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Early on, I made the choice to not to invest in learning native mobile development. I focused all my limited time on the web, and I think that, for once, I made

Early on, I made the choice to not to invest in learning native mobile development. I focused all my limited time on the web, and I think that, for once, I made the right choice. Today, one can build amazing stuff for the browser. And, in my very humble opinion, the vast majority of apps should've been WebApps — except for maybe Uber, Google Drive, and games. I worked in the journalism business, and, in my country, the early 10s were filled with media outlets spending so much of the little money they had to build mobile apps. I was the sore thumb that rejected such trend. I knew very well that the quality of most of these apps would be questionable at best. And of course these companies won't be investing regularly in updating their mobile fronts. And that's exactly what happened: they're stuck with apps that are barely maintained, most of which looking like ancient artifacts from a bygone era. Because that's what they are.

host0 3y ago
PWAs, especially those built with an offline-first approach, are so much closer to the native experience than those from half a decade ago. However what concerns me is Google's and Apple's incentives to help them get better to a point where they can rival native apps which could hit their bottom line.
- maxlamb 3y ago
  I think you meant Google's and Apple's incentives to make them (PWAs) worse...
  - px43 3y ago
    My understanding is that there is a lot of political power inside Google (from the Chrome side of things) working to ensure that PWAs are the primary way that users interact with their phones. It's definitely a point of contention, with pressure on both sides, but there is a balance there. Apple on the other hand is only incentivized to funnel everyone through their App Store, and for some ridiculous reason, app developers use this to justify going all in on native apps, which I think is what this article is addressing.
    - dickersnoodle 3y ago
      One really good thing about native apps versus PWAs is that once the user installs a native app and learns the way it works they don't need to learn it again until they upgrade. With anything sourced from the web, the user is at the mercy of the wevdevs, who are at the mercy of the marketing and merchandising wizards who want to shake up the UI to try and goad users into buying more stuff. It's kind of like those round baskets that supermarkets like to clutter the aisles with; somehow they think it prompts you to buy things, but for me it adds one more product to my "no, not buying this ever again" list.
      - pmontra 3y ago
        Yes and no. Yes because for example I'm sticking to K9 mail 5.6 because of the UI change in the next versions. I picked K9 exactly because of the original UI so I'm not using the new one, which is like every other mail client. I saved the APK and I'm installing on any device of mine, also when my fingers slip on the update button. Uninstall and install 5.6 from the file manager. And no, because if the company behind the app wants to force people to upgrade they'll make the backend incompatible with the old app. Also no, because I don't think that many normal people invest time not upgrading an app because of the UI.
      - nox101 3y ago
        not my experience. Apps update automatically for most people so they are no different than web pages. You can turn off the updating and then in 2-3 months you'll get a message the app no longer works with whatever service it's tied to and you're required to upgrade. On my desktop there might be a few apps that don't need to upgrade but on my phone, 90% of all apps are tied to a service. Uber/Lift, bank apps, apartment apps, hotel apps, bike rental apps, social media apps, dating apps, streaming music apps, video apps, etc.
  - aCoreyJ 3y ago
    Google is the one pushing them. Apple has the incentive to keep people on the device though because they don't have an advertising business https://fugu-tracker.web.app/ https://fugu-tracker.web.app/
    - rchaud 3y ago
      Apple has a giant advertising business, but yes, it's not on the web like Google's is. It's on their own app properties like Apple News and the App Store.
      - threeseed 3y ago
        Apple does not have a giant advertising business. And it's so minor compared to what Google does it's ridiculous to even compare the two.
    - nerdix 3y ago
      Right. Google is incentivized to push PWAs and other forms of cross-platform mobile app development (hence Flutter). How often will the hot new app from some SV startup launch for iOS first with no Android app? Resource strapped companies that have to prioritize one platform will tend to pick iOS and that hurts Android (but is obviously good for Apple)
- ederamen 3y ago
  I'm hoping the latest EU regulation enforcing alternate browser engines will make a dent in this. ...but when I see how petulantly defiant Apple's responses to other regulations which threaten their lock-in strategies have been, I'm not optimistic.
- echelon 3y ago
  Google and Apple should be regulated to offer the same functionality and performance to the web. Their grip on the most important technology of the century is astounding and harmful. Honestly first-class web mobile installs without hoops and scare walls would be the thing to strive for.
  - idle_zealot 3y ago
