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Comment by vnglst | Hacker News Reader

Really cool to see what's possible in desktop browsers these days. Photoshop coming to our browsers is a huge achievement and milestone.

But it also makes me kinda sad that none of the mentioned examples properly work on mobile. If even big web companies can't pull that off, is it impossible? (Mainly thinking about Gmail and Google Docs here). Or have we given up on web applications on mobile?

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I’m fairly certain the reason that is currently not officially a thing is due to Safari on iOS missing a huge chunk of features that would have made that possible. They spent over a decade by this point intentionally underfunding that team while maintaining a browser monopoly on their platform under the guise of “security”.

That seems like it’s very slowly starting to change perhaps.

Google could have made Gmail to work on Chrome (just on Android) as a show case what would be possible on a good browser. It's true that Safari is lagging behind in features, but I don't believe it's the only reason.

Its not impossible. I think the biggest issue is that many of these ported web apps don't use the DOM for their UI. This makes it a much more difficult task creating responsive UI.

Except, according to the post, Photoshop uses Web Components for the UI.

I'm guessing the actual reason if that most desktop apps aren't designed with expectations that a mobile app has.

I'd assume that Gapps wanted native for the same reason FB did: more access to details on the device directly

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