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Comment by privateSFacct | Hacker News Reader

Look at your most used apps - none of them are "responsive pages". That should tell you something. Folks who have tried responsive pages haven't done that well.

I am curious - what is the most popular responsive webpage on iphone would people say? I'd like to check out the current leader in this space.

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None of my most used apps are responsive pages because Safari neuters the functionality.

- White Noise -> Safari can't play background sounds once closed.

- Messenger -> Notification trouble, not to mention Facebook won't let you use the mobile version of Messenger without a lot of effort.

- Google Maps -> Close, but a lot of the functionality, like reminders require notifications which isn't up-to-par with just Safari

- Teams -> See messenger.

I use Facebook's as I don't want Facebook's grubby hands using private APIs on my phone to get every bit of data they can. At least the browser limits them.

Plus the facebook app eats battery life. IME my phone battery lasts all day unless I install facebook: then it lasts a few hours.

and for whatever mind boggling reason their stand alone chat client is 300mb.

I haven't tried it on iOS, but Twitter's web app is quite good on Android/Firefox and Android/Chrome. Not quite as good as native, and prone to developing lag if I don't occasionally restart the browser. But surprisingly good.

They talk about the process of building it here: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-sourc...

I use the web app on iOS. Feature parity is 100% for me because I don't use push notifications at app on Twitter. The performance is a little worse (mostly touch targeting is not as good) but once you get used to it it is not noticeable. This is an acceptable tradeoff to me because it allows me to block almost all promoted tweets with Safari content blockers. I also think the Twitter native app may do devious things that are less likely to be permitted by Safari.

I tried it, it's pretty close honestly, but the performance just feels off and it does weird stuff all the time. The iOS app is just better.

It's unusable on Firefox Focus though. Trying to expand anything completely breaks scrolling on the page.

No just focus. And I've run into issues even if I don't expand anything. Around 40% of pages have a point below which I can't scroll (I'm jumped to the top of the page if I try). And then there's the unspecified error you get on around 60% of page loads that requires a refresh to fix.

Apple does some fairly beautiful responsive webpages... Albeit rather heavy! https://www.apple.com/apple-arcade/

Because once a company is invested in the native side, they probably aren't going to look at greenfield solutions anytime soon?

If you're considering building a new app, a responsive site with JS is definitely a contender. Take a look at the performance numbers. https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1174802413548474368

And they're only increasing, making it a more viable choice with each year passing.

Whats the slack app written in?

Desktop apps are (in)famously Electron.js

iOS is native: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/931599784137363459?s=20

Android is native, too (no source)

The iOS app is native UIKit I believe.

Google?

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