    I'm not aware of any scare walls on iOS. On Android is a site is installable a little banner is supposed to pop up and ask if you want to install it. On iOS one has to open the site's share sheet and pick an install option nestled in there somewhere. I suppose that counts as a hoop, but how else would you surface the functionality without it being invasive and annoying for most users? I think a more pertinent problem is that most devs don't want to distribute their apps as PWAs because Apple deletes saved data at unpredictable intervals and PWAs can't push engagement notifications as effectively as native apps. When I switched from the Uber PWA to their native app I suddenly started getting bombarded with ads from them in my notifications.
    - echelon 3y ago
      Those are downloads though the app stores. The links merely funnel you though the stores. Native web downloads of apps are impossible on iPhone/iOS. You have to go through the app store. Native downloads of apks are possible on Android, but not until you navigate to the hidden settings and enable them. And even then, Google scares users from installing apps this way. Nobody in practice does this. It's effectively not permitted.
      - idle_zealot 3y ago
        > but not until you navigate to the hidden settings and enable them This used to be the case for older Android versions, but isn't anymore. Currently any attempt to install an APK from an app without permission to do so will pop up a missing permission warning with a deep link into the relevant settings page with a switch you can flip. Flipping the switch will initiate the installation of the APK. I can't imagine sideloading being any easier without removing the permission barrier entirely, which seems ill-advised.
- ahmedfromtunis 3y ago
  > what concerns me is Google's and Apple's incentives to help them get better I think that despite that, they did a decently good job. A few years ago, I created a voice-only social app: people can easily record and send voice memos. I built it using fairly new tech at the time: the web audio api and native web components. (I refuse to touch react-style frameworks with a 20-foot pole.) It was 99% compatible with all major web browsers from the get-go, even with its fairly advanced "tech." The only thing that wasn't cross-platform was the audio files themselves. I had to make a deep-dive into the world of encodings and codecs so that I can offer users audio files in the formats that work on their machines. Obviously, there are areas where cross-platform-ity (??) is abysmal, but things will probably continue to evolve for the best ― hopefully. And yes, PWAs with their offline capabilities are just awesome!
- chilmers 3y ago
  The nice thing about the web is that while it’s no company’s favoured platform, it’s valuable to all of them as a way into each other’s platforms. That’s why whoever is “winning” the platform war a particular point tends to neglect the web. See Microsoft in the 2000s, and Apple now. But all their competitors are incentivised to push the web forward, because it’s a useful fallback as a way to get their apps into the walled garden. Then, eventually things shift and the company that was dominating falls behind a bit, or is facing antitrust problems, and suddenly they care about the web again. In that way, the web is a perpetual underdog, but never goes away.
  - mnvrth 3y ago
    Wow, that's a great way of putting it! Thanks, I had never linked the dots that way before.
  - behnamoh 3y ago
    > See Microsoft in the 2000s, and Apple now. This. Apple's Safari (on iOS and macOS) is the Microsoft IE of 2020s. It's unbelievably behind the more sophisticated browsers (Firefox, Chrome) and yet, Apple couldn't care less.
    - troupo 3y ago
      It's not IE by any imaginable standard. And it's only "unbelievably behind" if you count all the non-standard APIs that Chrome ships by default and calls them standard. As for why Safari isn't the new IE, I recommend Breaking the Web Forward https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_the_we.html https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_th...
      - behnamoh 3y ago
        A browser that doesn't support extensions unless they're installed as separate apps on the platform is not worthy of the name "browser"; it's a lock-in mechanism.
  - treyd 3y ago
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  > PWAs . . . are so much closer to the native experience than those from half a decade ago. On the one hand I love this. I'm glad PWAs are helping drive people who wants and expect a certain thing towards the web. I am also however super sad that PWAs removed so much greatness of the web. Most don't launch in the browser. None have visible url bars. They just added a new mode so PWAs can have some kind of tabs. They don't integrate with bookmarks, or extensions. They don't have forward/back. I like the web a lot, and I feel like PWAs are a major step backwards for me. What's really scary to me js that new permissions are being added which are PWA only. I no longer can have a web like experience; I am forced to have an app like experience, without any of the affordances I get with a user agent/browser at my back. I feel so undermined here.
  - Sateeshm 3y ago
    You can use extensions with PWAs,at least on desktop
throw156754228 3y ago
So tired of junk apps cluttering up my phone and tablet. Examples: There's a parking station near me that has an app, the library photocopier has an app. Could all be done on the web.
- aronhegedus 3y ago
  I also don't understand why a parking meter needs an app, it should have a QR code>web>stripe payment (or a text to pay), rather than 2 buggy apps on iPhone and Android, which require data to download
  - bonyt 3y ago
    I’ve heard stories of people putting fake QR codes linking to fake payment portals for parking. I don’t think an app solves this problem though. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/01/fake-qr-codes-on-parking-meters.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/01/fake-qr-codes...
