Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

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> This, in turn, will enable competitors to replace app stores with directories of Progressive Web Apps.

The time for PWAs was in about 1998, when WAP was a thing.

Much as I would love a universal bytecode that would allow mobile phones to achieve this, PWAs are not the route to get there. They are a mess of custom, poorly documented and ever changing layers of web bits.

Yes, web assembly exists, yes its about 75% the speed of native. and its not as easy to develop for. I also don't see why phone makers will want to make it that easy. Unless they are forced to provide parity for their APIS, it'll always be second best to native.

But, for the end users, they will look at PWAs and think: "fuck, this has got slow, and its eating my battery" you can spot the react native apps when you use them(yes, yes I know its not entirely the same)

We have been lucky on desktop/laptop that we have added 5 zeros to the available compute, memory, network and GPU capacity. This allows a browser to run slack at the same speed as MIRC, from 2002. You don't have that luxury on mobile. You are limited by battery capacity, unless we suddenly find a way to 100x battery density, it'll be like that for a while.

That being said, the work on breaking the app store dominance is welcome. 25% tax on development is taking the piss. Obviously the "point" of the walled garden was to provide security to the end user, however google fucked that right up, so now its obviously just a cash cow.

But, I want a way to side load apps, I want a second market place. I don't want fucking PWAs on my phone.

Or what about plain ordinary web sites? I’d say that most of the time a brand has no business making an app when they just want to get a message out to people. For instance McDonald’s has an app to order food but why don’t they just make a web site you can order food from? Can it really be easier for end users to use an app that requires an extra installation step? I mean AMZN and Ebay had sites you could order all kinds of things in 1999 and they didn’t even need React.

> Can it really be easier for end users to use an app that requires an extra installation step?

It's not, but by making it an App, it forces a user to remember to install it (good mindshare), it takes up space on the homepage (good, free advertising), it gets to track your device id and track you (or, partially track you on iOS), it gets to spam your notification bar with more free advertisements, it gets to hook into your Google Pay / Apple Pay cards automatically, and it forever gets to poll your exact GPS position, while also having easier access to various bluetooth stack stuff (tracking beacons, onboarding devices, etc)

Yes, ~80% of that can be done on the web too, but the app gives you effectively permanent-cookies and permanent-permissions, and people have more practice doing it there.

I don't like it at all, but I get why lots of companies write a webapp, and then shove it into a native app wrapper (whether via React Native, Cordova, Turbo Native, or equivilant). The benefits of the app wrapper and app store, outweigh the drawbacks, for many businesses.

Related to this, if I already know the name of the company, I tend to trust the first result on the App Store far more than the first result on Google.

All of the „benefits“ you listed are why I hate native apps with a passion and avoid installing them whenever possible. I don’t want your mindshare, notifications, spam and all the other bullshit no thanks

I wonder (or maybe just hope) that this might swing back if consumers develop a preference for those businesses that intentionally avoid these and other dark patterns.

No, activism and legislation are the only things that can even potentially hold back these kinds of unethical business practices. There's no way you're going to educate enough of the general public and make them care enough about something like "installing apps in not necessary".

> Can it really be easier for end users to use an app that requires an extra installation step?

Yes it can, because you install it once and it's right there on your home screen, very easy to get to. The friction of typing the website name or dealing with the inherent clunkiness of a mobile site vs the app cannot be understated and it is part of why brands create apps.

Plus, don't forget the notifications they can send, for deals and promotions. That is also why I have several apps for brands installed, because I know I already want to use their products, so the free discount works in my favor. I have the willpower to resist impulsive purchases, personally speaking, but many don't. When a notification pops up announcing "50% off on this sandwich," it's tempting for people who hadn't planned to spend at all that day. They might think they're saving money by spending less than full price, not realizing that spending anything at all is more than they intended. Brands understand this psychology and optimize their strategies accordingly, targeting those who are likely to be swayed into spending when they receive a compelling offer. It is no different than offering flash sales and deals, which work extremely well in the world of marketing.

The web has apis to add icons to your home screen and to send push notifications. Both work fine on android.

And yet companies still prefer to create an Android app…

Because they want to track you.

