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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

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acdha

Here's what Safari users don't get. Can you be precise about which ones are vital?

1. Install prompt (the user has to start with the "Add to Home Screen" command)

2. Link interception (i.e. browsing in the normal browser switching to the PWA rather than continuing normally)

3. Shared storage between the normal browser and the PWA

4. Ability to start fullscreen

5. SVG icons

6. Background sync

7. Push notifications

The rest of that is largely a list of things like "Web Bluetooth" which are non-standard Chrome features which Firefox also doesn't implement and often have significant privacy or security concerns.

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Push notifications alone are enough to force most apps to be native. But a lot of the other stuff missing is what keeps the experience from being quite as polished as a native app.

It might be interesting to go through the apps you have installed and see how many don’t work as web apps. For me it’s about 10%, basically Signal and apps which use Bluetooth to configure things and which I use almost never.

> the other stuff missing is what keeps the experience from being quite as polished as a native app.

Features HN developers think are missing from the web to deliver an experience "as polished as a native app": notifications, prompt banners, link interception, Chrome-only non-standards like bluetooth etc.

Features actual users think are missing from the web to deliver an experience "as polished as a native app": actual native-like experience: responsiveness, smooth animations, polished usable and accesible controls, maintaining scroll position and location in the app, fast scrolling through large lists, no loading states for the simplest actions...

I mean, people people keep bringing up Twitter's objectively bad web app as an example of one of the best PWA apps... Have these people never seen an actual native app?

I would say every one of those except the SVG icons put PWA's at a huge disadvantage, to the point of being borderline unusable.

Do you feel like the current state of PWA's in iOS presents a viable alternative to publishing an app for any real usecase?

Having played with several PWAs on Android and Windows where support is better, I’m not sure that they’d be any more popular even if Safari filled those feature holes. The average PWA experience sits somewhere between underwhelming and uncompelling, primarily because SPAs in general are anything but consistently good. For PWAs to not be bad, SPAs need to stop being bad first.

A ton of "Native Apps" are SPA's using React native, Cordova, et al. The problem is not the tech, the problem is the arbitrary feature gating (including the kinds of tricks that React Native is able to leverage when packaging an app vs running in a mobile browser).

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