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    it is "surveillance capitalism" -- they want names and contact info for "their customers" .. this is a serious sickness in the modern times IMHO
  - threeseed 3y ago
    There are many reasons to have a parking app. You can extend your parking time, find closest parking meters, download tax invoices for businesses etc. All of these are much faster to do on a native app than a clunky mobile web site.
idle_zealot 3y ago
> except for maybe Uber, Google Drive, and games I understand Drive working better as a native app; it needs to be able to provide a virtual filesystem to the OS and do background syncing and such. But why Uber? Uber has (or maybe had) a mobile site that works fine for requesting rides and basically everything the app can do. I don't see what value Uber being a native app adds for the user. The same goes for most mobile games; they tend to have simple graphics that the browser is perfectly capable of rendering with great performance, and they tend to reinvent all common UI components so losing access to native system buttons and such wouldn't make a difference. PWAs should also provide plenty of storage for local save files and other game data. The exception of course being games that really push the system to its limits. I don't expect, say, Death Stranding or the RE4 remake to work well without direct access to native graphics acceleration, and they're too large to load as a single webpage. I will reiterate though that this is not the case for most mobile apps, even extremely profitable F2P ones that would benefit greatly from an extra 30% revenue. Why then do they not target the web? My gut feel is that it's because mobile users are trained to look in the app store for apps and games, not the web, while desktop users expect apps to be available in the browser with the exception of some professional tools and high-end games. That is to say, it's largely a cultural problem. Of course, Apple's lackluster support or PWAs doesn't help.
- pmarreck 3y ago
  Uber could have been coded to a PWA just fine. Parent comment is simply unknowledgeable. It's funny because the very first thing that Steve Jobs pushed when the first iPhone came out was PWA's, essentially, and not an App Store, which didn't exist yet... and the same API's are still available in Webkit I believe
- mplewis 3y ago
  Uber provides features like push notifications and Dynamic Island support to users. Web Push only became available recently, and it’s only available if you install the web app to the Home Screen.
- rchaud 3y ago
  Uber had an excellent PWA, m.uber.com. I used it for years, but it didn't seem to work right on a new phone, with some UI elements not visible or off-screen, so I went back to the app.
rubicon33 3y ago
I just wish Web wasn't such a frustrating development experience. While it has improved leaps and bounds in the last decade, I still find it to be suboptimal when compared to native offerings. Most of that frustration comes down to tooling and more specifically TypeScript. I'm not sure how to succinctly express my pain here but I have found generally that I wrestle with the type system in TypeScript far more than native offerings.
- CharlieDigital 3y ago
  > I just wish Web wasn't such a frustrating development experience It's got to be better than building to target two totally different platforms (and even more once you factor in tablets, Windows desktop/Linux/macOS) and then jumping through hoops to get your app packaged, reviewed, and updated consistently onto the target devices. > Most of that frustration comes down to tooling and more specifically TypeScript I think that a lot of folks get frustrated with TS because they are coming at it from the wrong perspective. Instead of thinking about it like a static type system, think about it like "JavaScript with shape definitions". Give this a shot: https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2023/09/typescript-is-not-a-programming-language/ https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2023/09/typescript-is-not-a-progra...
  - threeseed 3y ago
    There are plenty of options e.g. React Native, Flutter if you want one codebase. And if you want to have a lowest common denominator user experience that's fine but you shouldn't expect users to reward you for it. That's why successful apps tailor the experience for each platform.
    - CharlieDigital 3y ago
      Neither solution takes away the fact that you have to jump through hoops for distribution. Web apps and PWA's built with HTML and JavaScript are likely to work as-is for a decade or more given we are likely to see minimal incompatibilities with existing HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in that time and likely to see more net new capabilities. > if you want to have a lowest common denominator user experience... One is a native app with a budget in the millions built by dozens of engineers. One is a web app built by...me: https://youtube.com/shorts/bxs9ZpIJ6RM https://youtube.com/shorts/bxs9ZpIJ6RM Not sure that there's that much sacrifice when it comes to modern web apps.
mgaunard 3y ago
Why invest time fad-of-the-month technology at all? Invest your time into foundational pieces of the technology stack instead.
gofreddygo 3y ago
This comment almost reads like from another dimension. I made the choice to stick to web too. But everywhere I look, IOS, mac, android, windows on the phone, tablet, tv, cars its all apps. Be it under the guise of security, features or whatever, all of the UI is driven from apps. Some do a better job than others, but sucky or not you're forced to go the app route.

