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Comment by BandButcher | Hacker News Reader

Understandable... PWAs are ultimately an alternative path from traditional mobile apps which will take away money from apple/google.

But as a web dev community we need to stand firm and build PWAs regardless. If we treat pwas on iOS like we did Internet explorer (i.e. giving it special attention and hack solutions as opposed to just not developing for it) we will lose the fight.

I suggest you call out the issues with ios and put disclaimers on your app page saying what's not supported, or add taglines like "for the best experience, use <other broswer>".

Apple can afford the dev work to update Safari or work with the standards committee, but im sure with their new vr goggles they will take the proprietary route

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Can't we just give up on the "Progressive" branding and just say we are making Web Apps? There are just so many things that make "PWA" a bad smell. I mean, have you ever asked a user if they need more spam spamifications in their life? (Yeah, your app does and 95% say "hell no") Personally I find it much easier to find web sites with Safari (until last week I would hit "1" and Safari would automatically show me my RSS reader, now I have a choice of that or my Fraxinus bookmark manager) than it is to find icons on my iPad (there are so many signs of carelessness on both the part of Apple and app makers; the other day I realized part of it is that iOS doesn't draw boundaries around icons so if the colors of an icon are similar to the colors on the background the edges of the icon become invisible which means the icon becomes invisible) I can type "n" in Safari and it fills in Hacker News, if there was a (cr)app to use HN it might have an H for an icon, or maybe a N or another Y and it would be orange: orange icons tend to disappear into the background on my iPad and for any given letter there is some app that uses it for an icon.

We should just have the story that we are making better and better web apps and Apple isn't keeping up with others.

I'm also not fond of the PWA branding or the confusion around implementing one.

  Yeah, your app does and 95% say "hell no"

For some types of apps, particularly social media ones, the only path forward is those 5% of users that like your app enough to “commit”. And I think that’s what PWAs offer on a practical level — a way to commit to a website and keep it remindable. To say the least your typing-over-tapping preference is not universal, but even so I think both mobile OSs have type-to-search integrated natively now. So I think you can see why it’s a nice reminder, for those people.

Plus, “progressive web app” tells a (well informed) user “this website can use your camera and gyroscope and GPS and such”.

Plus plus, and I think this is the most important: it’s a fun community and a great resume term. It’s no fun to just be a “web developer”, you’ve gotta be a progressive, web3, 3D, local-first, no-js, all-js web developer ;)

I make apps with A-Frame that use the gyroscope and all that and I wouldn't call them "progressive". My goal is to give a "it just works" experience and labels don't help with that.

fyi if you pull down in the middle of any home screen a global search shows up. i just keep one screen of my most used apps then search for all the others

I started doing this after hitting the maximum number of pages. New apps didn’t have anywhere to go and I was forced to use search anyways. The App Library to the right is pretty nice and groups things by category so I don’t have to move icons between pages anymore which was very annoying.

I for one would much rather have native mobile apps that use platform-appropriate controls rather than web apps that use whatever some designer came up with. We’ve already lost this battle on computers because of electron, but iOS is nice precisely because there isn’t an easy way to just ship web technology “apps”.

Is it though?

A large portion of apps on the mobile app stores are already built using cross-platform technologies like React Native, Ionic or Flutter. In some instances it is very easy to tell, in other it's not. You can create quality experiences using cross-platform, you can create awful experiences using native tooling.

In many instances, I'd rather have the not totally native app that exists than the absolutely perfectly native app that does not exist.

As for PWAs, I am personally all for it. I have so many apps on my phone that don't need to be an app in the first place. Why not make a great PWA experience rather than a mediocre mobile app? In terms of capabilities, PWA are perfectly suitable for the majority of usecases.

I understand your point, but it somewhat says that making awesome native apps is not even an option anymore.

I use Things (a todo app) daily. It was #1 of Design in the AppStore maybe already 5 years ago. I think it's a perfect example for a beautifully made native app. I really feel how the native behaviour workes so much smoother.

I would love for creators to somehow strive more for beautifully made apps instead of the fast profit.

Things is a great example for PWAs, because it does not exist on Android, Linux or Windows. It could be though, if it would be a PWA.

It is not and it seems like the developer focused its resources on native software for Apple products.

It could, yes. But the user experience and the amazing level of usability will degrade, and I would move to another product.

And we've come full circle!

> But as a web dev community we need to stand firm and build PWAs regardless. If we treat pwas on iOS like we did Internet explorer (i.e. giving it special attention and hack solutions as opposed to just not developing for it) we will lose the fight.

Comeon, it’s a todo app, being native provides marginal benefits over its functionality.

Except that it feels smoother (the UI, animations, UX) instead of a web app, and is amazingly fast/reactive?

