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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I prefer a native app to a web app because the web browser is basically an O/S running inside an O/S and there's a annoying amount of gain mismatch / poor coupling between the two. Native (non electron) apps on the Mac just integrate with the other OS capabilities (e.g. text selection, drag/drop all work consistently and interoperate properly; keystrokes, shortcuts, system context menu & integrations, etc just make using the machine smoother. This is also true under iOS.

I don't like apps that are just a wrapper to a web view, but they do protect in one way: if you fumblefinger when entering an address in the browser it can autocomplete to a phisher, while my bank's app is in a known place on my screen.

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I'd argue bookmarks achieve much of the same result, but I see your point.

Cross-platform, as much as I'd like it to work, just doesn't seem to ever feel native. I'd very much like to see a transpilation-based cross-platform development framework that generates real Swift/Kotlin/Javascript for iOS/Android/Web, but I'm not sure if it's possible with all of the nice developer experience goodies that developers would come to expect (namely hot reloading) -- but maybe!

People have been trying to make that work since the 80s.

The different interfaces don’t have the same metaphors or semantics so cross-platform UI toolkits are always restricted to worst-case lowest common denominator capabilities.

You see this outside UX too — few programs are written to pure POSIX because usually you want to do more than that core.

> I don't like apps that are just a wrapper to a web view...

Devs are just too aware that they do it to maximise profits and not to maximise UX quality. It's just like Linux guys building console tools and pretending they are better than a (good) UI.

Well, if one is an advocate of PWAs, wrapping it in an app store app should provide an equivalently good and perhaps more user-accessible experience, no?

So my point wasn't to point at the junk apps like, say, the CVS or ATT apps which are simply a web view to a shitty website that is itself just a poorly written skimcoat over a mainframe.

I'm talking about people who put a lot of effort into the web site and then turned it into an app as well to make it easier to run. I'm saying that those provide a crummy experience in practice as well, because in practice I think the web browser experience is rarely that good for anything more than simple functionality.

There are apps today that are using a mix of web and local capabilities.

- photopea.com - import local image, make edits, export back to local storage

- tldraw.com - same

- demo.logseq.com - best example I've found yet. No login required, you can import a local folder of Markdown files, and have the Logseq web app interpret them as a set of backlinked notes.

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