6 ms·

Haha, excellent timing: I opened HN just now because: 1. I got tired of waiting 2h for my app to get notarized because 2. I can't sell it on the AppStore in

Haha, excellent timing: I opened HN just now because: 1. I got tired of waiting 2h for my app to get notarized because 2. I can't sell it on the AppStore in the EU... because 3. the AppStore Connect page gets stuck at their DSA compliance form (it's been 10 days). And, to add insult to injury, the whole thing could be a PWA, without any compromises in the UX whatsoever. I misread the title, but I still posted this comment as an example of confirmation bias* in the orange book for posteriority. Time to step away from the computer! * (sunk cost fallacy)

echelon 9mo ago
> the whole thing could be a PWA Apple neutered the web as best they could to force you to use their rails. I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks, kids especially, to make animation, games, and mini apps, and deploy them as single binary blobs. A single swf file could be kept and run anywhere. For the younger generation: imagine right clicking to download a YouTube video or a video game you'd see on itch.io. And you could send those to friends. You could even embed online multiplayer and chatrooms into the apps. It all just worked. What we have now is a soup of complexity that can't even match the feature set.
- marcosdumay 9mo ago
  Just like Microsoft before them. But flash specifically deserved to die.
  - NewsaHackO 9mo ago
    Absolutely. Apple had the balls to be the first major tech company to take the first material step to actually end the security nightmare that was Flash for good.
    - as1mov 9mo ago
      I'm sure it was the security that of Flash that worried them, and not the fact that a third party was encroaching on their walled garden that couldn't be extorted.
      - LoganDark 9mo ago
        Just because they can be worried about multiple things doesn't mean they were only worried about the worst of them. Security in Flash was a total and utter nightmare. It was awful.
- titzer 9mo ago
  Flash was cool, but the plugin was full of bugs and a constant source of pretty serious vulnerabilities. I too miss the flash games era of the web at times, but it wasn't some utopian thing.
- tliltocatl 9mo ago
  Flash was cool, but it was also a spectacular dumpster file. Honestly I'm sort of glad Google&Apple killed it. Yes it was an amazing medium, but it feels almost like Adobe kept thinking about it as an animation studio and didn't care to run it as an application platform with all the concerns it entails (i. e. security). And support of anything that's not Windows, while technically present, was abysmal. HTML5, with all it sins and warts, is a better platform, even if it has much higher entry barrier.
  - echelon 9mo ago
    Creativity dropped off a chasm with HTML5. During the Flash era, creativity flourished. It was accessible, too. Seven year olds could use it. Flash was getting better and better. It could have become an open standard had Jobs not murdered it to keep runtimes off iPhone. He was worried about competition. The battery and security issues were technical problems and fully solvable. The companies that filled the web void - Google and Apple - both had their own selfish reasons not to propose a successor. And they haven't helped anyone else step up to the plate. It would be impossible now. Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web. Smartphones might have pushed us forward, but the app layer held us back. The 1990s and 2000s web saw what AOL and Microsoft were trying to lock us into and instead opted for open and flexible. Platformization locked us into hyperscaler rails where they get action on everything we do. This has slowed us down tremendously, and a lot of the free energy and innovation capital of the system goes to taxation.
    - pdntspa 9mo ago
      > Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web. No they wouldn't. We've forgotten just how bad and sloppy flash apps were. The handful of companies that used Adobe Flex turned out awful POS that barely worked. It occupied the same space that Electron does today -- bloated, slow, and permitting cheap-ass devs to utilize cheap talent to develop 'apps' with all the finesse of a sledgehammer As a kid I loved flash, I was making interactive apps in AS2/3 in high school. But I watched in horror as it became the de facto platform for crapware
- teaearlgraycold 9mo ago
  On the other hand you're okay with Adobe having that level of control over the web? Maybe one day we'll see a JS/WASM framework that is just as portable.
  - echelon 9mo ago