No one wants to invest time and effort to develop for a platform that has a horrible review process. You have to invest multiple people's months worth of work without knowing if that particular snapshot of your app will offend the reviwer.

The lack of native apps is the App Store reviews process fault.

And the only reason for that review is that Apple won’t let any software run on the platform. If Apple is the gatekeeper, any bad software that makes it through is their fault. They would never be able to keep up with it all or give private APIs a fair analysis, so they gatekeeper approvals and simply block anything they can’t vaguely autoanalyze.

The App Store revenue is a poison pill that will eventually start killing them. It’s already holding back their platforms, and the law can’t not bring down the hammer forever. The iPhone, iPad, Watch, and the Vision Pro would be truly remarkable platforms without the arbitrary, puritan rules.

One good thing about PWAs is that they run inside a browser. So if that's a good browser like firefox, you can use addons to limit tracking. Or force dark mode even for apps that don't bother implementing it (eg the Amazon shopping app) with dark reader.

This is exactly what I dislike about PWAs: the move to sandboxing everything in the browser is a big step back because the browser silos everything in a non-composable way.

Exactly. Pwa is cheap

The fact that an app is in the store doesn't mean that uses platform appropriate controls. In fact a lot of applications nowadays are just web app packaged with tools like Ionic, or cross platform applications built with React Native or Flutter that doesn't use "platform-appropriate controls".

If most applications are embedding a web browser, or at least part of a web browser (in case of RN), why not just have applications that... run in a browser? No need to install them, no need to update them, I can just open an URL and they work.

> No need to install them, no need to update them, I can just open an URL and they work.

The App Store is a useful distribution mechanism. For better or worse more people seem to be willing to buy an app, search in the App Store, etc.

There have been threads on HN about a discoverability problem for on the web, not that it doesn’t exist for apps too.

I made a one time use website and my only feedback from normal people was that it should be an app…

React Native renders down to native iOS component classes, though: there are definitely too many generic UIViews for my taste, but it’s pretty different from electron that just constructs UIs from divs like a web app.

You don't have to override the native styles of UI controls with CSS. If you don't add any CSS, they will look just like in native apps. It's a choice, just like you could implement your completely custom controls in native apps if you wanted to.

Sort of: it’s possible for a browser to render the controls with native components. Designers of web applications tend to think their aesthetic preferences are more important than the preferences of their users; and, browsers have not always used real native controls: Google Chrome just shipped its own controls for form inputs, for example. Historically, various parts of the Cocoa text input system also worked incorrectly in Firefox and Chrome.

Were you not around during the big iOS custom controls era? It’s less pronounced now but it’s not like every native app ever has avoided custom controls.

It is not fundamentally wrong to do custom stuff. I prefer native apps as well but this sound bite needs to go away.

> for the best experience, use <other broswer>

In this case you’d need “use <other operating system>”. There’s no alternatives to Safari for PWAs on iOS.

This is unfortunately correct. Chrome on iOS uses Safari's Webkit, which is horribly broken on <insert here> things.

That just changed in the EU: https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engi...

As did the ability to install PWAs. It appears to be gone in the EU in the latest builds of iOS.

If I see a “best viewed in” badge I’m very likely to go find an alternative, regardless of the platform or browser I’m using. Those badges would best remain a vestige of the IE-Netscape era.

I'm a web developer and native app developer but I'm also a user. If I want to use a service and they have a message saying "for the best experience, use <other os>" I will never use that service again. There are no apps or services that would cause me to switch. So you can take that stance but you are just hurting your app because you as a developer don't want to learn native apps.

This business model can only be broken via regulations from another country. The European Union is on it right now, and their plans give a little bit of hope.

Apple/Google will never voluntarily give up their stores. And it's also not reasonable to think that the US will regulate it. Those stores bring a lot of money from all around the world into the US. It would be crazy from an US perspective to stop them doing this. Those profits can be taxed without taking away any money from their citizens. So basically free tax money.

Depends on what outcome you want. If you're developing in a commercial outlet to make money you should do it iOS and MacOS first, because those users are more willing to pay for software and services.

> "for the best experience, use <other browser>"

You just lost a customer.

Google alongside Microsoft, are the two main companies behind PWAs.

And yet do they really use it for the advantages? Office and docs still don’t work offline as PWAs.

For example, packing them as apps on the respective stores.

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/android/trusted-web-activi...

https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/browser/tru...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/progressive...

Just because you don't get Office as PWA, doesn't mean they aren't serious about them.

I agree with the sentiment, but building for IE was not just an interesting and hacky technical challenge, IE was basically the platform.

“Am I wrong? No, it is the users who are wrong.”

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