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Comment by grey-area | Hacker News Reader

This author seems to think the only competitor to react is other js frameworks, when in fact most of the web's largest sites work just fine with small amounts of what he calls 'artisanal js'.

You probably don't need your js framework, your 10k npm dependencies, or your complex mix of server and client side rendering. Not every website needs an api and clients to consume it, and not everything needs to be an app.

The web is a success because it is simple, accessible, fast, and nobody cares how the server makes the html they are reading. Let's keep it that way.

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> your 10k npm dependencies

Believe me, you're preaching to the choir. Nor am I advocating for every website to have an API. But unfortunately we part ways here:

> The web is a success

The web is not a success. It's dying. Consumers vastly prefer native apps — one recent study (https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web/) tells us that 90% of mobile time is spent in apps vs 10% in browsers.

We can make those with JS/React so I wonder if users can tell. Of course the hugely popular, cross-platform apps are probably going to be "really native" forever..

Apps only work for very specific use cases. The difficulty in getting people to download your app shows that. That study doesn’t seem to break down what apps are being used. I’m going to guess games, as they dominate the charts, or specific websites that have created mobile apps. Facebook, Twitter or maps, which are used for multiple hours straight when driving.

If there is a site you use often enough it graduates to living in your phone. But the majority of what apps can do is never even touched.

I’d be much more interested in a breakdown of app usage, as I bet active time shifts more towards web

> The difficulty in getting people to download your app shows that

This one I'm always interested in. What is difficult about downloading an app?

You're misreading that statement. Downloading an app is not difficult, _getting_ people to download one is.

How is that different than any other distribution platform?

I'm not sure it really needs to be explained that if you're trying to introduce a service to someone for the first time, asking them to access a web page (available on whatever device they're with at the moment and up, running and ready to interact with in seconds) is less likely to lose their attention than asking them to download and install yet another app.

I personally don’t have much problem with the 100+ apps on my phone, but really it’s an app graveyard. I use maybe 10 regularly. I’ve also cut social media apps from my phone due to battery usage and privacy violations.

Downloading an app is more personal, phone storage space is still a premium for many people. App devs don’t seem to care at all how big there app is. We yell at at web devs when their page is >1mb. I’ve tried downloading simple apps whose size are 400mb, what the hell are they doing? If I can visit their site that’s 1mb or download their app that’s 400x, maybe I’ll just visit the site and be on with my day.

Downloading apps is not difficult but it's difficult to get people to download apps.

You’re on a web page. You can either do what you need or tap the install link, approve the install, wait for a huge download, find and open it, wait for it to initialize, authenticate in the app, and then find whatever you were doing. If you use this all the time it’s amortized over heavy usage but the vast majority of business apps are not, and every study I’ve seen shows people falling off at each of those stages.

How much of this is a consequence of companies intentionally crippling their websites, though? I can name countless companies that either don't have a website beyond what is essentially a link to the app store or have removed a significant number of features from their website.

Well, I think this is really hyperbolic. I think it depends on the application, and the consumer. And the web is a tremendous success. You should take a step back and look at how your entire life is affected by the web. It seems really, really off the mark to say that the web is not a success.

You can criticize it, sure. But - you are using a computer 100% because of the web, not because of spreadsheet software.

Now, back to web vs. native. You just have people who prefer either. I exclusively use apps. I think the experience is better in every way, and I've never seen a web application deliver comparable experience to a native app. But, almost every native app is backed by a web server. And, some things I do want to remain web apps, like Wikipedia.

I think the web community overall looks at native apps like they are some weird, alien technology because they're completely blinded by what they build and what tools they use. Like always, if we understood why users enjoy native apps, we could learn a lot of things. I'd argue that we are learning that, which is why there are lots of SPAs. That doesn't mean that's the only way to build software, it just means that people do actually enjoy that experience.

> I think the web community overall looks at native apps like they are some weird, alien technology because they're completely blinded by what they build and what tools they use.

There is some everything-looks-like-a-nail but that's not all. I'm making a native desktop app now which is slow going. Every platform I want to support is so different, and cross-platform tooling often requires branching and learning each ones quirks anyway.

Just making an Electron/ReactNative app is often the best of both worlds should a website not suffice. (Excluding concerns like battery life, app size, or memory footprint.)

"I exclusively use apps."

Curious. Did you post this using a native app?

Not the person you're responding to but there are plenty of HN native app clients, if that's what you're getting at.

On my mobile I never access HN via the website, I use one of those apps.

There's a distinction to make between "the web is successful" and "the web has made humans successful". We've paid a tremendous privacy and security cost, and a loss of control over our online lives.

FB's 5" of page load is a miserable failure that makes me question what I am doing here.

If they dived deeper into the usage patterns and broke down app usage by specific apps, I'd suspect a vast majority of that time is spent in a tiny handful of popular apps, since there are also countless studies pointing to the fact that consumers don't install more than a handful of native apps.

If you remove time spent in those popular apps and their respective websites from the stats, the data would likely paint a vastly different story (that might not be in the best interest for a site that relies on pushing "Launching mobile apps for your WordPress site" to highlight ofc).

