Hacker News Reader

Comment by ziont | Hacker News Reader

and takes forever to load on a typical cellular network in Canada.

Fuck PWAs, I've seen some retailers who ditched it because it ended up hurting their conversions.

Certain demographics DO NOT want to see stare at fucking blank page with grey rectangles because it offers 'superior customer experience essential'. They want webpages that load fast, they don't even give a shit about Responsive designs.

Yeah, if the entire world was on 5g already, but even then, people simply don't trust PWAs vs apps from the Google or Apple store. In their minds, its safer because a large corporation is "looking after" them.

PWA and AMP are a dud, and the lack of adoption shows this.

View on HN

Seems like you're confusing a number of things here. Progressive web apps can be cached offline and load instantly. They typically have smaller download sizes than native apps. There's zero reason for a PWA to take longer to load than a web page because a PWA is a web page. Perhaps your complaint is with Single Page Apps? That's a legitimate complaint, but doesn't really have a lot to do with PWAs.

> they don't even give a shit about Responsive designs.

Users don't know what "responsive design is". But conversion stats for sites that have a specific mobile layout vs ones where you're pinch-and-zooming constantly show that users are a lot more productive on sites with a mobile view.

The first experience is crucial, according to Google 51% of your visitors will leave if they don't see content within the first 5 seconds.

Then you tell people, yeah but its okay to do this the first time, then the second time they come to your PWA, it will load super fast!

Except it's not at all fast because it turns out cellular network is spotty so not everyone experiences/reports the same experience, it turns jaded users who feel discriminated because they don't have a thousand dollar phone that can render their PWA jank free.

There's an Application in PWA somewhere I'm sure of it.

You are right about conversion rates but I was specifically talking about online shoppers for a specific niche to demonstrate the extreme case where people are fine with what they have and rather not see changes they need to . relearn.

But PWAs don't slow down page loads. I feel like I'm going insane that I have to point this out again and again. The first load of a PWA is the load of a web page, nothing more, nothing less. After that, the PWA can cache assets for next load. If the page loads slowly it's because it's a crappily made page, not because it's a PWA.

Progressive web apps can be cached offline and load instantly

They only load instantly once they've been cached. Until then, it's Grey Rectangle City, and the user moves on.

Yeah, on first load they load... like a web page. Because they are a web page. "Grey rectangle city" is not something a progressive web app does unless the creator of the app tells it to. Like I said, it sounds like the complaint is with single page apps, not with progressive web apps.

I guess I'm not sure what the preferred alternative is here? First load of a native app involves going to an app store and downloading a multi-megabyte app. A PWA involves loading a normal web site, then once it has loaded, cache resources to allow instant loading in the future. I know which one of those two I'd prefer.

This argument is non-sensical. The counter-point of this argument is downloading an App from the App Store, which is usually a 50MB+ download, which is worse then "Grey Rectangle City". I'm on a flight right now, and I'd rather use a PWA over airplane wifi then try to download a full app from the App Store. You're proposing that a 50MB+ download is somehow way better than a <1MB download and I don't buy that.. especially on slow networks.

This measurement of size is irrelevant. With application you get everything you need, none of the data needs to be lazy loaded or trick the user somehow to make up for the connection latency, hence "Rectangle city"

The PWA file sizes can easily surpass 50mb but the difference is it gets it intermittently and this depends on a uninterrupted cellular connection (the specific demographic PWA is targetting which is mobile) ends up producing an inferior experience to just downloading an app and it's not all tall order, phones now have crazy amount of storage and insanely fast WIFI.

Sure it would be nice to order condoms online from Amazon's PWA while waiting for my starbucks, but I could've easily satisfied my impulses in front of a PC.

The seamless omni-channel bullshit google is selling to retailers is not going well, which seemingly are there target market to counter Amazon's dominance in e-commerce.

Google has royally fucked up by eroding trust via AMP and have hurt the PWA intiative with poor timing. It's 10 years too early.

I also hate AMP, but I still disagree that downloading an app is better than using the browser (on a slow connection). If I already have the app, great— but I don’t want to download every app on earth “just in case”.

> Yeah, if the entire world was on 5g already

Even if the world was, I still wouldn't like it. Lightweight webpages are infinitely superior. Data is still expensive, particularly for those of us who can't afford unlimited.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com