Exactly how is it easier to “track you” using an application thst is sandbox that you have to explicitly give it permission to have access to your location or other data than it is on to track you on a website where there are literally dozens of ways to track you across different websites?

Ha, go look at all the permissions on Android that you cannot deny. Example, Starbucks app...

Other

Advertising ID Permission run foreground service control vibration run at startup have full network access use biometric hardware view network connections change network connectivity prevent phone from sleeping Play Install Referrer API view Wi-Fi connections use fingerprint hardware show notifications receive data from Internet

There is also a vibration api for web browsers.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Vibration_A...

Isn’t using the biometric API still controlled by a secure place on the device where all it gives you back is - did you pass the biometric check?

Advertising tracking is still easier on the web.

The rest of the permissions says a lot about Android and even so.

If PWAs were good enough on Android and it was just mean old Apple holding them back they should be pervasive for the 80% of the population that uses Android

On the other hand I have notifications turned on for basically nothing. Giving up coupons and deals seems a reasonable trade off. But then I basically don’t really frequent places like fast food where coupons are probably most prevalent.

They don't because an app allows them to gather much more data on the user.

They even block you from using their app if you didn't get it from the play store. I don't know any other app that even checks for that.

Clearly it's just a vehicle for data collection and nothing else

Occam’s Razor says the reason McDonalds doesn’t is because the app /makes them more money/.

Does not mean "better for the consumer". Capitalism 101.

actually, capitalism 101 teaches that "making more money" and "better for the consumer" are synonymous so long as markets are competitive and operate at the market clearing price, that point which is also best for the producer.

In theory communism also works.

i don't have time to write a treatise, but if we consider capitalism vs socialism/communism to be equivalent to quantum theory vs general relativity, that part of communism (allocation of resources) does not in theory work.

Anecdotal, Dominos has a website I can order food from and it’s insanely good experience to use it in basically all aspects I can think of. I love ordering food from them just because the experience is so good. The food is a different story, but man their UX is something everyone else could learn from.

Dominos has a fairly strong history of having actually usable tech. The few times I’ve had to order from them I’ve always been impressed.

Love-hate relationship with them as a tech firm.

Yes, their UX is beyond good. Webapps, CLI, order from some vehicle dashboards, Uber-like delivery meet point GPS capture,

but it's pretty important to note that they filed paperwork and patented a pizza tracking progress bar, keeping other pizzerias and apps from utilizing what's essentially the "Slide to Unlock" of any Internet-based food ordering.

It made perfect business sense, even if just to keep someone else from locking them out of the feature...but..had to mention how broken things are, that other pizza chains or stores couldn't/can't/won't offer proper modern order life cycle tracking due to this.

Timhortons up in Canada also has solid website that looks parity with the app.

Web Apps don't require an extra installation step, they merely allow the user to "install" the app -- to pin it to the homescreen and have it open without the browser UI.

I’ve never understood that.

To me mobile icons all look the same and it is highly stressful to scroll through pages of them. Even Apple is terrible if you just stop and think. Photos are just a meaningless pinwheel, the Settings are hidden behind a movie poster for The Golden Compass, if I had a Hacker News app it would get confused with all the other apps that have an H or N or Y for their icon or that are colored orange. As it is I can type “n” on my iPad and… it is auto suggested. I type “1” and it suggests my web based RSS reader - why are brands shooting themselves in the foot by getting lost in a maze of twisty icons that all look alike?

What I don’t understand is that I can frequently ‘grok’ icons on my desktop although I hardly ever use them (so much easier to hit the windows button and type 2 or 3 letters and hit enter). Steam will install icons for games I download an instantly I know that’s Atelier Sophie. I use Microsoft’s RDP client for iPad all the time and think it is great but the icon is completely meaningless, it is just some burnt umber wedges that look like the logo of a multimodal shipping company from the 1970s.

Scrolling through the app list stresses me out too, I avoid it and just pin apps I regularly use to the home screens.

Authenticator apps are a great example, I don't use them often enough to pin to home and all are identically named and have generic icons.

Another pain point is the overuse of material design with similar color schemes (it's not just google apps that use this). Half the app list become lost in a sea of red, blue, green and yellow fragments.

