maker in the history of the world, ever enable developers to make money? > Monetizing the web directly is practically impossible, certainly without resorting to intrusive ads (which are often blocked) and the attention span of people is incredibly short, so they will bounce. In order to survive you need a compelling reason for people to keep coming back and some source of revenue which is not the web site itself. Subscription fees, ads, etc, basically everything mobile apps do now, too.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    I don't think this is snark. It just misses the point. The App Store has payment infrastructure built into it. Much, much easier to use for a developer and for a user than a different bespoke payment integration for each website.
    - 3y ago
mwn 3y ago
Does anyone have a good recommendation on reading about continuously updating PWAs. It is quite obvious for the App Store that you can push new versions and your users are notified that they need to update. If someone has a good reading on this I would appreciate it as I have started to develop PWAs. Sometimes my PWA stops working and I have to save it to Home Screen again and I am not sure how to troubleshoot this. Thank you.
croes 3y ago
Which browsers? Chromium based and Safari? Stills sounds like a duopoly, even the same companies.
ilkke 3y ago
Precisely the reason for the character assassination of Flash at the hands of Steve Jobs. I am still curious if some attempted deal with Adobe failed precessing it.
FridgeSeal 3y ago
Oh yeah because so many of the web-apps and SPA’s were forced to put up with are so much better than apps. Some businesses wrap their pages in an app and it’s equally bad, these orgs will do “lowest effort” in whatever format you give them, so that’s pretty moot either way. The people and orgs that do build actual apps present an experience that is far nicer than the equivalent web app. They’ll often work partially offline, they are most efficient and responsive, and better behaved at staying in the state I left them in, unlike your average web page. Commonly the counter argument here is “oh but PWA’s” or “but one more JS thing” or some such, which gives real “please bro, just one more lane, one more lane will fix it, please bro” vibes. Also, the browser monopoly is even worse, google basically does whatever it pleases and everyone else has to kowtow or feebly resist.
hamilyon2 3y ago
Can I download 33Gb of music from streaming service so I can listen to it offline in browser tab? Web can't be both nimble, document-based and have full-blown offline capabilities, at least I don't know any way to do it now
- tgv 3y ago
  By adding all sorts of APIs to Javascript that just also accidentally happens to allow Google to search your phone's file system from the browser.
- ThatPlayer 3y ago
  Looks like you should be able to do it with the CacheStorage apis https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/CacheStorage https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/CacheStorag...
ptx 3y ago
> The tech press almost universally fails to mention the web as a substitute for native apps Maybe because this topic was already thoroughly covered and debated back in 2007 when the first iPhone was released? Here's John Gruber characterizing the announcement in unfavorable terms: https://daringfireball.net/2007/06/wwdc_2007_keynote https://daringfireball.net/2007/06/wwdc_2007_keynote And then there was Mozilla's Firefox OS which went all in on this approach, going beyond the limitations of the iPhone's implementation. Searching for those stories should find the press coverage the post author is looking for.
sylware 3y ago
Not Big Tech browsers but noscript/basic (x)html browsers, where reasonable (where it does not work, a very simple public network API does usually suffice). As tons if not most online services can be provided via such browsers (actually it was until Big Tech broke and corrupted everything for their own benefit with their absurdely and grotesquely massive and complex web engine, including their SDK).
maelito 3y ago
I'm looking for resources that explain why touch gestures (for instance, modal sheet swipe) are so much more fluid on mobile. And what can we do about it.
nobodyandproud 3y ago
Why did Firefox drop its support for PWAs on the desktop?
insane_dreamer 3y ago
Sorry, but this is wishful thinking. Apple/Google will put up every technical obstacle they can, plus the problem is social, not technical -- the vast majority of customers want ease of use, and that's what app stores provide. I'm filing this along with those "this is the year of Linux on the desktop" predictions
weare138 3y ago
The 2 most popular mobile browsers are also made by those two same companies.
can16358p 3y ago
> An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to defend yourself against corporate predation. Really? The experience difference between a native app and a webpage is night and day.
stevage 3y ago
This would be a much more interesting and pleasant article to read if it wasn't so full of this breathless "I can't believe the big tech sites aren't writing about this!?!" hyperbole.

300 points by cdme 3y ago

mpol 3y ago

Sure, the duopoly of app stores and browsers as a disruptor is a big story. But can I take offense of all this "The biggest story"? I see it so often, especially here on HN, and it feels overly dramatic. Maybe even self-centered, like; "this is the truth", where somebody went too far in some kind of cool-aid (of the wrong kind). It is not as awful as conspiracy theories, they are even more awful, but the feeling goes in the same direction.

tallowen 3y ago

I am surprised that part of Mozilla's never introduced an Android launcher for progressive web apps. Given that they already have Firefox on Android and their history with FirefoxOS, I expected this to be a key lever to get app/website developers to consider this as an option. Are there barriers such as performance or API issues (e.g. double click behaviors) that prevent the webmanifest and other approaches from gaining traction here?

sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago
Bad leadership + weak board = lost decade.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ProcNetDev 3y ago
AFAIK, they are refusing to implement BLE in Firefox(https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674737 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674737) saying that, "implementing it is harmful to the web." Pretty hard to have a PWA future, if you can't access standard app APIs. Seems like it would require a big mindset change for Mozilla to get on board with PWAs.
- ff2400t 3y ago
  Their official position cites security as the reason they haven't implemented it yet. https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - JimDabell 3y ago
    There’s a stack of Blink-only Google specifications that people are pushing as “standard” that are anything but. Both Apple and Mozilla reject them on privacy or security grounds, then get criticised as being “behind” (or in Apple’s case, “deliberately holding back the web”). No, a specification created and implemented unilaterally by Google is not a standard.
    - charcircuit 3y ago
      Most standards start by being implemented by one browser. I would rather a standard exist based off a real implementation than one thrown out of an ivory tower.
      - ff2400t 3y ago
        The whole point of standards is that there should be multiple implementations that can support it. Now I do agree with your point on that standards should be based on feedback from implementations but as the above comment said, this is just google making adding features and making standard documents to shift blame on other browser for not implementing them.
        charcircuit 3y ago
        To be fair where are the other browser's proposals for giving apps the capabilities they need? Browsers should be shamed for not making an effort to support common use cases that apps need.
ff2400t 3y ago
I am curious what do you mean by Launcher here. Firefox Allows installing app to your android laucher home screen and you can add any website as a shortcut to the homescreen.

njroute22 3y ago

Another angle is - "tech reporters" don't want to touch this because some mysterious blacklisting would result and their digital life would slowly come crumbling down. They're afraid to ruffle feathers.

dwaite 3y ago
No real justification for conspiracy theories. We have already seen a company fail when betting on PWA to fill in gaps in native app support for their platform - it was called Windows Phone.

idopmstuff 3y ago

> The implication is clear: browsers unchained can do to mobile what the web did to desktop, where more than 70% of daily "jobs to be done" happen on the web. This was an actual debate in the early days of app stores. Facebook was the most prominent company that decided to go with an HTML5 app instead of a native one. Doing so was one of the biggest strategic mistakes they've ever made. Zuck's words, not mine. (https://www.engadget.com/2012-09-11-zuckerberg-html-5-facebook-mobile-app-mistake.html https://www.engadget.com/2012-09-11-zuckerberg-html-5-facebo...). Web apps were slower, had issues dealing with the various browsers and saw less use. It doesn't seem like the author has done any real research here.

qgin 3y ago
There's no technical reason this needs to be true though. It's wild that I can use a full-featured spreadsheet instantly on the web on my laptop, but on my phone someone wants me to download a 100mb binary to order a pizza.
- EA-3167 3y ago
  I've always assumed it was by design, because you can't use ad blockers or privacy addons in an app.
- outworlder 3y ago
  These days they will ask you to download 100MB of JS, CSS, HTML and assets to order the same pizza.
  - rezmason 3y ago
    That is a real problem. But if that problem manifests in web and native software alike, then neither the web nor the app stores directly cause it, right?
- Eridrus 3y ago
  "My highly abstract cross-platform framework must be as fast as native code" is not a sane view on this. A tonne of effort has gone into making spreadsheets work on the web; both in the browsers as well as the spreadsheet apps themselves. The fact that the web works as well as it does is a huge feat of engineering, but in no way indicative of there being no technical reason that native apps can be better.

qgin 3y ago

It's not outside the realm of possibility for web apps to have as good of an experience as binary apps for most use cases. But Apple has no motivation to make "the good stuff" easily available to web developers. Letting a webapp capable webpage have an in-page "install this app" button that added it to the home screen would wipe out 50% of app store usage. But as it is, as an "add to home screen" option on the share menu of a webpage, which very few have noticed or understand the meaning of... it keeps web apps from taking off.

steve1977 3y ago
Web apps on Chrome suck compared to native desktop apps on both Windows and macoS, so I don’t see how this is Apple‘s fault really.
- postalrat 3y ago
  Yet somehow most native apps people use are either: a web browser, something built with a web browser.
  - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    Looking at Windows, we’ve got MS Office, File Explorer, Photoshop, Visual Studio, System admin/utilities, Notepad, Paint, Audacity, and so on… If all people actually used were just Facebook and Google Docs then Chromebooks would be far outselling Windows laptops; instead they’re just mildly competetive. I won’t deny that “the web”, as a platform (especially Chromium) presents a compelling platform to which a good chunk of those apps could be ported (especially the apps which don’t need low-level or low-latency hardware interfaces - but I think you’re underselling the value, and necessity, of things using Win32+WDM/NTDDK instead of HTML+JS.
  - steve1977 3y ago
    And that is very sad.
wharvle 3y ago
> It's not outside the realm of possibility for web apps to have as good of an experience as binary apps for most use cases. But Apple has no motivation to make "the good stuff" easily available to web developers. How’s Apple making web apps bad on literally every platform?

thaumasiotes 3y ago

Well, I can say why I don't expect coverage of this. As far as I know, mobile OSes already allow the user to navigate to whatever web page they want. There's nothing to unblock.

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

Because they want to make sure Microsoft/X gets the priority, so they can pretend we have an "open market" ;)

amadeuspagel 3y ago

> This, in turn, will enable competitors to replace app stores with directories of Progressive Web Apps. > Work is also underway to give competing browsers a chance to facilitate PWAs that can install other PWAs. Web App Stores would then become a real possibility through browsers that support them, and we should expect that regulatory and legislative interventions will facilitate this in the near future. Removed from the need to police security (browsers have that covered) and handle distribution (websites update themselves), PWA app stores like store.app can become honest-to-goodness app management surfaces that can safely facilitate discovery and sync. It's ironic that this article criticises tech media for sleeping on web apps and focusing on app store competition only to envision Web App Stores. There's no need for app stores on the web. We already have discovery (Hacker News) and search (Google). I could imagine a subreddit specifically for web apps, but is even that necessary?

