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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

I agree with pretty much everything in this article - I firmly believe that we're due a "post-app" world where progressively enhanced web sites provide 95% of the functionality we require. But we're not there yet - I'd love to see better WebView integration into native UI components (UINavigationController and the like), to provide things like swipe-to-go-back, which is monumentally hard to do on the web.

But hey. Maybe, just maybe, we'll end up back in a world were cross-platform development is viable. If Apple lets us.

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> I firmly believe that we're due a "post-app" world where progressively enhanced web sites provide 95% of the functionality we require.

I don't think we are. Apps provide users with better performance - compiled native is going to be faster for almost everything and should also use less battery - and provide Apple + Google with control over the ecosystem.

The latter makes it possible for (e.g.) Apple to claim that it won't unlock a phone for the FBI.

It doesn't matter whether or not the claim is true. It matters that the claim is possible at all.

>If Apple lets us.

Apple won't. Nor will Google. It's a political decision, not a technical one.

There will be a post-app world one day, but it will only happen when there's a new platform and a new kind of OS - probably something AI-based like Echo/Alexa that has no concept of separate applications.

I'd be interested in a composable OS where you could build processes from free components and then share them. This is how a lot of web development works already - see also left-pad and NPM - but if a friendlier, simpler version was available in UserLand, that might start to chip away at the walled gardens around app dev.

Of course neither Apple nor Google are likely to support something like this.

> Of course neither Apple nor Google are likely to support something like this.

They won't when they're on top. See Microsoft, Sun, etc.

But when the cracks start to show, they will cave. Long term betting against internet technologies is almost as foolish as betting against Open Source.

And if you think about it, how much longer can the gold rush last? Especially for mobile devices. How far are we from saturation? Probably not that far. The markets that are left are much smaller and harder to enter than the existing ones.

Of course, Apple or Google could pull some tricks to create entirely new markets, but that's usually a long shot.

And when the stocks stop going up (or they go up slower than expected), that's when we'll start seeing concessions from them.

Look at Microsoft these days.

I just tried the https://www.pokedex.org/ site on Chrome for Android, and I could add it to my home screen, but that doesn't add it to my app drawer.

That is annoying, I don't want it on my home screen but it seems to be the only way to turn it into a 'native app'.

I don't think Progressive Web Apps are ready for the mainstream, but I'm hopeful that in the next few years we can get there.

Interesting, I see the same thing, though it hadn't occurred to me. Seems easily fixable, though I agree that we're not there yet.

However, I have uninstalled the Facebook app from my phone, and now receive push notifications from the mobile website, which I have on my home screen. It's a fantastic experience.

(I'm the author of Pokedex.org.)

Unfortunately it's a limitation of the Android platform; you can't add arbitrary launch activities at runtime. So the Chrome team is unable to fix this AFAIK.

However, you could imagine a future release of Android that sports a custom homescreen app that just includes Chrome progressive webapps in the main app drawer. Or someone might be able to write a third-party homescreen app already that does that. (Not sure if Chrome exports that data though TBH.)

Also, FWIW, the "add to homescreen" is really just icing on the cake - even without it, PWAs save data locally and are launchable offline. If you remove Pokedex.org from your homescreen, you'll notice you can still navigate to https://pokedex.org while in airplane mode, and Chrome still reports some 6MB of Pokémon data as being stored on your device. (It remains to be seen whether this is a bug or a feature... but we'll see how many PWAs abuse it.)

The Chrome team should tell the Google Now Home activity team to show these apps in the drawer until they get the Android team to implement runtime (instead of install time) addition of launcher activities. It sounds like an instance of UX failure through non-communication.

I struggle to find the reference, but I'm almost certain that the unveiling of the original iPhone came forward with this intention ("progressively enhanced web sites provide 95% of the functionality we require"), which is why there was no app store or anything until the second release of the iPhone. We were supposed to develop amazing web pages, which could be placed as shortcuts on the home screen and function somewhat like a native app.

Of course, back then, I'm not sure there were any sites that were actually mobile friendly, and developers were more interested in hacking the device to make native apps than using a browser to make crippled apps.

It certainly was, but that was before the 30% cut idea came along.

For the time, the web app method was not the best solution. Thankfully they moved on.

"This app provides the functionality I require" is a pretty meagre goal. The idea of native apps using a platform's native support is that users come into your app already knowing how to use most of it, having learned the platform conventions.

If every app is a cross-platform web app, what's the point in having more than one platform?

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