Hacker News Reader

Comment by woahitsraj | Hacker News Reader

While I'm a huge Svelte fan, this project hasn't really gotten very much care and attention over the last few years.

Which is honestly fine. React and React Native I think do a much better job of filling the niche of people who want to build native apps with web tech.

That being said, I think with the progress that Safari has made in implementing PWA support, the increased hostility of Apple toward native developers, and browser improvements like WebGPU coming out soon, I really hope that we no longer have to build native apps for like 95% of use cases. The only major hurdle to this is Apple continuing to treat web apps as second class citizens on iOS and only begrudgingly adding APIs to Safari to make good native experiences.

View on HN

We've been working with Capacitor recently which is the current iteration of webview-to-native. Basically you just build a website and run it through a compile step to output iOS and Android. The ergonomics of the build process and integration with native features is definitely a bit lumpy, but we've been very successful at building an all-in-one codebase that will power web, ios and android with minimal drift.

Not sure what you built but for anyone interested in going down this venue there's a blog post by a Svelte Ambassador that you can read here: https://khromov.se/how-i-published-a-gratitude-journaling-ap...

Capacitor is great! Did Svelte + Capacitor for my last app. Highly recommend.

> The only major hurdle to this is Apple continuing to treat web apps as second class citizens on iOS

If you add a site to iOS' homescreen it automatically becomes a PWA. The best example I found of a site fully leveraging this feature is Cryptee[0]. They talk about the PWA thing here: https://crypt.ee/download

[0] https://crypt.ee/

The whole add to home screen process is needlessly convoluted. It would be nice if there was something similar to Smart Banners for PWAs: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/promoting_a...

You just click "Share -> Add To Home Screen." I understand that that's technically more clicks than a smart banner but hardly "convoluted"

I think it's convoluted relative to a Smart Banner. Smart Banners give users a clear call to action, and they're not buried in a menu somewhere.

It's hard to make this point without linking to a screenshot, but the share menu is incredibly bloated. To get to the add to home screen button a user has to know it's in the share menu (which is just an unlabeled icon), and then scroll past the following menu items:

- An options button (which leads to another menu)

- Air Drop

- Share via text message (with several different contacts listed individually to share with)

- Copy

- Add to Reading List

- Add Bookmark

- Add to Favorites

- Add to Quick Note

- Find on Page

Adding to your own home screen under a "share" menu is something probably 90% of users would never think of.

Fastmail does this too, and it works extremely well.

I agree it's MUCH better than it used to be (and huge credit to Jen Simmons and her team for making this possible). However Safari APIs are still WAY behind Chrome/Android and I think this is probably intentional to push developers into using the App Store so Apple can collect their 30% tax

https://fugu-tracker.web.app/

It's absolutely intentional, but going to slowly get better even as they drag their feet

i wonder when someone is going to sue apple over this absurd limit. There's 0 justification for it, it's almost the definition of racket.

> increased hostility of Apple toward native developers

Chortle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com