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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

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”.

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