CharlesW 3y ago
Additionally, it's not like Big Tech is somehow preventing PWApp Stores from being a thing. They're already a thing. https://store.app/ https://store.app/
- judah 3y ago
  The author mentions PWA stores like store.app, and some shortcomings: > PWA app stores like Appscope and store.app exist, but they're hobbled by gatekeepers that have denied competing browsers access to APIs that could turn PWA directories into real contenders.
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    The author is simply wrong in this case. To make sure I was giving him the benefit of the doubt, I just went to store.app and added Microsoft Loop to my Home Screen in about 5 seconds. It was easier and faster than installing a native app!
    - postalrat 3y ago

Zetobal 3y ago

Two different mobile oss tried exactly this and they both failed. Three if you count webOS from palm.

wkat4242 3y ago
Even Apple tried it and they failed and scrambled to launch their own app store after everyone started jailbreaking and using Cydia apps that were so much better than the web apps Apple wanted iPhone users to use :) And in the end Cydia made Apple develop its biggest money maker ever!
rchaud 3y ago
"Failure" here means they didn't manage to join the oligopoly themselves, and went bust instead, as network effects are a zero-sum game. By that metric, every flavour of Linux has also failed. Yet Linux is also heavily used and actively developed, serving an important purpose where Windows/Mac were not suitable. It helps that computer/server hardware and components are modular and not as tied to a particular OS as phones are.
- Zetobal 3y ago
  No failed means that the corporations behind them have gone bust or abandoned these osses.

KaiserPro 3y ago

> This, in turn, will enable competitors to replace app stores with directories of Progressive Web Apps. The time for PWAs was in about 1998, when WAP was a thing. Much as I would love a universal bytecode that would allow mobile phones to achieve this, PWAs are not the route to get there. They are a mess of custom, poorly documented and ever changing layers of web bits. Yes, web assembly exists, yes its about 75% the speed of native. and its not as easy to develop for. I also don't see why phone makers will want to make it that easy. Unless they are forced to provide parity for their APIS, it'll always be second best to native. But, for the end users, they will look at PWAs and think: "fuck, this has got slow, and its eating my battery" you can spot the react native apps when you use them(yes, yes I know its not entirely the same) We have been lucky on desktop/laptop that we have added 5 zeros to the available compute, memory, network and GPU capacity. This allows a browser to run slack at the same speed as MIRC, from 2002. You don't have that luxury on mobile. You are limited by battery capacity, unless we suddenly find a way to 100x battery density, it'll be like that for a while. That being said, the work on breaking the app store dominance is welcome. 25% tax on development is taking the piss. Obviously the "point" of the walled garden was to provide security to the end user, however google fucked that right up, so now its obviously just a cash cow. But, I want a way to side load apps, I want a second market place. I don't want fucking PWAs on my phone.

fwsgonzo 3y ago
75% is a stretch. The last time I tested it, it was ~50% of my native program despite my best efforts, with AOT. Which is still good btw, just not as constantly advertised.
- KaiserPro 3y ago
  My colleague has been doing some stonking work with it, he claims its about 70% as fast, I was rounding up for safety!
  - fwsgonzo 3y ago
    That's pretty good if you ask me! I was using an image encoder that had a WebAssembly SIMD CMake option, which is nice, but it only had half of native performance. I suppose it will continue to improve over time.

aredox 3y ago

PWA are not as good as apps - and not because of OS vendors restricting APIs. Honestly this is one of Doctorow's weakest arguments - PWA are part of the enshittification of tech: poor substitutes to full-fledged performant applications, that you never own, that "phone home" all the time, always dependent on someone else... I can get working binaries of old closed source software of yesteryear; I can't get working "open-source" webpages of five years ago, a maze of calls to different web ressources that the Internet Archive couldn't cache correctly, to display fully and correctly.

tazu 3y ago
Agreed, this is why I'm much more excited about the possibility of sideloading native apps.
vitiral 3y ago
> Honestly this is one of Doctorow's weakest arguments This isn't Doctorow. I went and searched, here's the article I think you're referencing https://doctorow.medium.com/web-apps-could-de-monopolize-mobile-devices-57e8a2d4bfb2 https://doctorow.medium.com/web-apps-could-de-monopolize-mob...
- radiospiel 3y ago
  I think they refer to https://archive.org/details/GeneralComputation https://archive.org/details/GeneralComputation

ggm 3y ago

About the only time I can tell some app is a web app is when my password keystore tells me it can fill in my credentials.

pimlottc 3y ago
Native iOS apps can work with password managers too: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/password_autofill/about_the_password_autofill_workflow https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/password_...
- ggm 3y ago
  The web pages for bitwarden about integration with apps on android doesn't explicitly say "it's pwa only" so maybe I misapprehended.

camillomiller 3y ago

Because this is a non story, at most an analysis or opinion piece, based on assumptions that are not founded on report-worthy facts or specific sources. That’s all for “just another guy with a blog on the internet who thinks he knows how journalism works”.

esprehn 3y ago
The author is hardly "just another guy": https://infrequently.org/about-me/ https://infrequently.org/about-me/ You don't have to agree with him, but he's certainly qualified to write things like this.
- camillomiller 3y ago
  If anything, it's the opposite: >> Hi, I'm Alex Russell, a Microsoft Partner PM on the Edge team and Blink API OWNER. It is my professional mission to build a web that works for everyone. Given his conflict of interest, I don't see anyone who would publish this story as more than an educated Op Ed.