    Ironically, Macromedia / Adobe didn't try to assert any control back then. They were even opening the standard, IIRC. They learned this much later after learning the game from Meta, Google, and Apple.
- thisislife2 9mo ago
  Macromedia Flash was indeed a beautiful, innovative piece of software. HTML 5 still doesn't match its features vis the ease and usability that Flash offered in creating and deploying content online. But after its acquisition by Adobe, it just ever so slowly went downhill. It should have been open sourced.
- ajross 9mo ago
  > I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks Capcut and Roblox would like words. No, that's kinda just wrong. Content generation for non-technical folks has never been easier or more effective. Flash is just something nerds here remember fondly because it was a gateway drug into hackerdom. Some of us are older and might feel the same way about Hypercard or TurboPascal or whatnot.
- raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
  This myth that Apple “killed” Flash on mobile should die. When Flash finally came to Android in 2010-11, it required a phone that had a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM and barely ran on that. The first iPhone came with 128MB RAM with a 400Mhz CPU, it couldn’t even run Safari smoothly. If you scrolled too fast, you would get a checkerboard while you waited on the page to render. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011. Adobe was always making promises it couldn’t keep. The Motorola Xoom was suppose to be the “iPad Killer” that could run Flash , Adobe was late leaving the Xoom in the unenviable position that you couldn’t go to the Xoom home page on the Xoom at launch because it required Flash.
- antod 9mo ago
  "Run anywhere" was getting pretty stretched long before it was killed, Linux support was orphaned, old, buggy, vulnerable and hard to run in contemporary browsers. I was stoked to watch Apple nail the coffin shut, and see it consigned to history along with Java applets.
- jodrellblank 9mo ago
  You say the security and battery issues "were solvable", so why didn't Macromedia or Adobe solve them? Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005, the era of Palms, Blackberries, Nokia/Symbian, Windows Phone, Microsoft Tablet PC; mobile devices were not a new surprise by 2005. Adobe did get Flash onto Palm mobile devices and TVs and early Android smartphones, and the experience was poor[1][2] - not just from those two issues; Flash sites weren't designed for mobile or touch or small screens. Customers had a choice of Flash-mobile devices, and preferred iPhones. > "Ryan Lawler of TechCrunch wrote in 2012 "Jobs was right", adding Android users had poor experiences with watching Flash content and interactive Flash experiences were "often wonky or didn't perform well, even on high-powered phones".[9] Mike Isaac of Wired wrote in 2011 that "In [our] testing of multiple Flash-compatible devices, choppiness and browser crashes were common", and a former Adobe employee stated "Flash is a resource hog [...] It's a battery drain, and it's unreliable on mobile web browsers".[10] Kyle Wagner of Gizmodo wrote in 2011 that "Adobe was never really able to smooth over performance, battery, and security issues".[11]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash [1] https://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9692/palm-joins-adobe-flash-project-for-palm-pre-webos-flash-support/ https://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9692/palm-joins-adobe-fl... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/ere0c/how_does_flash_run_on_webos_20_for_people_with_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/ere0c/how_does_flash_...
pcl 9mo ago
Have you built a PWA solution for it? If not, why not?
- rpastuszak 9mo ago
  Oh boy, I have I've been working with offline-first web apps since the late 2000s... then the particular app I have in mind has been used as a PWA for the past 6-7 years. I really, really, love building stuff for/on the web. When working with founders/clients we'd often start with building the MVP as a PWA, because of how easy it is to iterate and test. (https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/web-and-feedback-loops/ https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/web-and-feedback-loops/) That said, some reasons off the top of my head in random order: - seemingly small but UX critical features breaking or not working at all (wake, audio, notifications, scroll breaking). - most of the users don't know/haven't been taught they can install a site or assume that PWAs are inherently worse - PWAs are harder to monetise (no super easy way to let the user pay a lifetime licence for the app, customers want super easy, and