I also wonder how much the current epidemic and increased migration towards WFH will affect native mobile app usage, particularly among non-driving commuters. People will be using desktops more for casual browsing, and thus likely to be using web browsers outside of a small number of desktop apps (office suites, games and so on).

Yeah, we let the web become Cable TV. It's dying the same slow death as Cable TV while executives scratch their heads about why the perpetual growth stopped.

The advertising is so pervasive, so annoying, so invasive and so awful it just makes the medium unusable. The same trends are starting to creep into podcasting and video games and I just wish people would realize they are slowly destroying their own businesses with this garbage.

Mobile games do have a lot of ads, thankfully desktop games have not yet suffered that fate. And it's often possible to pay to remove ads from mobile.

> The web is not a success. It's dying. Consumers vastly prefer native apps — one recent study (https://www.mobiloud.com/blog/mobile-apps-vs-the-mobile-web/) tells us that 90% of mobile time is spent in apps vs 10% in browsers.

Does that really mean anything other than you can do more things with mobile devices than just browse the web? I might use WhatsApp on my phone, draw with Procreate on my iPad or play games. I don't see why any of those things should involve the web browser, but that doesn't mean the web is somehow dying.

I mean, to draw an analogy, it doesn't mean Netflix is dying if I use 90% of my time at home not watching Netflix.

Why do any of those things need to be native apps, rather than instantly-accessible, no-install-required URLs that come with all the protections of the web's security model?

The first thing that comes to mind is that I can use them offline. I don't need the internet to draw or play most games.

EDIT: I do understand you can make web apps that work offline by jumping through enough hoops. But then again, why would you? Why try to unnecessarily shoehorn everything into the web paradigm?

Let's take an iPad drawing app that is super well integrated with Apple Pencil. What benefit would forcing it onto the web bring, considering the performance hit and usage of specialized hardware?

Or a recording app that I might use to take voice notes or record other audio. Why does that need to be a web application?

Web apps can also work offline.

Web apps are:

* platform agnostic

* can't be blocked by a central platform gate-keeper

* generally much smaller (download size) than native apps

* don't take up permanent space on your device (good for things you only use occasionally)

* always up-to-date

Personally I prefer native apps for tools I use frequently. Everything else I prefer the web.

* The trade-off is that they're alien to the platform either behave entirely different or at worst poorly emulate platform semantics.

* this is true-ish. It's not that they can't it's that they aren't. If Apple or Google just up and blocked a site in Safari or Chrome it's basically dead. "Technically accessible in Firefox" isn't exactly a selling point. You're also gate-kept by your ability to get a public cert.

* True but download size only really matters on first install. It's absolutely friction but not really something that I've ever seen people care about anymore. Pictures take up almost all of the storage on people's phones now.

* True but the trade-off there is that you have to download it every time. Native apps win in the long run if you use it often.

* Users have never cared about this. This is only a benefit to the very techy.

iOS can offload unused apps.

Because ios refused to allow web pages to have the same functionality as javascript within a mobile app?

And for good reason; I don’t want individual web pages having access to everything that an app can do.

They don't have to be. But also it isn't clear the web is the right tool for that job just because there are some pros.

I'd rather see better cross-platform native tools than more web tools. The web is bloated, overloaded, and has a lot of historical baggage. That isn't to say it can't still be used well, but I still like seeing alternatives with innovation.

Maybe I'm behind the times, but my understanding is that web browsers are a rather large chunk of malware installation vectors.

>Does that really mean anything other than you can do more things with mobile devices than just browse the web?

That depends, what is the usage pattern of browsers vs. everything else on the desktop computer? Because you can use the desktop computer for more things than browsing the web.

That's a very weird assumption to make considering that the web was intended for sharing information, not running applications. The fact that customers prefer native apps does not mean that the web is dead. The web is good for somethings. And native is good for others.

For ex., I read your article on a mobile webpage. Downloading an app for that would be madness. But trying to use a big webapp like jira on the mobile would be a study in madness. Hell, It doesn't work on the desktop well enough.

The bottom line is that the web is good for some things, native apps are good for some things. Instead of trying to shoehorn web everywhere, it would be better to use the correct tool for the job

Even the word "prefer" is questionable. The typical consumer gets an Android phone which comes with pre installed apps. Should they somehow still by choice end up at a web property, they are aggressively pulled towards the native app.

What do you mean "prefer"? The correct word is pushed.

The web is the most successful document publishing platform in history. It's what enabled this conversation.

Many of the most popular apps are reliant on the web or web servers for their content (social media for example), and it's ok if some content is not on the web. Games for example are a special case which are better served by native code.

A marketer like the one doing those surveys is understandably going to be concerned with where the captive eyeballs are, and platforms do have a tendency to try to herd users into their walled garden, but in the long run I think the open web will win over corporate walled gardens.

> The web is not a success. It's dying.

Web apps are dying because the web isn't a good application platform. Google made a real good argument with Gmail and Maps, but unless you have their resources (even if you do, looking at Facebook here), it's very hard to create a great application experience on the web--for many of the reasons you write about in your post.