softfalcon 3y ago

> Browsers are the most likely disruptor of the mobile duopoly but you'd never know it reading Wired or The Verge. I'm confused, The Verge has several articles about this hubbub of anti-trust this, Epic v Apple lawsuit that, EU forcing browser choice for iOS, and now Epic v Google and the recent win. There has also been tons of discussion about web apps, new app stores, etc in the comments. How exactly are they ignoring this story? It feels like it's been at the forefront of their coverage for months now.

dingnuts 3y ago
>I'm confused, The Verge has several articles about this hubbub of anti-trust this, Epic v Apple lawsuit that, and now Epic v Google and the recent win right but none of those articles talk about how the -browser- could disrupt this duopoly >There has been tons of discussion about web apps, new app stores, etc that's what the article is about. these articles tend to talk about new app stores, but not much else. anecdotally I agree with the author's observation about this. the only time I've heard about PWAs it was from other nerds, not the news media.
- softfalcon 3y ago
  I see what you mean. To be honest though, both Wired and The Verge are only really playing catch up to the current zeitgeist. If and when PWA's start being a big thing, we'll see articles show up about it. Even then, it'll only be when some major company makes a splash and being a PWA is the killer feature. I don't really see The Verge and Wired pushing stories early. It's not that they're asleep, it's just that they're grabbing the stories from social media, converting it into press format, planning articles about it, then releasing. They're not at the forefront of tech, becoming buddy buddy with the devs, getting that inside scoop. They're just doing broader coverage for the masses interested in tech. Anyone deep into this stuff is already subscribed to various subreddits, reading HN, nerding out in dev Discords, or having arguments on Twitter.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    What is so up-to-the-minute about PWAs? They were somebody’s side project from 8 years ago which Google inexplicably didn’t kill. Despite controlling the browser, Google never came out with a reliable and sensible scheme to store files so it’s just another own goal like Windows Phone.

PaulHoule 3y ago

Progressive Web Apps? So I can get spammed by spam spamifications? Or so you can attempt to cache some files by building a Rube Goldberg machine on top of a Rube Goldberg machine? It would be one thing if they gave you some policy control over the browser’s caching engine or let you download a ZIP file and then look up any file you want in it. But as it is it is another terrible Google side project like Compute Engine or Kubernetes or OKRs that they tried to foist on the world…. At least this time people had some sense and said “Nein Danke” like they do in Germany. What’s tragic about it is that Google controls a freaking web browser and could have come out with something sensible but not we got a side project API to make a fake web server but no simple and reliable storage mechanism to go with it. … and we got an astroturf campaign second only to TripleByte sponsoring thousands of blog posts on how “hiring is broken” demanding that Apple implement a side-project API on Safari.

etchalon 3y ago

Web applications are only ever capable of being "as good" as native apps could be a handful of years ago. It's a moving target.

kgdiem 3y ago

Here’s something that’s kind of obvious but only occurred to me the other day — if you sell apps for $3 or less, the App Store fee costs about the same or less than anyone else is going to charge under the small business program. Unfortunately my next app is going to cost $9.99

charcircuit 3y ago

It's the opposite. The mobile duopoly disrupted the web platform. Which disrupted the desktop platform which came before it. All of these platforms are still here today and they are competing with each other.

katzgrau 3y ago

> Reporters and editors aren't software engineers, so the potential of browser competition can remain understandably opaque. There you go. As a virtual unknown who has fought the good fight against Google and has tried to help make reporters aware of tech/services they hadn’t considered before - well, some people have a hard time thinking about what they’re not used to or don’t initially understand.

aj7 3y ago

One loser could be Microsoft. I found, almost inadvertently, that when Apple essentially bricked Drive on my 2013 MacBook Pro, I could open a new Chrome window (not actually necessary, but neater workflow) and simply run Drive and Sheets there. This was a big eye opener. Especially when it works perfectly on an iPad in an emergency.

csixty4 3y ago

I just spent a year and a half building and rolling out a web version of a popular native app. We had to make a lot of compromises to get it out the door. Native apps can block screenshots. Apple doesn't always like it, but you can plead your case to the reviewers. Web apps don't have an API to prevent screenshotting or to know when one is about to be taken and hide their contents. This is important to protect privacy (nudes) and people have come to expect it. Know what's interesting? Screenshot protection is available for Encrypted Media Extension (DRM) video if you have Hollywood $$$. Browsers (on desktop) also have dev tools built in. They make it easy to download any image you can see even if we put all the right click prevention scripts and CSS hacks in the world in place. Imagine having to explain to the privacy protection team that you can't disable dev tools for your site when that's not even an issue on native mobile without extra steps. Those are platform wide issues, and I seriously doubt the people setting web standards are going to be on board with new standards that keep information (even very, very personal information) from being free. I've championed the web since 1996. And PWAs may be fine to replace some basic e-commerce and information apps. But the platform needs to make some changes before it can totally replace native apps.

wilsonnb3 3y ago
> Native apps can block screenshots > This is important to protect privacy (nudes) and people have come to expect it. Considering you can just, ya know, take a picture of it, this doesn't seem important at all.
- smelendez 3y ago
  That was my first thought too. My next thoughts were: - it protects the platform, to some extent, by reducing the number of unwanted screenshots - it sets a social norm that taking screenshots is unwanted and makes the screenshot taker look extra creepy if they share the image with anyone - if a platform provides screenshot blocking, and users (who have all seen pictures of one screen taken from another device) value that protection and make decisions about what to post based on it, the company should think long and hard before deploying a version that breaks that assumption

doctornoble 3y ago

So the most like the disruptor of the mobile duopoly of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS are Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari. Got it.

