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Facebook's mobile web app is very good. In fact it is quite a lot better than their native app on Android. I believe most of the examples of bad mobile web apps (eg: twitter, linkedIn) are because the organization focuses their resources on the native side instead of the mobile web app.

> Every web app I've used has required a painful sign-up process, which is usually where I bail out of the process. Way more friction than an app store install.

That signup process can be made better. Nothing fixes the pains of having to download a large app over a potentially slow/spotty network, sacrifice an unknown amount of privacy, then having to twiddle a variable amount of options to get the thing to stop sending you notifications about every single action or event, then after a week of use, having to re-download the large app again because of updates.

With today's web apps, I can only sympathize with the examples that deal with file size. The others still apply to using web services.

> Nothing fixes the pains of having to download a large app over a potentially slow/spotty network

You mean like the 12 MB it takes to load a Google Sheet? At least with a native app, once it's downloaded you know it's there and it won't go into an indeterminate state if you happen to try to use a feature that hasn't been loaded yet.

> sacrifice an unknown amount of privacy, then having to twiddle a variable amount of options to get the thing to stop sending you notifications about every single action or event

These are not issues when you have iOS's permissions model

> These are not issues when you have iOS's permissions model

Which is 13.9% market share currently.

Unless Apple wants to make budget devices (they don't), this world does not exist, and it won't any time soon.

> You mean like the 12 MB it takes to load a Google Sheet?

Although I realize we are speaking in hypotheticals, and generalizing the type of apps people use (I realize there are smaller ~2 meg apps), the average size of an iOS app is 20mb, and the average android app is 7mb. You pointed out an exceptional use case, not the most common.

> Every web app I've used has required a painful sign-up process, which is usually where I bail out of the process. Way more friction than an app store install.

Support for password managers like LastPass is one of the areas where Android shines compared to iOS.

Also, you seem to imply that most apps downloaded from the app store don't require a sign-up process. I beg to differ. And I note that the sign-up process is even more painful outside of a browser (e.g. outside of the browser you can't use LastPass to generate a random password for you)

For what it's worth, iOS and OS X both have Keychain built into them, basically LastPass but blessed by the OS.

ex: http://imgur.com/YJXCWxz

true, but as of now only a handful of native apps support it (e.g. Uber does, but then Uber supports any major password manager including LastPass).

My main argument being that any password manager, be it Lastpass or not, tends to work better on Android because of features like "draw over other apps" which basically means creating a modal window on top of other apps. On Android this action can be initiated by clicking on an icon which lives in the notification drawer, and it can be done in any app, while on iOS it's only possible in an app that supports the iOS 8+ extensibility features (such as Uber)

On iOS Keychain works relatively well for Safari, but needs to be explicitely supported for native apps, which means basically never.

Also as far as I know there's no first party app to directly view your keychain items in iOS, which makes it useless when the domain detection fails (it's the most painful when the same service has two clearly different domains for desktop web and mobile web, which is a pretty common case)

I use keychain but end up duplicating a lot of entries in a Lastpast like app just to cover these cases.

> Also as far as I know there's no first party app to directly view your keychain items in iOS, which makes it useless when the domain detection fails

They fixed that in either iOS 8 or 9, there's now a "Other Passwords..." option that lets you browse/free-text search through all your saved passwords.

Yes, this definitely improved the situation, but I think there is still big limitations on what you have access to.

Perhaps some of the entries are not marked as web passwords, and/or it is limited to the passwords Safari has saved (Chrome or firefox passwords would get ignored for instance). I have hundreds of entries in my keychain and "Other Passwords..." won't display most of them.

As a behavior, it doesn't bother me much if Safari wouldn't get automatic access to other apps' keychain entries or generic passwords (from a security perspective it's a sensible limitation). Instead I would like a separate keychain app, mirroring the abilities of the OSX app.

Why would a PWA have a sign-up process when a native app wouldn't?

Every web app I've used has required a painful sign-up process, which is usually where I bail out of the process.

How do you feel about using Facebook or Google accounts to sign into third party apps?

The website about 'progressive web apps' [1] has 3 demo apps. None of them work in Firefox 43 on Linux. The apps require JavaScript but fail to use the <noscript/> tag to tell the user.

I've an iPad 1 on which I can install web pages as web apps by bookmarking them. If the page has the right meta tags [2], the app/page will open as fullscreen. This works fine with many web APIs e.g. WebAudio. I do not know if Android or Ubuntu phone support Web Apps in the same way.

I like this way of distributing simple applications, but take care to check the JavaScript with Closure Compiler.

[1] https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps [2] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/AppleA...

Are they broken if js is enabled?

Yes, even with js enabled they are broken.

airhorner reacts to mouse clicks visually but plays no sound. (Debug console says: "EncodingError: The given encoding is not supported.")

voice memos needs cookies or local data but does not inform the user about this requirement. With cookies / local data enabled and after a reload, it does work.

The weather app also needs local storage enabled but fails silently when it is not available.