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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

And because web app publishers have full control. If I have a web application, I can update it right now and it will be updated for ALL my users at the same time. No store policies bullshit, no need to somehow notify users that a new version has to be downloaded and installed, no fragmentation of your user base because half of your customers stay at an old version due to whatever reasons out of your reach.

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But you don’t get full control, and that’s why people go native. Because platforms rightly distrust web apps. This will likely be true for a long time as security becomes a bigger deal everyday.

Most "modern" platforms distrust native apps too. (Android, iOS and increasingly macOS, Windows and even Linux)

This is one of the main reason that I often prefer web apps. (my preference obviously depends on the use case) I would much rather run a random company's messaging/video chat/whatever app inside my browser with strong sandboxing. Because browsers have truly accepted that applications should be considered malicious by default.

This. I cannot stress how important is this for modern app development. Just like Deno doesn't trust any script that is passed to it, no user should trust an app just cause it's installed directly in the system (and I can't believe I lived with that mindset as well). The developers should grow cautious of any tool and library they install, and the user should inspect more often what kind of access is it giving to anything they browse on the web, cause at least there they can block it.

But in those more modern platforms, web apps still have a big disparity vs native in terms of privilege, and it's not obvious why the gap should shrink; after all, apps that run native have passed their internal bureaucracy process and are thus more trustworthy.

You're talking about control of the hardware/filesystem/etc, I'm talking about control of the application itself.

You're talking about the relationship between publisher and platform, and how there are web wins in the direction of managing and updating apps.

But those wins must also be balanced with the loss of control due to those same platforms distrusting your app. Now your app, for all the wins it's going to achieve on maintenance and updating, is also going to take hits from its inability to do things that other people take for granted on native apps.

They are part of the same story of balancing pros and cons.

Of course. Everybody here is aware of the tradeoff of using web technologies versus native ones. The fact that I emphasize what I see as the strongest benefits doesn't mean I'm not aware or ignore the tradeoff.

As someone who works with a lot of large businesses; they vastly prefer SaaS delivered over the web these days. Not only does it mean there’s no infrastructure to manage, there are also no deployment / upgrade headaches if you need to roll a client out to a few thousand corporate users.

Web apps are also a hell of a lot easier to secure these days (as long as you trust / validate the platform’s security, which should be in the contract anyway). Which is also why a lot of “native” apps are pretty much web apps with some wrappers around platform-native hardware integration.

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