I mostly agree with you and that’s why I use a single page with the eight or so apps that I actually use daily. All the rest are in the App Library and I launch them with search. For me, it’s much faster than scrolling and looking for the icon. Typically I only have to type one or two characters to find the app I need.

I did not know you could do that. I think I show how lazy/non-power-user-ish some people can be. On my iphone I rely on "Frequently Visited" web links because I just don't seem to like "Favorites". I don't know why. I don't use bookmarks on my web browser either. So now I moved some web pages onto my homescreen, inside a folder. (It took a long time to figure out how to make a folder.) I will do this with other web pages too. I don't like installing apps unless it is something I wil really use. I stil have far too many. I should probably delete/move to folders several of those.

(And for what it is worth, the (email) inbox on my iphone shows 129,523 message unread)

> but why don’t they just make a web site you can order food from?

How will they sniff which smart devices are on their customers' networks, so they can make the next round of unnecessarily frictionless apps, for the next round of devices?

75% is a stretch. The last time I tested it, it was ~50% of my native program despite my best efforts, with AOT. Which is still good btw, just not as constantly advertised.

My colleague has been doing some stonking work with it, he claims its about 70% as fast, I was rounding up for safety!

That's pretty good if you ask me! I was using an image encoder that had a WebAssembly SIMD CMake option, which is nice, but it only had half of native performance. I suppose it will continue to improve over time.

Depending on the browser and also when this was WASM SIMD could have been a pessimization. It added first with compatibility in mind and took/is taking awhile to reach full performance potential

This is not a typical app.

Encoding images is a pretty typical thing to do though?

> But, for the end users, they will look at PWAs and think: "fuck, this has got slow, and its eating my battery"

It's not PWA's fault as a set of Web APIs. This is due to abusing these Web APIs by lazy/ignorant web devs, who create monsters like Slack instead of e.g. Let's Chat (https://browsingthenet.blogspot.com/2015/05/slack-is-so-slow...).

As for example Slack, I'm using Wee-Slack + Glowing Bear (https://glowing-bear.org) and it's very snappy. I don't need a closed-source binary blob on my tablet.

> you can spot the react native apps when you use them

Bullshit. React native uses native components, that is why its called react native. You are likely confusing react native with those other tech stacks that use a webview, like phonegap/cordova, etc, in which you can use react DOM (not native).

Bullshit to your bullshit. React native is mostly interpreted Javascript-based additional layer on top of a platform native components.

And you can spot that when you use them? How, exactly?

I can understand the phonegap/cordova confusion, as they will only ever be styled imitations of the real components so may not look or behave exactly the same - but react native is using native components, so what difference is there to "spot"?

>We have been lucky on desktop/laptop that we have added 5 zeros to the available compute, memory, network and GPU capacity. This allows a browser to run slack at the same speed as MIRC, from 2002.

I war running mIRC in 2002. Slack is worse.

Even today, mIRC is still faster than Slack.

Yes! It's still a functioning application on Windows! I use it from time to time.

You missed the point. Of course it is still faster. Its like a hundred times smaller doing the same stuff.

I don't think I missed the point at all.

When I got Internet I was basically in mIRC and Mosaic and it wasn't clear to me at all that the web will be the big thing and IRC a niche one day. Similarly its a bit funny that mIRC survives to this day but the browser of the day died long ago.

Eh, I think those posts really fail to highlight the amount of features more slack has and this comes from am a long-lived IRC user that started on quakenet 25 years ago and still uses IRC today (through IRCCloud), mostly for libera (former freenode).

A very tiny and incomplete list: - well working secure file transfer - always on chat history that doesn't rely on you being online or running/buying an irc-bot - voice and video calls - threads - avatars - added layers of security and authentication (critical for business) - plugins/addons (everything on IRC had to be implemented with a chatbot and it was quite limited) - text formatting - support for longer text messages

It's really an apple to oranges comparison to be honest. Yes, they are both fruits, as in they are both used to communicate, but this is where the comparison ends.

The question is why all those things need to be in the same application.

All those were solved problems 25 years ago, they just needed a basic level of tech literacy to achieve.

Obligatory comic: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DuJMkjIXcAcRru9?format=jpg

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