mmis1000 3y ago
It's basically why Apple sabotage safari so hard to the point that 'doing anything more than a static page on safari requires tons of workarounds'. (And also why you can only use webkit on iphone)
deleted 3y ago
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capybara_2020 3y ago

I doubt browsers are coming back. Companies love apps. They get complete control over what you do(No easy way of viewing source, no modifying the frontend etc) and they can suck up all your data. Plus browsers are are lagging in terms of say animations and probably always will with the need to build consensus before a new ideas is added. Then adoption can take years.

vcryan 3y ago

Amazing post

hobobaggins 3y ago

Not if Apple has its way. They've consistently regressed, failed to implement standards, implemented them brokenly, delayed/delayed/delayed, stated that a feature was bad for privacy|security|performance, etc. Just an endless stream of roadblocks. For example: photo and file uploads (yes, really! remember "iOS doesn't have a filesystem, so no uploads" which really damaged craigslist because Browse didn't work on iPhone for many years), webrtc, PWA add-to-home, sticky/fixed positioning, scrolling through notch (it worked, and then it didn't), service workers, push notifications, and so much more than I can't even remember (maybe someone else can list their favorites). Even when eventually we got the features, they were often broken in order to keep pushing people into the App Store. Does the author REALLY believe that Apple won't instantly drop support for any feature that could seriously disrupt the App Store? Not on your life.

judge2020 3y ago
> Browse didn't work on iPhone for many years The web API always allowed you to choose photos from your camera roll.
- hobobaggins 3y ago
  No, it did not, not until iOS 6 (!!) And Steve Jobs ensured that Flash uploaders popular at the time could never work on the iPhone, either. Example: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/4104/is-it-possible-to-upload-files-to-a-website-from-safari-on-iphone https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/4104/is-it-possibl... Ironically, Microsoft had tried to kill the web off with Internet Explorer just a few years before, but no one noticed what Apple was doing, because they did it so well... they got 400,000 and then a million apps in their app store, completely bypassing the web altogether. And as evidenced by your comment on this very technical forum, even now, people still might not have noticed what Apple was doing.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    You’re really complaining about something that was fixed over a decade ago? What next, complaining about 8.3 character filenames on Windows 3.1?

Dwedit 3y ago

The duopoly of Webkit and Gecko?

singlepaynews 3y ago

I've read some tech debates in this thread that are above my pay grade, but I largely agree with the title. Case in point, the same discussions in this thread that are above my pay grade drove the building of our startup as a browser-based PWA, instead of two native apps. Certainly native apps would have been better as a 'perfect solution', and we're still looking at building them in the future, but for delivering a working MVP it didn't make sense to even attempt. I suspect this will apply to many/most app startups going forward, and that means between native apps and PWAs, the browser is the marketplace of first-to-market products.

sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
I think you definitely made the right decision. As a user and a developer I hate native apps with a passion, so I for one can’t wait for the browser supremacy to take off.

neilv 3y ago

I made an HTML5 Offline app years ago, and with much effort got it to do some impressive things, in a cross-platform and update-able way. But it was especially difficult on Safari, and seemed like Apple had intentionally regressed on some standards, for whatever reason. Android seemed to support the standards better. Desktop browsers worked well, but we were mainly interested in a particular tablet, and secondarily in other handhelds. I later made a tricky iOS-specific app for a different purpose with SwiftUI, and it was successful after much effort, but the whole Apple App Store process and distribution was so much headache. The problems were Apple's heavy-handed authoritarianism, the slow iteration with reviews, and surprisingly inconsistent quality/correctness of the developer account site and TestFlight. I'm not a huge fan of Web technologies lately, but at least they can mean being relatively free of the app store tyrants. And maybe there's a way to hold the device platform vendors accountable for supporting open standards properly. It might have to be with legislation or government purchasing pressure (since we techies collectively have dropped the ball on that accountability, such as with adoption and professionalism).

hoc 3y ago

Reading something like that from a Microsoft guy seems so ironic. The tone and framing is also unnecessary aggressive, the framing single-sided. So the question remains: What the actual agenda here? If it was just about PWAs, I'd be happy. It's not like Apple's first approach to iOS apps wasn't "PWA-only" and webOS on Palm didn't try that. I also remember MS installing all kind of crap on my systems with their own browser monopoly and ActiveX and what not tricks, reaching deep into system function where/when the user just expected safe content browsing in their... browser. That also was the main "backdoor" for many of the cheaper hacks during that era. And while I don't wan't to go all FUD here, I don't want to go there again either. Especially not if some MS guy is demanding that is some extreme and stoking fashion. For the rest: There are much more ways to extend the basic browser engines with native functionality. So if it's just about PW "apps", there is no real reason to not wrap them in your own extended native app wrapper. If you want to break the barrier between browsing and installing stuff though, you'll need that MS-proposed approach. Just not sure if that's a good idea, given what they did last time with it when they were the monopolists with the freedom to act "freely".