host0 3y ago

PWAs, especially those built with an offline-first approach, are so much closer to the native experience than those from half a decade ago. However what concerns me is Google's and Apple's incentives to help them get better to a point where they can rival native apps which could hit their bottom line.

maxlamb 3y ago
I think you meant Google's and Apple's incentives to make them (PWAs) worse...
- px43 3y ago
  My understanding is that there is a lot of political power inside Google (from the Chrome side of things) working to ensure that PWAs are the primary way that users interact with their phones. It's definitely a point of contention, with pressure on both sides, but there is a balance there. Apple on the other hand is only incentivized to funnel everyone through their App Store, and for some ridiculous reason, app developers use this to justify going all in on native apps, which I think is what this article is addressing.
  - dickersnoodle 3y ago
    One really good thing about native apps versus PWAs is that once the user installs a native app and learns the way it works they don't need to learn it again until they upgrade. With anything sourced from the web, the user is at the mercy of the wevdevs, who are at the mercy of the marketing and merchandising wizards who want to shake up the UI to try and goad users into buying more stuff. It's kind of like those round baskets that supermarkets like to clutter the aisles with; somehow they think it prompts you to buy things, but for me it adds one more product to my "no, not buying this ever again" list.
    - pmontra 3y ago
      Yes and no. Yes because for example I'm sticking to K9 mail 5.6 because of the UI change in the next versions. I picked K9 exactly because of the original UI so I'm not using the new one, which is like every other mail client. I saved the APK and I'm installing on any device of mine, also when my fingers slip on the update button. Uninstall and install 5.6 from the file manager. And no, because if the company behind the app wants to force people to upgrade they'll make the backend incompatible with the old app. Also no, because I don't think that many normal people invest time not upgrading an app because of the UI.
    - nox101 3y ago
      not my experience. Apps update automatically for most people so they are no different than web pages. You can turn off the updating and then in 2-3 months you'll get a message the app no longer works with whatever service it's tied to and you're required to upgrade. On my desktop there might be a few apps that don't need to upgrade but on my phone, 90% of all apps are tied to a service. Uber/Lift, bank apps, apartment apps, hotel apps, bike rental apps, social media apps, dating apps, streaming music apps, video apps, etc.
- aCoreyJ 3y ago
  Google is the one pushing them. Apple has the incentive to keep people on the device though because they don't have an advertising business https://fugu-tracker.web.app/ https://fugu-tracker.web.app/
  - rchaud 3y ago
    Apple has a giant advertising business, but yes, it's not on the web like Google's is. It's on their own app properties like Apple News and the App Store.
    - threeseed 3y ago
      Apple does not have a giant advertising business. And it's so minor compared to what Google does it's ridiculous to even compare the two.
  - nerdix 3y ago
    Right. Google is incentivized to push PWAs and other forms of cross-platform mobile app development (hence Flutter). How often will the hot new app from some SV startup launch for iOS first with no Android app? Resource strapped companies that have to prioritize one platform will tend to pick iOS and that hurts Android (but is obviously good for Apple)
ederamen 3y ago
I'm hoping the latest EU regulation enforcing alternate browser engines will make a dent in this. ...but when I see how petulantly defiant Apple's responses to other regulations which threaten their lock-in strategies have been, I'm not optimistic.
echelon 3y ago
Google and Apple should be regulated to offer the same functionality and performance to the web. Their grip on the most important technology of the century is astounding and harmful. Honestly first-class web mobile installs without hoops and scare walls would be the thing to strive for.
- idle_zealot 3y ago
  I'm not aware of any scare walls on iOS. On Android is a site is installable a little banner is supposed to pop up and ask if you want to install it. On iOS one has to open the site's share sheet and pick an install option nestled in there somewhere. I suppose that counts as a hoop, but how else would you surface the functionality without it being invasive and annoying for most users? I think a more pertinent problem is that most devs don't want to distribute their apps as PWAs because Apple deletes saved data at unpredictable intervals and PWAs can't push engagement notifications as effectively as native apps. When I switched from the Uber PWA to their native app I suddenly started getting bombarded with ads from them in my notifications.
