PWA's have room to grow but have a lot of benefits over native apps
Just gonna leave us hangin'?
User abuse is rampant on the Web. For example, those APIs you mention are used to fingerprint machines. If you're genuinely concerned with abuse of privacy, you'd do yourself a huge favor by researching the history and current mechanisms for such abuse by websites and, by extension, PWAs.
Both on desktop and mobile I use an array of browser extensions to limit online tracking and fingerprinting. On Android I use Webapps Sandboxed Browser [1] to log in to webapps without leaking the logged in status to other websites.
I feel that with the web I get a fighting chance, while native apps are designed for tracking you.
That's relative to the size of the thing you're installing, no? Wouldn't it then be comparable to software of the same size being installed on the host system?
>no/much less space taken on local storage.
Isn't this, too, relative to the size of the application or the data it is persisting?
What’s the likelihood that people are going to put their credit card information into some unknown website compared to using Apple/Google for payments?
Every “advantage” you mentioned is better for the developer not the user. That’s why PWA’s will never take off.
Outside of HN's bubble, people do that all the time. Or at worst they will use PayPal or an equivalent to make payments.
If people were so willing to make payments on random websites, merchants wouldn’t be falling all over themselves to use Amazon’s marketplace and sell their self published books through Kindle.
Not to mention that micropayments on the web has been the holy grail that no one has found in over two decades.
Apple was the first to make $0.99 payments over the internet feasible with iTunes back in 2005. There is much more friction to buying something on the web than just clicking on buy from Amazon/Apple/Google.
People fall all over themselves to use Amazon's marketplace because
- it has a lower barrier to entry to setting up and managing a store themselves - it has a built-in audience they can access without trying to hustle their proprietary domain name into the public consciousness (SEO is hard)
What on earth gives you the idea that it has anything to do with people's willingness or lack thereof to make payments on random websites?
> There is much more friction to buying something on the web than just clicking on buy from Amazon/Apple/Google.
Again, low-friction payment platforms that aren't "use Apple/Google's in-app payment SDKs" are readily available in 2020. PayPal is one such, Flutterwave is another (in sub-Saharan Africa), etc. In fact, I use those far more in a month than I've ever used Apple or Google Pay.
So the same advantages that using the App Store had over going to random websites and installing J2Me apps back in the day....
Again, low-friction payment platforms that aren't "use Apple/Google's in-app payment SDKs" are readily available in 2020. PayPal is one such, Flutterwave is another (in sub-Saharan Africa), etc. In fact, I use those far more in a month than I've ever used Apple or Google Pay.
You realize Apple has had more users payment information on file than any other company since the iTunes heyday than maybe Amazon?
Stripe integrates with Google Pay, so not as janky as you might imagine...
Native, cross-platform frameworks exist.
>no app store approvals/revenue share required[...]
Software was distributed long before those walled gardens came into existence. It is as possible as ever to install native software on your machine without having to go through a "store."
>openable via a link[...]
I don't follow. Do you mean a hyperlink from within a browser? I suppose, if one really wanted, it wouldn't take much effort to create such a thing for launching their native applications, but why would that be an advantage: "links" to open applications have existed as icons and various other actions for as long as graphical UIs have been in existence.
>works to the webs' strengths
What does this mean? What advantages do PWAs have, garnered from the Web, that native applications are unable to tap in to?
- Crossplatform (in use and development)
- No store/developer fees to pay
- CSS and HTML are capable of things native can only dream of like real reusable responsive UIs across many types of devices.
https://medium.com/missive-app/our-dirty-little-secret-cross...
- Until SwiftUI web front end was way more advanced in terms of reactive programming of UIs
Software was distributed long before those walled gardens popped up. Native applications need no store.
>- Crossplatform (in use and development)
Cross-platform frameworks exist for native applications.
>- No store/developer fees to pay
Same goes for native applications
>- CSS and HTML are capable of things native can only dream of like real reusable responsive UIs across many types of devices.
>https://medium.com/missive-app/our-dirty-little-secret-cross....
This is just an incredibly odd statement. First of all, if such layouts are rendering on your machine then of course native applications are also capable of such a feat. Web browsers capabilities are limited to the resources being made available on the host machine. The same goes for any software running on the machine.
And second: Qt.
>- Until SwiftUI web front end was way more advanced in terms of reactive programming of UIs
I don't understand what you mean here.
On iOS they do. On Android 99% of users won't use a different store.
> Cross-platform frameworks exist for native applications.
Nothing really good though. Best ones are RN and Flutter which do not get you there 100%.
A PWA will consume less memory and will be smaller than a RN or Flutter app.
> Same goes for native applications
Not on iOS.
> if such layouts are rendering on your machine then of course native applications are also capable of such a feat
Theoretically, yes.
> And second: Qt.
Remind me again how much a QT license costs?
> I don't understand what you mean here.
For the last 10 or so years UI development for the web has gone from archaic jQuery imperative DOM manipulation to a new paradigm with data binding and reactive data.
UI data binding in the native world exists but is extremely complicated and tedious. AFAIK the only thing that is similar to what we have now in web dev is SwiftUI.