judah

54 ms·

241.
by judah 9y ago
Author here. That's correct - Apple waived my $99/year fee. I documented that in the post. But my post wasn't about me , it was about the hurdles involved in getting a PWA into the app store. For many people, $99/year +
242.
by judah 9y ago
Author here. That's my opinion based on experience. I have no axe to grind against Apple; I love their hardware and currently own a beautiful iPhone. Their developer story needs work, especially around web apps.
243.
by judah 9y ago
>> your post reads as a complaint Thanks for letting me know. I'll change my tone in future posts.
244.
by judah 9y ago
The free and open web is BS? Well, I disagree. That any person with the will and the skill can publish something for all the world to see, without the need for gatekeepers? That's incredible freedom the world has never before seen. &gt
245.
by judah 9y ago
I "loved" that too. Excepting having to find out that the problem really was a JS validation bug. To have to discover this in 3rd party obfuscated JS was not fun. :-) But hooray, I got it working.
246.
by judah 9y ago
Author here. Every platform needs developers. One needs only to look to Windows Phone to see that an excellent OS without an app ecosystem is doomed.
247.
by judah 9y ago
Yes, that was the case for me. If there was some other way, it was not available for me. The good news is that DnB probably already have a profile on your company. The bad news is, if any of the info is incomplete or incorrect, you need to
248.
by judah 9y ago
I answer that in the post. The short of it is, because 1) that's where users look for apps and 2) Apple greatly restricts web apps in Safari. So much so that to be first-class citizen, you need to be an app in the store.
249.
by judah 9y ago
Stepping back a moment, it's worth noting that this was Steve Jobs' original vision for the iPhone: “The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exac
250.
by judah 9y ago
You're right that mobile did help kill plugins. But that was the final blow; HTML5 had already disrupted native apps on desktop OS for a few years, and as browsers picked up HTML5 support, there was almost no need for plugins. (I say t
251.
by judah 9y ago
Author here. I'm not making any money on their platform. I'm a non-profit, building a free app; this isn't about money. I mentioned money in the post as a list of all barriers to moving a PWA to app store. $99/year + 33%
252.
by judah 9y ago
No, I wrote the post to document how an existing web app can be moved into the app store, the reasons for that, and the hurdles in doing so. APIs: Yes, Google is improving the situation -- making more and more common OS APIs exposed to stan
253.
by judah 9y ago
Author here. Maybe Java fans, or Sun/Oracle employees and fanboys said that. That doesn't really mean much. I did predict years ago that open web technologies will destroy native (desktop) apps, Flash, and Silverlight. In hindsigh
254.
by judah 9y ago
Author here. Yeah, I suspected precisely this. They run it through an automated test, and a human reviews only if the automated test raises a flag. I guess that's OK. I did like the fact that my app went from submitted to in the Google
255.
by judah 9y ago
No, that wasn't my conclusion. If you read the article, I offer a summary at the end, where I give a winner. (Winner, meaning best/easiest/simplest/fewest barriers to entry from a developer perspective.) The winner is Go
256.
by judah 9y ago
Mac button, not Macbook, but you already knew that. Open standards are good. And we should want them to win, because it provides a safe haven from the abuses of big corporations. And I think right now, Apple is stepping into those waters: t
257.
by judah 9y ago
Imagine if you install Pandora as a PWA. It's now on your homescreen. You launch it. You start playing some music. Now you switch over to Twitter. Woops! The audio stopped playing. You bring Pandora back to the fore. It reloads and sta
258.
by judah 9y ago
Agreed. As a non-profit, there is no way I'm building separate codebases for each platform. I simply don't have the time or money to do that. In this sense, the web has already won here: I'm able to take a single codebase (HT
259.
by judah 9y ago
Yes, I'm using hyperbole. :-) Even $1000 to build a free app is too much. (That said, going to Apple.com and clicking Mac shows me the base model for $4999.00 [0]) What happened to cross-platform apps? Why is it that Google and Microso
260.
by judah 9y ago
Agreed that apps (web or native) shouldn't have free access to e.g. your contacts without permission. But Apple goes beyond security and actually makes it impossible to build first-class experiences for iOS without paying $99/year
261.
by judah 9y ago
Partially agree. I understand security concerns; we shouldn't allow random web apps to freely access privileged operations, for example. (Should we allow web apps to ask for permission? That is another question.) But stopping web app
262.
by judah 9y ago
Controls: It doesn't force me to use native controls. :-) My web app today is still using the free and opened web, and all the goodness that comes with that, for UI and code. Requiring a Mac: Now you've met one. I built a halfway
263.
by judah 9y ago
Yep, I hear you. Unfortunately, the status quo today is, that's where the users are. I love the free and opened web. I want it to win. I think it will win and eat native apps (PWAs are already making that happen.) But the barriers to t
264.
by judah 9y ago
I think PWAs will win in the long run, regardless of WebAssembly. Both are exciting technologies, though, and WebAssembly will help bring performance in line with native.
265.
by judah 9y ago
I recognize that. I mentioned that Google's one-time $25 fee is quite reasonable to have an app in the app store.
266.
by judah 9y ago
It's possible. But you currently have to write code for each platform; iOS uses a Cordova plugin for this, so your JS has to talk to Cordova. Windows uses its own proprietary namespace which is injected into your app, so you write JS t
267.
by judah 9y ago
I describe that in the article, but here's the short of it: iOS: You have to use Cordova plugins. I used RemoteCommand[0] and NowPlaying[1] that lets me write JavaScript that calls into native iOS functionality. Once the Cordova plugin
268.
by judah 9y ago
The dev experience was better with MS's tools, of course. They created PWABuilder, and it *actually generates a Windows Store package (.appx) that can be submitted to the store. No other steps required. Pretty amazing. Google wasn&#x27
269.
by judah 9y ago
Thanks. I'll fix that in the article. Yeah, PWABuilder is amazing. A web page that analyzes your PWA, tells you any additional things you need to do to your PWA before submission, then generates packages for iOS, Google Play, and Windo
270.
by judah 9y ago
Yeah. That was actually one of the most painful points, and it had nothing to do with the software itself. And to make matters worse, D&B have a client-side validation bug on their site when updating your profile. I actually had to set

More ›