that's not for me to judge) - critical, but non-obvious to a non-technical person (and thus difficult to explain) features are unstable or janky on iOS when running standalone/via home screen (example: wiping offline storage every few days). In some ways things work better than, say 10 years ago, but at the same time there's the *unpredictability*. I really don't want to worry about my app breaking in some impossible to fix way next year. Not, when the app is meant to pay my rent. Performance was rarely an issue, discounting experiments like running image recognition inside a "service worker" in JS, on iPhone 7 for an AR game I was messing with. That was in 2016 (before Pokemon Go came out and kind... of dumbed down the idea or AR).
  - pcl 8mo ago
    I think the offline storage situation is improved with the latest manifest structure, although I haven’t experimented in depth. I know that at least one of my PWAs has local data going back a couple years at this point. I really wish Apple had kept investing more fully in this space. So many of the pieces are there, but like you said, there are still assorted blockers. It’s clear they still care about this space to a certain extent, since they have been fixing bugs and making improvements (screen-lock APIs and offline support, for example). But it could be so much better.
candiddevmike 9mo ago
I can't sign into Apple without going incognito in Chrome. I put in my email, and it throws and error before asking me for my password. It's not an extension, it's not a cookie, idk what it is. And then when I do get past he password, it sends a OTP to a Mac Mini I never use and have to tap around to get it to generate a SMS code. No option for external TOTP, and no way to remove the Mac Mini I don't use from OTP without signing out of it.
- shreddit 9mo ago
  I have the exact same problem. It’s saying something about not being able to confirm my identity? I took a look at the dev tools and it’s apparently making a request to a server which returns an error. It only works in incognito because it’s using a different ip address there…
  - alt227 9mo ago
    Sorry, how is it that you make Chrome incognito window use a differnt IP address? That sounds like a good magic trick.
    - shreddit 9mo ago
      Beats me. Same computer, same browser. Don’t know whether it’s the exact same address though. Cleared cookies already. Still only working in incognito.
  - candiddevmike 9mo ago
    Exact same problem, exact same error. Glad to know I'm not alone!!!
  - stringtoint 9mo ago
    Funny, I had this problem yesterday when I tried to login to Apple Business Manager. Thought I had messed up but worked fine in incognito.
- eptcyka 9mo ago
epistasis 9mo ago
I use PWAs on iOS and they're pretty great. That was the original plan for apps on iOS, before Apple was pressured into creating an app store.
- graemep 9mo ago
  Who pressured Apple and why? I had nor even heard of app stores before then IIRC unless you count Linux repos.
  - epistasis 9mo ago
    > While originally developing iPhone prior to its unveiling in 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did not intend to let third-party developers build native apps for iOS, instead directing them to make web applications for the Safari web browser.[10] However, backlash from developers prompted the company to reconsider,[10] with Jobs announcing in October 2007 that Apple would have a software development kit available for developers by February 2008.[11][12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(Apple) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(Apple)
    - bartread 9mo ago
      And the irony of this is that a lot of the apps in the app store are hybrid apps that are basically web apps with a thin native wrapper around them because it's just so much less of a hassle to develop for both iOS and Android that way and because, if you're coming at it as an outsider, Swift is such a ball-ache to deal with compared to other languages and stacks. So PWAs would have been more than fine but, unfortunately, that ship has long since sailed, and Apple make way too much money out of the app store for a course change.
      - raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
        It came out in the Epic vs Apple trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases of pay to win games. The only money Apple is making from these “could have been a web app” apps are for things like Uber where you can use Apple Pay (not in app purchases)- that has the same credit card fees regardless. If it’s only mean old Apple, where are all of the great Android PWAs and why do developers decide to make native Android apps?
zahlman 9mo ago
> the orange book ?