But I think that's fine. The web isn't a good application platform, but it is a good information platform. There's also other protocols beyond HTTP. Imagine if getting the most out of the internet didn't require millions of lines of C++, hyper-complicated JS JITs, layer upon layer on HTTP, and opening the door to the surveillance state.

Even gmail and Google Maps aren’t what they used to be. On a machine that isn’t top of the line, Gmail takes ten+ seconds to load to interactivity, and then going to each email takes five or so seconds. It’s basically unusable.

On a machine that isn’t top of the line, Gmail takes ten+ seconds to load to interactivity, and then going to each email takes five or so seconds

For giggles, I just loaded HN on a 2011 MacBook Air. It took just under 2 seconds for the front page.

Then I loaded GMail on the same machine. 15 seconds to the front page. Plus, it came in with 21 errors ranging from invalid headers to invalid sources to cross-origin issues.

The errors are really embarrassing. Come on Google, how hard is it to just not have cross-origin issues?

There's no good reason for an email client to be a SPA rather than normal web pages with some scripting to get pushed relevant updates.

I'm still struggling to understand why my small react app which has 7 dependencies (4 of which are react, react-dom, react-router, react-router-dom) needs 615 node modules.

While the percentage of time that I use in apps vs. the web is definitely heavily skewed, it is just two apps: Facebook and YouTube... occasionally Instagram or TikTok. Now ask the question "what percentage of products do you use are you using via an app or via the web" and the answer is going to be ridiculously dominated by the web: I might use 20 different products over the course of 10 minutes on the web while researching some topic, flipping between hacker news, stack overflow, medium, smaller personal blogs, documentation from microsoft or mozilla, major and minor news sites... this list is absolutely endless. Even for sites I might use that have an app, I am not going to open that app for just the one page I want from it as that's slower and pointless as I probably only want to use that site for five seconds.

Essentially, you have purposefully asked the wrong question in order to lie to us using statistics.

> tells us that 90% of mobile time is spent in apps vs 10% in browsers.

Given how hard certain sites (fb, LinkedIn, reddit for a start) push their apps it is kind of understandable.

Please everyone remember though that using does not necessarily mean prefer.

I mostly loathe apps.

Just about every major website will continually prod you to install their app when viewed on a phone. I have given in myself a few times just to make the nagging go away. That muddies the “web is a failure” argument imo.

For who?

If the sites in the genres I care about remain, I am unaffected (except for, perhaps, economically in a bigger picture).

For example, I don't care if ESPN's app is favored over it's website. I don't care if various lifestyle magazines have apps. Lots of examples here, pick your own.

I spend my time on the web or in a select few apps like Discord, Hangouts, Signal, etc. Even then, I don't really care if the sites are optimized for mobile. I usually prefer when they aren't because most people do it poorly. Just make a nice website with appropriate viewports and non-fixed whitespace on the sides and it'll probably work out unless you're doing some fancy interactive stuff. In which case, I probably want it to be on a desktop anyway.

Such a poor take. Consumers mass spending time in chat and Netflix doesn't mean the web is dying.

Consumers hate apps. The average they install per month is zero. 90% of their installed apps are completely unused. Almost any new app they do install has single usage, and is then abandoned forever.

I wanted to add one point to that

- most people only install popular apps

- top apps in playstore are actively hostile to using their website.

Reddit, Imgur, instagram, snapchat, whatsapp, twitter etc. You name it. They either don't have a functioning mobile website or native only.

> your 10k npm dependencies

Svelte projects do not put 10k dependencies in the final bundle.

In fact when using Svelte you won't need many dependencies you typically need when using React:

- State management (MobX, Redux, etc)

- CSS stuff (classnames, CSS in JS, etc)

- Animation

Even on a simple use case like a synthetic benchmark Svelte is still the absolute leader in start-up metrics:

https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/current.ht...

Also check the metrics for a real world project:

https://medium.com/dailyjs/a-realworld-comparison-of-front-e...

You don't need additional state management or css "stuff" to use React.

Certainly but it's very common.

The site the article appears on is a very well-tuned Rails app.

The web is not only html documents rendered server-side though. You need much more advanced interactions.

I keep hearing this, but I think it's too broad of a statement.

There are definitely functionalities that are impractical to implement with server-side rendering and forms alone. Map widgets and drag-and-drop come to mind.

The issue I have though, is that the overwelming majority of web functionality can be implemented as server-side rendering.

Even HN would have a poor usability with only server side rendering.

Sure, but it's much leaner because it only uses JavaScript when it is necessary.

But you don't need javascript frameworks to add a small amount of state changes without page reloads, it's very easy to do without using something like react.

The comparison is between server-side with a bit of js where required, and the proposed 'modern web' where js frameworks attempt to take over the entire experience server and client side so that they can remodel the world in their image.

Most websites simply don't need react and friends, even if they are more app-like than doc-based they still don't need it, and they certainly don't need to be a single page application (the best modern example of throwing out almost everything that is good about the web - urls, links, docs, stateless).

Turn javascript off and find out. The only difference I know of is that the vote buttons force a full refresh instead of making an ajax request.

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