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Comment by epeus | Hacker News Reader

I've been pointing out the bursting of the app bubble for a while now, this is a trailing indicator. Progressive Web Apps make way more sense.

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...and are way, way more limited in terms of leveraging device functionality.

I'm not hating on mobile-optimized web apps, just making the point that they aren't a one-size fits all solution, and as such, I don't think a blanket statement like "Progressive Web Apps make way more sense" really works.

There are only a few apps that leverage device functionality e.g. gyrometer, fingerprint, etc. Even location and camera are now available for web apps. So for a majority of native apps a web app makes more sense.

Fingerprint sensor for authentication is a big hole. Mint integrates with TouchID, and it's great. But my bank's webview-wrapping "app" requires a login and password every launch, and it's very annoying.

Agreed it is a big hole for a specific set of apps where you don't want the browser to save the credentials.

Apple might be making fingerprint sensing available for the web soon

https://stripe.com/apple-pay

Except is much easier to build nice app with native SDK instead of dancing shamanic dances around web tech which was never intended for the apps in the first place. If people advocating web apps would spend just a half of that time educating themselves what's really offered by SDKs…

"much easier" is very relative. Someone proficient in web dev technologies isn't necessarily going to find Objective C development or Android Development much easier. If you want to see an example of a nice web app try www.hoteltonight.com from your phone's browser.

Your definition of "device functionality" is pretty different from mine then - consider local storage on a device. Many enterprise applications can end up storing massive amounts of data on devices; that data often needs to be encrypted. Not gonna fly with a web app.

Web apps don't support push notifications on devices. Again, a hugely important example of extremely common device functionality.

Web apps require constant connectivity. Device goes into a tunnel, app quickly stops working. Or even more realistic, user drives 20km to the middle of nowhere, has no cell service, but still needs to do their job without worrying about web site connectivity.

And those are just the extremely common use cases. Again, I'm not hating on mobile-optimized web. There are many use cases where it makes perfect sense. But you really can't make a blanket statement like "So for a majority of native apps a web app makes more sense"; it's just not the case.

Enterprise applications are a different beast, especially if they are report heavy. Having said that HTML5 does have offline storage API albeit with a 5MB limit though support for it is up to the browser.

HTML5 also has Notifications API[1] which can be leveraged for push notifications on mobile devices.

I do not disagree that there are many use cases for using Apps especially in the Enterprise space but there are far too many consumer apps than enterprise ones so maybe I should change that statement to "a majority of native consumer apps" :)

[1]https://mobiforge.com/design-development/web-push-notificati...

Enterprise apps are a perfectly normal beast for mobile development, 5MB of local storage is a joke, and the notifications you're referring to are not true platform push notifications.

Some of the iOS apps I use have been "updated" from native to something wrapping a web view, and the experience is noticeably worse. I hope you're mistaken.

Do they make more sense? Mobile-accessible web applications just have different delivery method, they are otherwise pretty much just "apps" and the same forces are at work. If your flappy bird clone is HTML5 that doesn't make anyone more likely to find and use it.

This isn't a technological issue at all.

jfc... not everything is a bubble. This was just an initial boom phase of growth which was to be expected.

A few months ago I might have agreed with you. However given the growing power of React Native and the recent announcement of Android Instant Apps, I think there is going to be a surge in app "downloads".

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