echelon 9mo ago

> the whole thing could be a PWA Apple neutered the web as best they could to force you to use their rails. I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks, kids especially, to make animation, games, and mini apps, and deploy them as single binary blobs. A single swf file could be kept and run anywhere. For the younger generation: imagine right clicking to download a YouTube video or a video game you'd see on itch.io. And you could send those to friends. You could even embed online multiplayer and chatrooms into the apps. It all just worked. What we have now is a soup of complexity that can't even match the feature set.

marcosdumay 9mo ago
Just like Microsoft before them. But flash specifically deserved to die.
- NewsaHackO 9mo ago
  Absolutely. Apple had the balls to be the first major tech company to take the first material step to actually end the security nightmare that was Flash for good.
  - as1mov 9mo ago
    I'm sure it was the security that of Flash that worried them, and not the fact that a third party was encroaching on their walled garden that couldn't be extorted.
    - LoganDark 9mo ago
      Just because they can be worried about multiple things doesn't mean they were only worried about the worst of them. Security in Flash was a total and utter nightmare. It was awful.
titzer 9mo ago
Flash was cool, but the plugin was full of bugs and a constant source of pretty serious vulnerabilities. I too miss the flash games era of the web at times, but it wasn't some utopian thing.
tliltocatl 9mo ago
Flash was cool, but it was also a spectacular dumpster file. Honestly I'm sort of glad Google&Apple killed it. Yes it was an amazing medium, but it feels almost like Adobe kept thinking about it as an animation studio and didn't care to run it as an application platform with all the concerns it entails (i. e. security). And support of anything that's not Windows, while technically present, was abysmal. HTML5, with all it sins and warts, is a better platform, even if it has much higher entry barrier.
- echelon 9mo ago
  Creativity dropped off a chasm with HTML5. During the Flash era, creativity flourished. It was accessible, too. Seven year olds could use it. Flash was getting better and better. It could have become an open standard had Jobs not murdered it to keep runtimes off iPhone. He was worried about competition. The battery and security issues were technical problems and fully solvable. The companies that filled the web void - Google and Apple - both had their own selfish reasons not to propose a successor. And they haven't helped anyone else step up to the plate. It would be impossible now. Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web. Smartphones might have pushed us forward, but the app layer held us back. The 1990s and 2000s web saw what AOL and Microsoft were trying to lock us into and instead opted for open and flexible. Platformization locked us into hyperscaler rails where they get action on everything we do. This has slowed us down tremendously, and a lot of the free energy and innovation capital of the system goes to taxation.
  - pdntspa 9mo ago
    > Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web. No they wouldn't. We've forgotten just how bad and sloppy flash apps were. The handful of companies that used Adobe Flex turned out awful POS that barely worked. It occupied the same space that Electron does today -- bloated, slow, and permitting cheap-ass devs to utilize cheap talent to develop 'apps' with all the finesse of a sledgehammer As a kid I loved flash, I was making interactive apps in AS2/3 in high school. But I watched in horror as it became the de facto platform for crapware
teaearlgraycold 9mo ago
On the other hand you're okay with Adobe having that level of control over the web? Maybe one day we'll see a JS/WASM framework that is just as portable.
- echelon 9mo ago
  Ironically, Macromedia / Adobe didn't try to assert any control back then. They were even opening the standard, IIRC. They learned this much later after learning the game from Meta, Google, and Apple.
thisislife2 9mo ago
Macromedia Flash was indeed a beautiful, innovative piece of software. HTML 5 still doesn't match its features vis the ease and usability that Flash offered in creating and deploying content online. But after its acquisition by Adobe, it just ever so slowly went downhill. It should have been open sourced.
ajross 9mo ago
> I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks Capcut and Roblox would like words. No, that's kinda just wrong. Content generation for non-technical folks has never been easier or more effective. Flash is just something nerds here remember fondly because it was a gateway drug into hackerdom. Some of us are older and might feel the same way about Hypercard or TurboPascal or whatnot.
raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
This myth that Apple “killed” Flash on mobile should die. When Flash finally came to Android in 2010-11, it required a phone that had a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM and barely ran on that. The first iPhone came with 128MB RAM with a 400Mhz CPU, it couldn’t even run Safari smoothly. If you scrolled too fast, you would get a checkerboard while you waited on the page to render. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011. Adobe was always making promises it couldn’t keep. The Motorola Xoom was suppose to be the “iPad Killer” that could run Flash , Adobe was late leaving the Xoom in the unenviable position that you couldn’t go to the Xoom home page on the Xoom at launch because it required Flash.
antod 9mo ago
"Run anywhere" was getting pretty stretched long before it was killed, Linux support was orphaned, old, buggy, vulnerable and hard to run in contemporary browsers. I was stoked to watch Apple nail the coffin shut, and see it consigned to history along with Java applets.
jodrellblank 9mo ago
You say the security and battery issues "were solvable", so why didn't Macromedia or Adobe solve them? Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005, the era of Palms, Blackberries, Nokia/Symbian, Windows Phone, Microsoft Tablet PC; mobile devices were not a new surprise by 2005. Adobe did get Flash onto Palm mobile devices and TVs and early Android smartphones, and the experience was poor[1][2] - not just from those two issues; Flash sites weren't designed for mobile or touch or small screens. Customers had a choice of Flash-mobile devices, and preferred iPhones. > "Ryan Lawler of TechCrunch wrote in 2012 "Jobs was right", adding Android users had poor experiences with watching Flash content and interactive Flash experiences were "often wonky or didn't perform well, even on high-powered phones".[9] Mike Isaac of Wired wrote in 2011 that "In [our] testing of multiple Flash-compatible devices, choppiness and browser crashes were common", and a former Adobe employee stated "Flash is a resource hog [...] It's a battery drain, and it's unreliable on mobile web browsers".[10] Kyle Wagner of Gizmodo wrote in 2011 that "Adobe was never really able to smooth over performance, battery, and security issues".[11]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash [1] https://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9692/palm-joins-adobe-flash-project-for-palm-pre-webos-flash-support/ https://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9692/palm-joins-adobe-fl... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/ere0c/how_does_flash_run_on_webos_20_for_people_with_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/ere0c/how_does_flash_...

pcl 9mo ago

Have you built a PWA solution for it? If not, why not?

