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Comment by mekkkkkk | Hacker News Reader

I have yet to see a world in which local file access, background services, local notifications, timers, alarms, native media controls, etc, works as well on web as in native apps. A lot of it is there "in theory", but web tech has the achilles heel of only allowing stuff that would be safe to have in a random website that some asshat links you on twitter.

Of course this is only relevant if that deeper plumbing into the OS is needed, and of course it's quickly changing. Perhaps the day comes when web apps can truly be first class citizens in all major OSes, but it ain't here yet.

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“Everything” working in a web app is unlikely to happen any time soon. The security model is so different, though less different between mobile and web than mobile and desktop. Also the Apple/Safari ecosystem is the new IE and dragging down some of the innovation.

However, I believe it might not matter. 95% apps can be done as web apps today, especially what comes to boring business applications. 5% we can wait for some time.

What comes to Flutter, it can never integrate well within a browser as it sufferes from the same issue as Java applets. It does not use the web browser native rendering engine and widgets will always feel kludgy, have accessibility issues and so on. Not a big deal for some apps like games. And Google Docs is already using Canvas based rendering so seems like Flutter canvas based apps might have hope.

> And Google Docs is already using Canvas based rendering so seems like Flutter canvas based apps might have hope.

Well, isn’t it the Java applets model as you call it as well? But is a colored div that much better of a button?

Though I don’t disagree with you, indeed most apps can be web-based.

That plumbing is there and easily doable, but up to Apple… just like how the proliferation of QR codes in America didn’t happen until Apple decided to include it in the camera app. It (QR codes) was widely used for maybe almost a decade in China due to inclusion in the ubiquitous Wechat app.

However given the app store is a cash cow for Apple I highly doubt they’d want to integrate web more deeply.

Notifications is the main one which is still missing (at least on iOS, not sure about android). If notifications are possible for websites, then it would make web dev so much better for vast majority of apps.

Local storage already does a lot of needed data storage (though apple has recently made this complicated with their auto delete after certain period). Local file access for uploads is also now possible on iOS using the Files app.

You have yet to see a world where people update their beliefs more than once per decades. Hybrid native web apps are trivial, see e.g. Ionic capacitor plugins

I'm well aware of hybrid apps and Ionic. I wouldn't call those solutions properly "web" though. They're basically only using web tech as a presentation layer, and deferring to native plugins to do the heavy lifting when required. Very similar to how Flutter does it.

So if your claim is simply that CSS/HTML/JS is capable of creating good user interfaces, I'm not arguing against it.

> a presentation layer, and deferring to native plugins to do the heavy lifting when required

bruh it's not just UI, the JS/TS code is where the business logic code is. And anyway the UI is the whole point, we are debating UI libraries. But most importantly native plugins are niche, you use them very rarely and for very specific needs, they occupy generally less than 1-5% of the code base. e.g. when you need to access the camera or sensors, which you usually don't need and most apps don't actually benefit from plugins. I'm not even talking about the fact that most of those niche needs are generally covered by equivalent modern web APIs (e.g. web share) but since plugins are trivial to use, people often use them even when a web api already exist.

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