  - echelon 3y ago
    Those are downloads though the app stores. The links merely funnel you though the stores. Native web downloads of apps are impossible on iPhone/iOS. You have to go through the app store. Native downloads of apks are possible on Android, but not until you navigate to the hidden settings and enable them. And even then, Google scares users from installing apps this way. Nobody in practice does this. It's effectively not permitted.
    - idle_zealot 3y ago
      > but not until you navigate to the hidden settings and enable them This used to be the case for older Android versions, but isn't anymore. Currently any attempt to install an APK from an app without permission to do so will pop up a missing permission warning with a deep link into the relevant settings page with a switch you can flip. Flipping the switch will initiate the installation of the APK. I can't imagine sideloading being any easier without removing the permission barrier entirely, which seems ill-advised.
ahmedfromtunis 3y ago
> what concerns me is Google's and Apple's incentives to help them get better I think that despite that, they did a decently good job. A few years ago, I created a voice-only social app: people can easily record and send voice memos. I built it using fairly new tech at the time: the web audio api and native web components. (I refuse to touch react-style frameworks with a 20-foot pole.) It was 99% compatible with all major web browsers from the get-go, even with its fairly advanced "tech." The only thing that wasn't cross-platform was the audio files themselves. I had to make a deep-dive into the world of encodings and codecs so that I can offer users audio files in the formats that work on their machines. Obviously, there are areas where cross-platform-ity (??) is abysmal, but things will probably continue to evolve for the best ― hopefully. And yes, PWAs with their offline capabilities are just awesome!
chilmers 3y ago
The nice thing about the web is that while it’s no company’s favoured platform, it’s valuable to all of them as a way into each other’s platforms. That’s why whoever is “winning” the platform war a particular point tends to neglect the web. See Microsoft in the 2000s, and Apple now. But all their competitors are incentivised to push the web forward, because it’s a useful fallback as a way to get their apps into the walled garden. Then, eventually things shift and the company that was dominating falls behind a bit, or is facing antitrust problems, and suddenly they care about the web again. In that way, the web is a perpetual underdog, but never goes away.
- mnvrth 3y ago
  Wow, that's a great way of putting it! Thanks, I had never linked the dots that way before.
- behnamoh 3y ago
  > See Microsoft in the 2000s, and Apple now. This. Apple's Safari (on iOS and macOS) is the Microsoft IE of 2020s. It's unbelievably behind the more sophisticated browsers (Firefox, Chrome) and yet, Apple couldn't care less.
  - troupo 3y ago
    It's not IE by any imaginable standard. And it's only "unbelievably behind" if you count all the non-standard APIs that Chrome ships by default and calls them standard. As for why Safari isn't the new IE, I recommend Breaking the Web Forward https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_the_we.html https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_th...
    - behnamoh 3y ago
      A browser that doesn't support extensions unless they're installed as separate apps on the platform is not worthy of the name "browser"; it's a lock-in mechanism.
- treyd 3y ago
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
> PWAs . . . are so much closer to the native experience than those from half a decade ago. On the one hand I love this. I'm glad PWAs are helping drive people who wants and expect a certain thing towards the web. I am also however super sad that PWAs removed so much greatness of the web. Most don't launch in the browser. None have visible url bars. They just added a new mode so PWAs can have some kind of tabs. They don't integrate with bookmarks, or extensions. They don't have forward/back. I like the web a lot, and I feel like PWAs are a major step backwards for me. What's really scary to me js that new permissions are being added which are PWA only. I no longer can have a web like experience; I am forced to have an app like experience, without any of the affordances I get with a user agent/browser at my back. I feel so undermined here.
- Sateeshm 3y ago
  You can use extensions with PWAs,at least on desktop

