Hacker News Reader

Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

> A web app on the other hand is connected by definition, no?

No, not in the era of "progressive web apps", which is really just a little bit of branding around interconnected APIs. The Cache API in particular means that a webapp can be downloaded and made available offline on a permanent basis. Unless it isn't actually permanent at all, which is what Apple are doing here.

The web and the App Store are just delivery mechanisms for code with different trade-offs built into them. Apple have added an extra trade-off on the web side in the name of privacy.

View on HN

Having worked on a cross platform application that defined the UI via HTML I'm still kinda confused about this use case - it's super trivial to wrap a set of HTML + JS in an app that's essentially just a full screen webkit/whatever window and distribute this.

The advantage of PWAs then seems to be the ability to dodge the app store certification which, while onerous, is not a bad thing for your clients.

This is equal to saying “I’m ok with Apple having a censorship monopoly of what an iPhone can run”. I don’t think the majority of people here would agree with that. I also don’t think users buying a device that is supposed to support web apps would be happy to find out that in fact it doesn’t. I’m one of those very unhappy users.

> [...] is not a bad thing for your clients

Except when you have to pass some of the 30% Apple fee on to your clients.

Personally I would never expect a web app to be available offline on a permanent basis.

Okay?

I basically assume my phone is nearly useless without connectivity. And if I want something to work in that sort of environment, it better be a native app.

Okay?

...I guess I don't really see why the current state of things should block any future development. Browsers shouldn't ever implement new features because users today aren't expecting them to exist?

To an end user there’s an icon on their screen, they tap it, the app opens. It didn’t matter if they downloaded from the AppStore or from a website. This is no longer the case which is why the OP is upset.

Pretty sure it is still the case if they have connectivity...

I actually have an old phone that I used as a remote-control for my home-threater PC. No connectivity needed, but the phone did everything I needed. Move the mouse, act as a keyboard, and mostly raise volume / change channel.

Phones are computers. Even if you remote all connectivity to the outside world, they still function as well as any PC from the early 90s (or earlier). A huge amount of compute power, tons of storage, etc. etc.

Its not, at least not based on how the OG article is written. If you open your bank app it automatically tries to log you in if you saved your credentials in the past. This seems to say that if you don't use the app for a week it'll wipe that out. No one expects that.

That's not how I read it. Odds are my bank isn't using local storage for that.

Let's say you use an app that allows you to add Todos. You've added 30 Todos. No internet needed, it's always just worked. You go on vacation for 10 days. You get back, you open your app. No Todos...all gone. Very simple use case that is now broken.

Yes, you as the user could wipe those out. But now Apple is doing it just because you didn't use it in 7 days. And the user will not blame Apple, they won't even know Apple did that. They will blame the app developer, who in the interest of privacy didn't want to push your personal Todos to a database online.

Again, just a contrived example, please don't go down the road of why a server should have been used. Let's stick to the use case described.

That's just a failure of your imagination, though. The world was not always as it is today, and it is not bound to be so in the future.

That's the same era as the "year of the Linux" desktop. I keep hearing "PWAs will win" for ten years now. Some people just want to use ill-fitted web tech everywhere, because that's all they know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com