Parler Blocked on Apple's App Store After Capitol Riot Review | Hacker News Reader

Parler Blocked on Apple's App Store After Capitol Riot Review

bloomberg.com

46 pointscoloneltcb51 comments

No matter where you fall on this politically, Parler is clearly steeped in incompetence.

I have no interest in Parler, but I do wonder why they needed to have dedicated iOS developers when PWAs work fine.

I use Twitter's PWA on Android. It launches in fullscreen, with no browser chrome and the UI is identical to the app, last I saw. It's just text, images and video after all. Why should that require going through an app store and installing something on your device with a bunch of permissions granted to it?

It is easier for non technical people to use an app. That is why Twitter and Facebook both have apps.

Easier how? It’s funny how the goalposts keep shifting

Easier may not have quite been the correct word. There is pretty much an equal number of steps and ease of steps with PWAs and apps.

The average person has no clue PWA even exist. If you say install app x everybody can do that. If you say install the PWA most people would be at a complete loss of how to do it. Even people who know what PWAs are would quite possibly have to look up how to install it. With more and more people not having an internet connected device other than a phone they can't easily read directions on how to get the PWA while trying to do it. It is possible to include directions on the web site, but then when you open up the share menu (on iOS) you would no longer be able to read the directions to know to click add to home page.

The company would likely receive phone calls and have to walk people through how to install the PWA. You would also have people thinking the company is just being cheap and not paying people to develop the app forcing the end user to do more work (since they had to read directions to install it).

Don't get me wrong. I am very much in favor of people not creating apps when it is not actually needed, but the average user is going to have issues with it since they are so used to apps.

If they understand "search for Parler in the App Store", then it's not a stretch for them to say "got to parler.com and click "Add to Home Screen"".

Twitter had a 140 char limit for ages so that you could send tweets via SMS. The mobile web in 2008 was terrible. 2G/3G bandwidth, 256MB RAM and poor battery life. The browser would need to reload the tab if you went to the home screen and then went back to the browser.

The persistence of native apps occurred for two main reasons:

- pushing engagement by having access to system notifications

- improving the quality of ad targeting by accessing a much deeper level of user data than what a regular browser would allow.

Parler had the benefit of all this hindsight when they were creating the app.

Because companies deliberately degrade their web site experience on mobile and insist you use the app to get full functionality -- so they can harvest demographic and social data off your phone.

PWAs are gimped on iOS to the point where it mostly isn’t worth it to do anything with them

In fact, Steve Job’s WWDC 2007 launch, his “one more thing” for iPhone was that you could develop and distribute apps, web apps with icons using iPhone APIs: Web 2.0 + AJAX, integrate w/ iPhone services, instant distribution, easy to update, secure ...

Apple originally intended the iPhone to be open in this way, for HTML5 apps you’d get from anywhere. Similar to Palm Pre, and other devices of the time. There was no “app store”.

For a while after the app store, even the “native” apps toyed with being really just HTML5 apps in a wrapper (e.g. Facebook famously went that way before eventually going back). Those HTML5 app features have gotten better, not worse, but its almost as though devs haven’t ever seen or tried this approach.

This 2018 Medium article talks about how really “It’s been PWA all along”. Note that as time passes, more native API access is brought through securely, not less:

As of 2018: https://medium.com/@firt/progressive-web-apps-on-ios-are-her...

And as of 2021: https://firt.dev/pwa-2021/

That’s a somewhat anti-Apple take. Going back to the beginning, you can already see Apple struggling with implications of native API vs. openness.

See this October 2007 open letter from Steve Jobs:

“[We] were trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once — provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones — this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.”

https://www.imore.com/history-app-store-year-zero

As you watch these features release over a decade, this concept seems still in Apple’s DNA — they generally seem to continue to aim to reconcile that balancing act and not provide access until satisfied w/ compromises being made.

If you’re in a position of Parler, aiming for a non-family-friendly space, you may be better off making compromises of your own so you are not dependent on Apple or Google’s curated experiences, you can access the same audience directly.

You can't get push notifications on iOS with a PWA.

Without that you simply cannot drive the same kind of user engagement as something like Facebook messenger does.

Also people are trained now to look in the app store.

According to Parler's CEO, their bank and payment providers, lawyers, mail and messages services all cancelled on them.

Whoever is left holding the bag suddenly receives All of the Heat.

Having some trouble articulating what about that isn't conspiracy. Going upstream of some of people you disagree with to deprive everyone adjacent to them of economic services is not discourse, or even activism, it's the threat of collective punishment and ultimately, warfare. It is as though non-violence has come to mean using blackmail and fraud against others to do violence on your behalf.

It really does seem like public discourse on policy and culture has been exhausted. Such dark times.

Rewind a year and I'd agree out of principle, but the presumption of good faith has worn thin. At this point the red team has committed so much self harm across disparate areas, it's impossible to discern how much is earned vs unearned.

If that app requires more than 1 iOS Dev, they all should have been fired anyway.

someone should make a paid version of twitter.

Why? It's already priced at exactly what it's worth.

Twitter is making a paid version of Twitter

https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/25/22301375/twitter-super-fo...

Would you agree that a large portion of potential content providers wouldn’t trust Twitter with their content?

The poster's rewrite of this article's actual headline is misleading.

Nowhere in the article is it stated that Parler has been "permanently" blocked.

The headline shouldn't have been re-written, but I think that denial will, in fact, be effectively permanent. Parler's administration is fundamentally incompatible with markets that disallow the willful propagation of hate speech.

Perhaps it will be, and we'll find out if that's true, but meanwhile, we shouldn't be arbitrarily rewriting headlines when we post them here, especially to make them say things radically different from what the original headline, and article, said.

Submitted title was "Parler Permanently Blocked on App Store, Fires All iOS Devs". We've changed it to be that of the article.

How would that work if a european company gets its app blocked on Apple Store and couldnt fire its developer at will ?

Maybe assign them to something besides iOS development?

Where are you getting that European companies cannot fire at will?

In many countries they can; they may need to pay compensation but since its normally tied to the length of the employment, in the case of a startup it would be pretty low.

That's what you get for harboring nazis.

Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. We're trying to avoid that here, for what should be obvious reasons: they're tedious, nasty, and dumb.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we've had to ask you repeatedly not to do this. That's not cool.

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