throw156754228 3y ago

So tired of junk apps cluttering up my phone and tablet. Examples: There's a parking station near me that has an app, the library photocopier has an app. Could all be done on the web.

aronhegedus 3y ago
I also don't understand why a parking meter needs an app, it should have a QR code>web>stripe payment (or a text to pay), rather than 2 buggy apps on iPhone and Android, which require data to download
- bonyt 3y ago
  I’ve heard stories of people putting fake QR codes linking to fake payment portals for parking. I don’t think an app solves this problem though. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/01/fake-qr-codes-on-parking-meters.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/01/fake-qr-codes...
- mistrial9 3y ago
  it is "surveillance capitalism" -- they want names and contact info for "their customers" .. this is a serious sickness in the modern times IMHO
- threeseed 3y ago
  There are many reasons to have a parking app. You can extend your parking time, find closest parking meters, download tax invoices for businesses etc. All of these are much faster to do on a native app than a clunky mobile web site.

idle_zealot 3y ago

> except for maybe Uber, Google Drive, and games I understand Drive working better as a native app; it needs to be able to provide a virtual filesystem to the OS and do background syncing and such. But why Uber? Uber has (or maybe had) a mobile site that works fine for requesting rides and basically everything the app can do. I don't see what value Uber being a native app adds for the user. The same goes for most mobile games; they tend to have simple graphics that the browser is perfectly capable of rendering with great performance, and they tend to reinvent all common UI components so losing access to native system buttons and such wouldn't make a difference. PWAs should also provide plenty of storage for local save files and other game data. The exception of course being games that really push the system to its limits. I don't expect, say, Death Stranding or the RE4 remake to work well without direct access to native graphics acceleration, and they're too large to load as a single webpage. I will reiterate though that this is not the case for most mobile apps, even extremely profitable F2P ones that would benefit greatly from an extra 30% revenue. Why then do they not target the web? My gut feel is that it's because mobile users are trained to look in the app store for apps and games, not the web, while desktop users expect apps to be available in the browser with the exception of some professional tools and high-end games. That is to say, it's largely a cultural problem. Of course, Apple's lackluster support or PWAs doesn't help.

pmarreck 3y ago
Uber could have been coded to a PWA just fine. Parent comment is simply unknowledgeable. It's funny because the very first thing that Steve Jobs pushed when the first iPhone came out was PWA's, essentially, and not an App Store, which didn't exist yet... and the same API's are still available in Webkit I believe
mplewis 3y ago
Uber provides features like push notifications and Dynamic Island support to users. Web Push only became available recently, and it’s only available if you install the web app to the Home Screen.
rchaud 3y ago
Uber had an excellent PWA, m.uber.com. I used it for years, but it didn't seem to work right on a new phone, with some UI elements not visible or off-screen, so I went back to the app.

rubicon33 3y ago

I just wish Web wasn't such a frustrating development experience. While it has improved leaps and bounds in the last decade, I still find it to be suboptimal when compared to native offerings. Most of that frustration comes down to tooling and more specifically TypeScript. I'm not sure how to succinctly express my pain here but I have found generally that I wrestle with the type system in TypeScript far more than native offerings.

CharlieDigital 3y ago
> I just wish Web wasn't such a frustrating development experience It's got to be better than building to target two totally different platforms (and even more once you factor in tablets, Windows desktop/Linux/macOS) and then jumping through hoops to get your app packaged, reviewed, and updated consistently onto the target devices. > Most of that frustration comes down to tooling and more specifically TypeScript I think that a lot of folks get frustrated with TS because they are coming at it from the wrong perspective. Instead of thinking about it like a static type system, think about it like "JavaScript with shape definitions". Give this a shot: https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2023/09/typescript-is-not-a-programming-language/ https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2023/09/typescript-is-not-a-progra...
- threeseed 3y ago
  There are plenty of options e.g. React Native, Flutter if you want one codebase. And if you want to have a lowest common denominator user experience that's fine but you shouldn't expect users to reward you for it. That's why successful apps tailor the experience for each platform.
  - CharlieDigital 3y ago
    Neither solution takes away the fact that you have to jump through hoops for distribution. Web apps and PWA's built with HTML and JavaScript are likely to work as-is for a decade or more given we are likely to see minimal incompatibilities with existing HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in that time and likely to see more net new capabilities. > if you want to have a lowest common denominator user experience... One is a native app with a budget in the millions built by dozens of engineers. One is a web app built by...me: https://youtube.com/shorts/bxs9ZpIJ6RM https://youtube.com/shorts/bxs9ZpIJ6RM Not sure that there's that much sacrifice when it comes to modern web apps.

mgaunard 3y ago

Why invest time fad-of-the-month technology at all? Invest your time into foundational pieces of the technology stack instead.

gofreddygo 3y ago

This comment almost reads like from another dimension. I made the choice to stick to web too. But everywhere I look, IOS, mac, android, windows on the phone, tablet, tv, cars its all apps. Be it under the guise of security, features or whatever, all of the UI is driven from apps. Some do a better job than others, but sucky or not you're forced to go the app route.