rpastuszak 9mo ago
Oh boy, I have I've been working with offline-first web apps since the late 2000s... then the particular app I have in mind has been used as a PWA for the past 6-7 years. I really, really, love building stuff for/on the web. When working with founders/clients we'd often start with building the MVP as a PWA, because of how easy it is to iterate and test. (https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/web-and-feedback-loops/ https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/web-and-feedback-loops/) That said, some reasons off the top of my head in random order: - seemingly small but UX critical features breaking or not working at all (wake, audio, notifications, scroll breaking). - most of the users don't know/haven't been taught they can install a site or assume that PWAs are inherently worse - PWAs are harder to monetise (no super easy way to let the user pay a lifetime licence for the app, customers want super easy, and that's not for me to judge) - critical, but non-obvious to a non-technical person (and thus difficult to explain) features are unstable or janky on iOS when running standalone/via home screen (example: wiping offline storage every few days). In some ways things work better than, say 10 years ago, but at the same time there's the *unpredictability*. I really don't want to worry about my app breaking in some impossible to fix way next year. Not, when the app is meant to pay my rent. Performance was rarely an issue, discounting experiments like running image recognition inside a "service worker" in JS, on iPhone 7 for an AR game I was messing with. That was in 2016 (before Pokemon Go came out and kind... of dumbed down the idea or AR).
- pcl 8mo ago
  I think the offline storage situation is improved with the latest manifest structure, although I haven’t experimented in depth. I know that at least one of my PWAs has local data going back a couple years at this point. I really wish Apple had kept investing more fully in this space. So many of the pieces are there, but like you said, there are still assorted blockers. It’s clear they still care about this space to a certain extent, since they have been fixing bugs and making improvements (screen-lock APIs and offline support, for example). But it could be so much better.

candiddevmike 9mo ago

I can't sign into Apple without going incognito in Chrome. I put in my email, and it throws and error before asking me for my password. It's not an extension, it's not a cookie, idk what it is. And then when I do get past he password, it sends a OTP to a Mac Mini I never use and have to tap around to get it to generate a SMS code. No option for external TOTP, and no way to remove the Mac Mini I don't use from OTP without signing out of it.

shreddit 9mo ago
I have the exact same problem. It’s saying something about not being able to confirm my identity? I took a look at the dev tools and it’s apparently making a request to a server which returns an error. It only works in incognito because it’s using a different ip address there…
- alt227 9mo ago
  Sorry, how is it that you make Chrome incognito window use a differnt IP address? That sounds like a good magic trick.
  - shreddit 9mo ago
    Beats me. Same computer, same browser. Don’t know whether it’s the exact same address though. Cleared cookies already. Still only working in incognito.
- candiddevmike 9mo ago
  Exact same problem, exact same error. Glad to know I'm not alone!!!
- stringtoint 9mo ago
  Funny, I had this problem yesterday when I tried to login to Apple Business Manager. Thought I had messed up but worked fine in incognito.
eptcyka 9mo ago

epistasis 9mo ago

I use PWAs on iOS and they're pretty great. That was the original plan for apps on iOS, before Apple was pressured into creating an app store.

graemep 9mo ago
Who pressured Apple and why? I had nor even heard of app stores before then IIRC unless you count Linux repos.
- epistasis 9mo ago
  > While originally developing iPhone prior to its unveiling in 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did not intend to let third-party developers build native apps for iOS, instead directing them to make web applications for the Safari web browser.[10] However, backlash from developers prompted the company to reconsider,[10] with Jobs announcing in October 2007 that Apple would have a software development kit available for developers by February 2008.[11][12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(Apple) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(Apple)
  - bartread 9mo ago
    And the irony of this is that a lot of the apps in the app store are hybrid apps that are basically web apps with a thin native wrapper around them because it's just so much less of a hassle to develop for both iOS and Android that way and because, if you're coming at it as an outsider, Swift is such a ball-ache to deal with compared to other languages and stacks. So PWAs would have been more than fine but, unfortunately, that ship has long since sailed, and Apple make way too much money out of the app store for a course change.
    - raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
      It came out in the Epic vs Apple trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases of pay to win games. The only money Apple is making from these “could have been a web app” apps are for things like Uber where you can use Apple Pay (not in app purchases)- that has the same credit card fees regardless. If it’s only mean old Apple, where are all of the great Android PWAs and why do developers decide to make native Android apps?

zahlman 9mo ago

> the orange book ?