bob1029 3y ago

We've been off our iOS native app for almost 3 years now (B2B/Enterprise distribution). We use a plain web app with some basic PWA config to make the experience mostly the same for the legacy native users. Our latest generation web app doesn't even use websockets - it can get nearly 100% of the job done with multipart form posts. The only thing that absolutely had to be otherwise was submitting high res photos via AJAX because of a ~twelve year old bug in Safari that blows out memory utilization. We use a bit of javascript to bandaid where Apple refuses. We stopped letting it bother us after a while. Momentum does wonders for morale. The hardest part of the transition for us was dealing with iOS hardware features from Safari, specifically the camera. Getting high resolution image/video out of the correct camera consistently was a huge nightmare up until not very long ago. Maybe we were just holding it wrong, but I feel like something changed in the last 18 months to make it not so terrible. Today, you can constrain for ~2k@30fps video and mostly expect everything to "just work". My mood regarding Apple ecosystem has waffled 4-5 times over the course of the last ~decade. Today, I strongly recommend their hardware because I no longer have to worry about the App Store extortion + PKI certificate circus + weird dev ecosystem hellscape that we were trapped in for the prior half-decade. If you are building some sort of document/imaging solution, I don't know how you can beat the quality of the iPad camera. If you can make your product work flawlessly on iOS/Safari, I think you are among the freest of people. The only thing the App Store does for you beyond this point is marketing/PR. I'd argue that if your business is heavily dependent upon App Store presence + gimmicks to generate revenue, then I don't think you have a business worth investing in.

konaraddi 3y ago

The web could help new mobile operating systems succeed specifically because the web handles the catch-22 of kickstarting a new dual-sided marketplace (to get users you need app developers creating apps but to get app developers you need users). Building a new marketplace is a significant challenge and prevent(ed) new mobile operating systems from succeeding (e.g. Firefox OS, Windows Phone, Ubuntu Touch) among other reasons. Calling this out because it's alluded to in the post but doesn't seem to be explicitly stated. I wrote a brief blurb about it in 2019 - https://konaraddi.com/writing/2019/2019-01-06-pwas-could-help-new-mobile-OSes-succeed/ https://konaraddi.com/writing/2019/2019-01-06-pwas-could-hel...

gumballindie 3y ago

Legislation is the disruptor of duopoly.

jxdxbx 3y ago

I don’t agree with the idea that web apps should supplant native software. I’d rather the web were mostly just hyperlinked text. Going to a web page should not download and run software on my computer.

bgdkbtv 3y ago

I'd choose using a native app over a web app or PWA Especially lately with the mess that is modern web app development, native is currently the king

Multicomp 3y ago

I hope this article is true, because in that case, web apps like [1] and friends can start being treated like I'm used to treating programs, as binary files or otherwise fungible functions that you can call and get outputs, and if you don't like what one version of the function/binary/program/application does, you can substitute your own or a previous version. Being able to sideload (back in my day it was called installing) applications on mobile devices pushes the power towards the user more, and anything that fights for the users like that is something I can get behind [1] https://webxdc.org/ https://webxdc.org/ because i must shill for deltachat and simplex chat and other applications i love the idea of that i know will very scarcely break through the network lock in effects

curtisblaine 3y ago
webxdc looks very good, but I see that delta-chat doesn't really work with the biggest cloud mail providers without technical knowledge (all of them in the PREPARE state) :(
Vinnl 3y ago
> [installing] applications on mobile devices pushes the power towards the user more On the other hand, on a website I can relatively easily block trackers and suspicious network requests, or ensure that links open in my preferred browser, rather than an app-specific browser that tracks everything I do. I get the attraction of being able to keep and use old versions. But websites give me way more control over what they actually do on my device. (And in practice, in many cases I don't expect the code that runs locally to be the barrier to longevity. As soon as server-side APIs change, having access to an older version of the client code doesn't bring you much.)

quickthrower2 3y ago

Nah - the mobile browsers are heavily locked down. I think the way out is a new breakthrough phone manufacturer, using a truly open OS (not tied to Google / Apple). Maybe just Debian/Linux with a phone skin or similar. The breakthrough could be price, e.g. $100 for a great phone, or the new gimmick that sells lots of phones.

kaba0 3y ago
You can’t just ignore the many thousands of work hours by experts that went into ios/android to make it usable on a battery-powered device. I will happily take a laptop first that manages to not die on standby in a couple of hours running linux, let’s not get carried away. You can see the “state of the art” with pinephones though, but take a deep breath first.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  That is a very good point!

paul7986 3y ago

After using CHATgpt i want a phone whose interface is built around using CHATgpt. It can still have icons like an iPhone, but it's UI and focus is using Chat GPT (tho i use the PI app a bit more) to accomplish 50 to 70 percent of the things we already do on a phone via a text field or a voice assistant. It's responses would be via voice, text and graphical resprentations of the data and or task you requested. I've been using it while driving and it's light years ahead of Siri & Google search result.. like drivng to get food I ask how much cholesterol in XYZ's chicken nuggets. It then proceeds to have a conversation with me about my health. Maybe Microsoft is making such a phone now. I'd be the first to buy it.

shmerl 3y ago

> On the technology side, Apple has been enormously successful at denying essential capabilities to the web through a strategy of compelled monoculture combined with strategic foot-dragging Yes, it's mind boggling Apple to this day is not punished for this violation of competition law and brazenly gets away with this garbage for years.

