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Comment by holoduke | Hacker News Reader

But nowadays you can't really see the difference between good webapps and native apps. We also migrated our native apps to full SPA apps. And really it makes development so much easier. The apps we have are relatively simple without fancy stuff. But the css render engine is fast. Even on Android. And we reduced some of our apps from 30mbs of java code to 150kb of java/typescript. Plus as a bonus we can have a website and serve ios as well. For us there is really no reason to go back. Sidenote: some parts of the app are still native. Ads, Auth and analytics

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Thanks for posting, I think this is a great point. Web tech has advanced to the point that a large swath of apps can be implemented as PWAs with no loss of experience (though last I checked iOS was still holding things back).

This isn't true for all apps, but with the notable exception of games, I'd say it applies to most: banking/finance apps, social media apps, travel/airline/booking apps, etc.

> Ads, Auth and analytics

So two of the three parts that are native are there to make it a worse user experience?

If you seriously think analytics makes for a worse user experience, then you're speaking out of ignorance.

Analytics tell developers exactly where bugs and crashes occur.

And on which devices or versions of the OS the problem is.

Without analytics it would take weeks/months to figure out exactly what line of code is causing the issue. Heck, the developers might NEVER KNOW that the software has an issue.

Apps would just keep crashing on users for years. And developers would have no idea why users were abandoning their product.

Nobody that has any idea what they're talking about would say that analytics makes for a worse user experience.

But if he needed to have ads, what are the chances that analytics were added to “measure engagement”?

The native ads module on both Android and iOS can do that...so, I dunno, ZERO?

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