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> Steve Jobs said that web apps would take their place Yes I remember this. But he must have known their plans and basically lied about it.
by mongol 3y ago
> Steve Jobs said that web apps would take their place
Yes I remember this. But he must have known their plans and basically lied about it.
- justinator 3y agoSounds convenient, but I remember the backlash was so bad from this news, they rushed out a dev SDK to add that support in. Different time. "No Flash" sounded like a WTF, too.
- jdewerd 3y agoYeah, "webapps are all you need" is the one time I can recall Steve Jobs getting booed on stage.
- scarface_74 3y agoAnd now developers (not end users) are whining about not being able to do good [sic] PWAs Edit: Users may not know what a PWA is. But they do know what web apps based on Electron and I have never heard any user say that they love Electron apps and they would really love to have the same experience on mobile
- hombre_fatal 3y ago[dead]
- dnissley 3y agoI mean users do complain about not being able to sideload apps, which is an issue that is at least partially/minimally addressed through PWAs.
- scarface_74 3y agoHow many users outside of geeks complain about side loading?
- dnissley 3y agoWhenever a family member bitches to me about not being able to buy kindle books through the kindle app I count that as a non-geeky complaint about sideloading :)
- threeseed 3y agoI imagine users care far more about how bloated and slow Slack, Teams etc are. Rather than whether they can side-load some apps that don't already exist on the App Store. Which apart from gambling, porn and crypto I can't exactly think what they are.
- fauigerzigerk 3y agoPorn is a significant share of device/internet usage though (not sure how big gambling is).
- threeseed 3y agoAnd plenty of people watch porn on iPhones today. This is more about having specific apps for it.
- fauigerzigerk 3y agoThis is about whether or not people might complain about not being able to side-load apps. As a significant content category is excluded from the app store, it seems very likely that some people would like to side-load those apps and complain about not being able to do so. [Edit] Another reason why people might want to side-load is to circumvent restrictions or censorship in authoritarian countries (e.g VPNs).
- scarface_74 3y agoI really hate to ask this question because it may lead down a road that I don’t want to go. But what could a porn app do that you can’t do by going on a website?
- fauigerzigerk 3y agoIf you can answer this question for Youtube and TikTok, you have already answered it for porn tube sites as well. Other categories would probably be erotic themed chat apps, social networks and of course games. And the reasons are just as valid or invalid as for the respective non-porn equivalents. As far as I'm concerned, almost all apps could be websites.
- maxsilver 3y agoTo be fair, they're only whining about PWAs, because Apple artificially locked down all native apps. Apple forced the developer shift, their own preferences didn't necessarily change. If you could install + sell iPhone apps freely, like you can with OSX / macOS apps, 99% of developer complaints about PWAs would vanish.
- scarface_74 3y agoNo because the reason that developers want PWAs do that they can have the same shitty experience across all platforms - much like Electron apps
- DANmode 3y agoThe developers on HN clamoring for PWA support are not the same devs making "one layout works fine on all screen sizes" webapps. I'm sad you're equating the two groups.
- scarface_74 3y agoYes because the developers on HN can make good graphical apps using cross platform frameworks unlike the - Java developers - every mobile OS provider ever who said the same thing - Palm, Microsoft, Google (dart), RIM and even Apple at one point had the same “sweet solution” - all Electron developers
- DANmode 3y agoYou're equating webapps with cross-platform frameworks, so we'll just talk past each other. None of what you mentioned is all of "what webapps are", just a short list of shortcuts to the technical definition of one.
- scarface_74 3y agoSo exactly what is the difference between a “cross platform framework that runs on top of a VM that abstracts the difference in the underlying hardware” in this case of cross platform frameworks and a web app where it runs on a top of a browser that serves the same purpose and also abstracts the underlying hardware that has the same drawbacks?
- nottorp 3y ago> "No Flash" sounded like a WTF, too. No Flash saved a lot of power worldwide. Until people started to do javascript apps.
- ok123456 3y agoHackers figured out how to put together a GCC toolchain and make their own apps, and that jumpstarted it.
- OnlyMortal 3y agoI remember Cydia on the 2G iPhone. I was living in Belgium at the time so had to jailbreak a UK O2 iPhone. Worked fine for the time.
- olliej 3y agoThe plan was always web apps, they're vastly more secure than any other option. That's a significant part of why safari for windows ever existed. The problem was developers just wanted to write native apps, presumably believing that the only secure apple platform would be converted to the Mac-like experience, complete with malware, etc. So with no one making actual web apps, in part because the web standards of 15+ years ago were not as powerful, and in part because developers all thought web apps were bad, and ongoing "we want real apps" noise, you got the initial UIKit APIs, which lacked _a lot_ of functionality, and made a lot of things very hard. Or you can just go all conspiracy theory and say "they would never change their plans in response to market pressure, who would do such a thing?"
- jandrese 3y agoAlso, although the original iPhone had a full browser, it was pretty slow. Not only was the data slow, but the phone itself was hamstrung by insufficient RAM which caused way too much swapping on complex webpages. Making a webapp that performed adequately was difficult to say the least.
- grumpyprole 3y agoFurther evidence for this is that Apple ported their widgets, like stocks and weather, to native apps instead of using the web-based ones from OSX.
- lm411 3y agoApple used to push web apps pretty hard. E.g. if I recall correctly, in the early days of the App Store, the guidelines were that if your app could easily be a web app, it should be, and you could have your app submission rejected for that reason.
- ynx 3y agoI worked with a couple of people who worked on the original iPhone and they basically corroborated this: the writing was on the wall but the phone wasn't quite ready for it. They needed an out to ship the phone first and the SDK later.