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throwaway0x4 3y ago

[dead]

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

This will end up benefiting Google the most. Developers will target Chrome, especially if the government forces Apple to allow other browser engines on iOS. In addition, since the only real way to monetize web apps is via advertising, they will use Google ads.

galaxyLogic 3y ago

> keeping the web from contesting the role of app stores. The purpose of app-stores is to sell apps. How would the 'web" take on that role, of selling access to an app in return for a price.

ksec 3y ago

What would it take to have a third Mobile Platform is one question I had in my mind at least since 2017. ( The moment when I think Apple has really changed ) And the immediate answer to that was almost always, you cant, because you dont have an App ecosystem. A la Windows Mobile. I knew Apps were important, and I sometimes look up the most popular Apps on the two platform. But it never occur to me to check my own App usage or at least it wasn't obvious how to check it. Until all of a sudden I remember you could look at battery usage of Apps in the past 10 days on iOS. It turns out 60% of my usage was between a Game I played, and Safari, both being 30% each. The others were Youtube, Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter, News/ forum App. These few apps together were 35%. The other 5% was a long tail of other things, but mostly Uber, Food Delivery, and Banking Apps. Not only were the amount of Apps I used much much smaller than I thought. Most of them could be a Web App, and do offer an Online, Web version. I am not the usual one to be optimistic on HN. The task is still easily tens of billions of investment. But may be, just may be it isn't as impossible as it seems. At least Microsoft could take a shot. Not saying they will simply because the strategic vision of Nadella is laser focus on Cloud.

dreamcompiler 3y ago

Back when the iPhone app store first happened many developers (including me) asked Apple why they needed to gatekeep software installs. Of course now we know it was because Apple wanted that 30% revenue stream, but at the time Apple said -- repeatedly -- that it was because they needed to "protect the integrity of the cell phone networks." Some developers knew this was horseshit because they knew the baseband processor was a separate chip that was easily isolatable from the main CPU. We complained but there were not enough of us to rattle Apple's cage sufficiently. Here's the proof that Apple was lying about this: The iPod Touch (remember that thing?) had exactly the same App Store lockdown mechanism and it didn't have a baseband processor at all. IOW it wasn't protecting the cell phone networks because it couldn't even participate in the cell phone networks. The iPod touch was just a plain desktop computer that happened to fit in your pocket, but we let Apple become the arbiter of what software we could install on it. And now Apple wants very much to make this true on the Mac as well. I can't believe we fell for this shit. It's not too late to stop it.

hawski 3y ago

I see now the thirst in this community to break browser engine practical monopoly and theoretical duopoly. Posts about new or alternative browser engines get much more attention and excitement than posts about new programming languages. I see this in myself. I wanted to make my own programming language in the past, but for a few years I want to make my own browser.

Roark66 3y ago

Yeah, right, and who owns these "browsers the most likely disruptor"?

criddell 3y ago
They said “browsers” but in reality only Chrome matters. We will go from a duopoly to monopoly.

puchatek 3y ago

I hope PWMs will have more to offer than push notifications, which I disable every time they're on offer, just like non-essential cookies.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

There are two camps here: - it will change, it must change, we want it to change, etc. - nothing ever changes, because nothing ever changes Just paraphrasing here. But the second camp is almost always right until it is not and everything changes anyway. Nothing stays the same forever. The duopoly has existed for quite long already. Something is going to change eventually. Maybe sooner rather than later. In the case of Apple and Google enjoying full control over mobile, this cannot continue for much longer because of the following reasons: - It no longer is a duopoly. Places like China and Russia are cutting loose from Californian oversight on their mobile networks. So there are a lot of phones with Android but without Google's flavor of it and Apple has withdrawn from the Russian market. In short, Chinese manufacturers are no longer that dependent on Google or Apple to lead the way. Other countries are pushing back as well. And the Chinese are happy to sell to all of them. - Regulatory oversight in both the EU and the US is putting pressure on both Apple and Google to open their app stores and reduce anti-competitive behavior exercised via those app stores. This includes competing unfairly with things in the app store, keeping competitors out of the app store, and squeezing app store developers for billions of revenue, etc. And in the case of Google, paying Mozilla and Apple for the privilege of being the default search engine on their browsers to the extent of many billions. They have been under a lot of scrutiny for years. For Apple that means their blanket ban on anything not using Safari as its web component might have to go. As soon as it does, there will be other browsers on the platform and they'll compete on quality and features. Like they caved in and added USB-C to the iphone, it might soon have a proper version of Chrome and Firefox running on it. - Smart phones as the dominant way to consume content might not last. We have other modalities coming up now, including VR and AR, voice only applications, AI apps. Apple and Google will try to "own" this space. But it is not a given that they will succeed in that. For example, most VR content so far comes via the Steam store. Not the Play store. And neither Google nor Apple has made much of an impact with their AI efforts so far. It's OpenAI and MS that are in the lead there. - There are a growing number of cross platform app development frameworks. Flutter is popular. React-native still is widely used. Jetbrains is positioning Compose as a cross platform option with IOS, Android, and Desktop support. Additionally, PWAs aren't that bad these days and they are about to become a lot more capable via WASM. Some widely used apps are PWAs these days and most of the rest contain quite a bit of web views. - Networks are changing. We have satellite networks like Starlink and various competitors now starting to offer connectivity everywhere. Mobile operators and phone calls as a use case are a side show for that. The whole point of a smart phone is that it is a phone that connects to the phone network, which until recently was the only way to get connectivity in a lot of places without WIFI. The phone operators control the network, and Apple and Google pretend that phone numbers and sim cards still matter and everybody gets their proprietary firmware from Qualcomm (another nice monopoly). That's the deal for the last fifteen years. That might stop being true soon.

