Comment by phartenfeller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phartenfeller | Hacker News Reader

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I agree that native apps can offer better experiences and often do because they get more development effort. I disagree that most people hate PWAs because they are just websites.

I think many mix bad websites with "PWA is a bad technology". All the cookie banners, ads and prompts to install the native app are the reason the experience is worse.

What could a native app for Wikipedia, Google or a basic news pages (without ads) do better? I use the Twitter PWA for years as it saves battery and offers the same experience. Maybe animations are not as smooth but most people won't even notice that. I also rather use YouTube in Firefox mobile so I can use uBlock even though the app offers more features and generally more ambition. For hardware heavy use cases native apps are obviously better.

Also when companies push people to install the native apps for quick access, push notifications and better data collection you can't take customer usage as a metric for people's taste.

> I think many mix bad websites with "PWA is a bad technology".

Exactly. I put together a demo a few years ago that employed somewhat novel interaction design to showcase some machine learning tech. A number of people were gobsmacked by it and asked endless questions about what framework it was built with. I didn't use a framework. I dug into the deep recesses of CSS to make it do what I wanted. Really, you can accomplish almost anything with HTML/CSS/JS/SVG (though I'll admit it might be painful).

actually, you can do everything with js

js web api-s have become so powerful (web animation instead of css)

of course you have to know what dom is (and there is cssom as well, modifiable via js)

but it took me some time to realize all you need is js (and understand what js-async really is)... actually I love the js async model for UI

the only problem is that js is a scripting language... some may use typescript for stronger types but what I would love to have and will never come since all web API is for js is a new language...

however, you can use webassembly for critical frontend tasks (like stockfish chess engine on lichess) or actually last time I checked V8 was so optimized that good js code was practically not inferior to webassebly or native...

but web apps can usually offer the same experiences if programmed well

it may be a current situation that some web apps seem inferior, but it is not a necessity

plenty of web developers cannot even use js as a programming language or companies do not heavily invest in web apps since 1. they already invested in a native app 2. apple crippled the web via webkit and now tries to flat out crash web capabilities on iPhones

I mean who will invest in a country with a dictator? Would you build something if the dictator can demolish it any time? Like Apple actually does this with businesses that had a web app strategy?

once companies see all platforms supporting web app technology, wait 5-10 years and then judge

if 90% of the best app programmers migrate to the web stack and flickering html-sites and css stylests are history, I would be surprised if anybody could say whether an app is native or not...

and again, you do not really see native AND web app from the same company on the same platform

but actually commanding pixels on a screen is just as possible with js as with other languages, in the end you instruct c++ or rust coded browsers with js to perform tasks and there is webassembly too

and of course, backend with supercomputers but actually it is possible from native too

I fully agree, and that is precisely why the EU is doing a great job regulating this, and they shouldn't stop and punish Apple more for their response actions.

Apple should allow other browser engines, and these should be able to leverage the OS capabilities comparable OSes are giving to their browsers.

> if 90% of the best app programmers migrate to the web stack and flickering html-sites and css stylests are history,

Why would they be history? What's stopping these developers (or the developers not working on native apps) from creating non-flickering html-sites? Are you seriously suggesting that the only reason these sites flicker is because all capable people are creating native apps?

> but actually commanding pixels on a screen is just as possible with js as with other languages, in the end you instruct c++ or rust coded browsers with js to perform tasks and there is webassembly too

So where is this abundance of great beautiful amazing non-flickering web apps? What's stopping you from creating them now?

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