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Comment by giorgioz | Hacker News Reader

At https://www.waiterio.com we use plain webviews for Android, iOS and macOS without any framework and Electron for Windows and Linux. The problem with frameworks is that once a year Apple make a change to their signature and it can break the framework for several weeks/months before a fix/hack around is found. By using native webviews you can quickly implement the change needed and get back online in days.

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Projects like Tauri use libraries like Wry[1], though. Getting Wry fixed to use the new API shouldn't be any more difficult than the work you need to do, right? And that work is then shared by everyone using the project.

[1]: https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry

Edit to correct that Tauri uses Wry and not Webview.

Wry is for desktop, but the grandparent is also targeting mobile.

I don't know how the website was translated, but the German translations are terrible.

would this work for Windows and Linux too?

Vanilla webviews is definitely possible on Windows with Webview2 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/ The problem though was compatibility since that webview might be based on old versions of Edge which used to be a much more outdated browser than Safari/Chrome. So far in 5 years of using Electron Windows never broke Electron except on a minor instance. Our Windows Electron app doesn't work on Windows 10 S. The problem might have became fixable by now but Windows S had so little marketshare that we never found time to fix that issue.

I mean MacOS, not Windows

yes we already had a macOS published on the App Store for 2 years written as a thin Swift app with WKWebView: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/waiterio-restaurant-pos-system...

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/wkwebview

The app store reviewers will allow apps with only webview only if you are offering some feature that would not be possible to implement in the browser alone.

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