MrDresden 3y ago

I'm sure the tech is there, but until web developers themselves start supporting mobile better then I don't see PWAs taking over. Seriously, to this day I open pages that scale horribly on mobile (2x just this morning) and even don't function properly on desktop. And I am supposed to believe that the same crowd will replace native applications with all that this entails (accessibility, i18n, offline functionality etc)? Sure, there are plenty of horrible mobile applications as well that do not fulfill these requirements either. But the difference is that those apps never get any usage whereas some of the webpages I have issues with are from big domains that serve massive amounts of content (news, video etc). If those aren't doing a proper job, then the capabilities of the tech stach won't matter. PWAs will be DoA.

renegat0x0 3y ago

Reminds me of 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...

fidotron 3y ago

The problems are not technical and they aren't Apple[1], they are structural. The whole reason the App Stores succeeded (past tense) is they enabled developers to make money. Monetizing the web directly is practically impossible, certainly without resorting to intrusive ads (which are often blocked) and the attention span of people is incredibly short, so they will bounce. In order to survive you need a compelling reason for people to keep coming back and some source of revenue which is not the web site itself. The fun part is those problems are now almost as true for apps as well, which is why so many of them rely on external realities to get people to install them, before performing a bait and switch. Additionally the rules around App Stores have quietly become far more restrictive in recent years. This isn't to say the web is technically appropriate either, because it's not. CSS in particular is essentially broken. [1] I did https://www.luduxia.com/reversi/ https://www.luduxia.com/reversi/ partly as an experiment to validate my thoughts about this. iOS Safari was actually one of the easier targets, certainly far easier than Chrome on Android.

oblio 3y ago
I'm sorry for the snark, but: > The whole reason the App Stores succeeded (past tense) is they enabled developers to make money. How will the internet, the biggest money maker in the history of the world, ever enable developers to make money? > Monetizing the web directly is practically impossible, certainly without resorting to intrusive ads (which are often blocked) and the attention span of people is incredibly short, so they will bounce. In order to survive you need a compelling reason for people to keep coming back and some source of revenue which is not the web site itself. Subscription fees, ads, etc, basically everything mobile apps do now, too.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  I don't think this is snark. It just misses the point. The App Store has payment infrastructure built into it. Much, much easier to use for a developer and for a user than a different bespoke payment integration for each website.
  - 3y ago

mwn 3y ago

Does anyone have a good recommendation on reading about continuously updating PWAs. It is quite obvious for the App Store that you can push new versions and your users are notified that they need to update. If someone has a good reading on this I would appreciate it as I have started to develop PWAs. Sometimes my PWA stops working and I have to save it to Home Screen again and I am not sure how to troubleshoot this. Thank you.

croes 3y ago

Which browsers? Chromium based and Safari? Stills sounds like a duopoly, even the same companies.

ilkke 3y ago

Precisely the reason for the character assassination of Flash at the hands of Steve Jobs. I am still curious if some attempted deal with Adobe failed precessing it.

FridgeSeal 3y ago

Oh yeah because so many of the web-apps and SPA’s were forced to put up with are so much better than apps. Some businesses wrap their pages in an app and it’s equally bad, these orgs will do “lowest effort” in whatever format you give them, so that’s pretty moot either way. The people and orgs that do build actual apps present an experience that is far nicer than the equivalent web app. They’ll often work partially offline, they are most efficient and responsive, and better behaved at staying in the state I left them in, unlike your average web page. Commonly the counter argument here is “oh but PWA’s” or “but one more JS thing” or some such, which gives real “please bro, just one more lane, one more lane will fix it, please bro” vibes. Also, the browser monopoly is even worse, google basically does whatever it pleases and everyone else has to kowtow or feebly resist.

hamilyon2 3y ago

Can I download 33Gb of music from streaming service so I can listen to it offline in browser tab? Web can't be both nimble, document-based and have full-blown offline capabilities, at least I don't know any way to do it now

tgv 3y ago
By adding all sorts of APIs to Javascript that just also accidentally happens to allow Google to search your phone's file system from the browser.
ThatPlayer 3y ago
Looks like you should be able to do it with the CacheStorage apis https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/CacheStorage https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/CacheStorag...

ptx 3y ago

> The tech press almost universally fails to mention the web as a substitute for native apps Maybe because this topic was already thoroughly covered and debated back in 2007 when the first iPhone was released? Here's John Gruber characterizing the announcement in unfavorable terms: https://daringfireball.net/2007/06/wwdc_2007_keynote https://daringfireball.net/2007/06/wwdc_2007_keynote And then there was Mozilla's Firefox OS which went all in on this approach, going beyond the limitations of the iPhone's implementation. Searching for those stories should find the press coverage the post author is looking for.

sylware 3y ago

Not Big Tech browsers but noscript/basic (x)html browsers, where reasonable (where it does not work, a very simple public network API does usually suffice). As tons if not most online services can be provided via such browsers (actually it was until Big Tech broke and corrupted everything for their own benefit with their absurdely and grotesquely massive and complex web engine, including their SDK).

maelito 3y ago

I'm looking for resources that explain why touch gestures (for instance, modal sheet swipe) are so much more fluid on mobile. And what can we do about it.

nobodyandproud 3y ago

Why did Firefox drop its support for PWAs on the desktop?

insane_dreamer 3y ago

Sorry, but this is wishful thinking. Apple/Google will put up every technical obstacle they can, plus the problem is social, not technical -- the vast majority of customers want ease of use, and that's what app stores provide. I'm filing this along with those "this is the year of Linux on the desktop" predictions

weare138 3y ago

The 2 most popular mobile browsers are also made by those two same companies.

can16358p 3y ago

> An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to defend yourself against corporate predation. Really? The experience difference between a native app and a webpage is night and day.

stevage 3y ago

This would be a much more interesting and pleasant article to read if it wasn't so full of this breathless "I can't believe the big tech sites aren't writing about this!?!" hyperbole.