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Comment by riyadparvez | Hacker News Reader

It seems very similar to Android feature called Google Play instant: https://developer.android.com/topic/google-play-instant.

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These shenanigans make me wonder why they don't just focus on making HTML5 apps a better experience. If they provided better widgets (e.g. including swipe gestures, which Angular/Polymer/MDL don't) and access to native hardware we'd be set.

HTML5 is just 100X easier and nicer to program with than that abomination of Android Studio followed by aligning, keysigning, and other steps.

The HTML5 hello world is

   <html><body>Hello World</body></html>

The native hello world is no less than 74 files of garbage, Gradle configurations, and other nonsense.

It requires three things that are famously hard for Apple (and Google and many others too, not just Apple, to be fair) to achieve:

- Work with others on standards

- Expose things on a open platform that won't allow you to have full control over what's possible for developers and users to do and use

- Admit that sometimes you're wrong and you have to change according to others

If all you want to do is deviate from standards on purpose, just change

   <html>

   <apple_ml>

and base64 encode the .html file (for no reason) and call the resulting file .iapp. Done. Standards broken. Proprietary status achieved with minimal effort. Change ".css" to ".bss" if you want to go the extra mile.

and leave everything else as-is? Sounds like a win-win for both developers and biz dev.

This is partially what the Fitbit Ionic is doing actually hah.

> .bss

Sadly already taken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.bss

This is even better.

Most apps are not hello world apps. So the next facebook might only be 100 files, mostly useful.

Also, your html5 app needs several icons for different screen sizes.

That is insanely trivial with img srcset

or with svg.

Multiple sizes of icons doesn’t sound like a problem for any app that you plan on spending more than 3 days creating.

You're free to make web pages if you like but despite your complaints, you yourself admit that its not a better experience and its not for lack of effort.

Actually, this comment suggested that more effort could make html5 an equivalent experience.

Because there's no clear way to get a cut from payments for web apps. Nobody will pay 30% to Apple if there's a way to avoid doing that and web app would be a way to do so.

This (or something like it?) has been available for ages, but the only time I've ever actually encountered it in the wild is with links to a JIRA project.

Zillow has been one app I’ve seen using this - visiting their site resulted in an offer to use the app without installation.

I think the Weather Channel does / did have an Instant App

I have two: CBC News and Yahoo Finance.

(You should be able to find them in the list of apps in Settings)

We have this instant app feature in our roadmap for more than 2 years. Every time we start with it, we run into the endless list of difficulties to get it to work. Max size, different modules, shares resources etc. It's hell on earth for most devs. That's why you see almost no apps having it. The idea is nice from a Google perspective. I would rather just add a link to each app in the playstore which goes to the app website. Up to the developer to create a web version of it. But of course this gives zero control to goole

Vimeo has one

A local news site uses it, however as that's in a (distant) second language for me, and I discovered their app doesn't let me select to copy-paste words into a translator, it wasn't useful. Probably just an issue with their app implementation however.

Screenshot -> OCR -> Translate

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