Comment by CorvusCrypto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CorvusCrypto | Hacker News Reader

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One thing I have noticed in this thread in general is that the web devs are extremely defensive. No, a web app is not inherently bad. No one is saying this.

But cherry picking questions to prove a point is silly. However, to show it's not a gangup on web apps here we go:

Speed of the install process? Probably slower than loading a web page for serious applications

How does the update system work? Depends if you're releasing as a single statically compiled program or using shared libs that can be updated. Also if you have a db to sync this will affect things.

How quickly can you release them to all platforms? As long as it takes to compile to all compatible targets.

Can they be easily customized and modified by the user? in what regard? if you mean configuration then yes. If you mean being able to manually tweak the style of the application like when fiddling around in the element inspector, then no unless you are using a theme parser that lets them adjust the themes.

Can they be easily shared? yes

What's the permission model like? Depends what granularity you want to have. Permissions can be restricted to the action level, user level, group level, machine level, global level, etc. Whatever logic you want to implement really.

How much can that application access? access in terms of what?

And one thing i've noticed is that "native devs" are extremely condescending.

I hear a LOT about how writing an application for the web is wrong (especially on HN), but not much about why it's a good idea. I see comments about how native is faster, "less bloated", portable, "better designed", offline, and more secure. But never any comments on how long they take to install, how difficult it is to use them across multiple devices, how you need to either use an app-store, bundle your own updater (which follows all the best security practices), or rely on a distro to get around to including it for you. I never read discussions on how they tend to be larger, they have more access to the underlying system by default, how they are more difficult to secure, or how if you use the one application across multiple platforms you need to learn multiple UIs.

And while none of that is true across the board, it's stuff you need to spend more time on to get right, whereas you tend to get it "for free" when targeting the web. Obviously things go the other way for some features. Getting high performance out of a web app takes more work, getting "high security" to work in a browser is much more difficult, getting offline takes some consideration (IMO it's not that difficult today, but it does still take work).

It might come across as defensive, but I can't bring up anything web-related on this site without being asked why I didn't make it native, or why I'm using javascript at all, or why I decided to use the web when there are "perfectly good UI toolkits for native app development" while hand waving away all the benefits and reasoning behind my decisions as either pointless or just by saying "you can do that with native too" without going into the mountain of work necessary to get it right. And in that comment I indulged that anger which I don't normally do on this site.

Part of the issue is that you are optimising for your own time and experience, not the users.

But I'm not.

I hear this excuse a lot, but there isn't a single benefit I've talked about which is for the developer only.

Install times are a big one. No user wants to install thing and manage dependencies or manually install updates. The sandboxing is another very pro-user thing as it makes sure my fuckups or mistakes can't easily cause their whole PC to be compromised, and they don't need to spend time making sure they have permissions setup correctly for my application on every device.

And for me, as a user, I greatly prefer web apps because I and many other people live a multi device life. If I have an Android phone, a Windows work PC, and a personal MacBook, I need to learn 3 different UIs for a single application. I need to configure them 3 times, manage their settings in 3 places. With a web app I learn 1 UI, I configure it once, I can login on my main PC or my father's Linux laptop and get the same app I'm used to in seconds.

No worrying about making backups for it, no worrying about the permissions I'm giving it, no worrying about the updates each machine is on, or how much space it might be taking up, or if it's using HTTP connections for updates, or that support for my older OS might get dropped, or that it won't hit my new distro for 6 months, or that it's not available in my package manager, or that it will autostart at boot and be an annoyance, or that uninstalling it will leave a bunch of shit behind, or any other of the things that native applications do that annoy me.

I go to a URL, and I use an app in less than a second on any device I own. And if I want, I can quickly go into the browser settings and wipe that app and everything it's touched from the PC in seconds.

That might be optimising for my wanted experience as a user, but I can't please everyone and I see a lot more multi-device multi-OS users who don't want to manage all the details of a native app than I ever do of users that want the opposite.

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