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Comment by asddubs | Hacker News Reader

my half-hearted counterpoints:

1. what about something like a usb flir heat camera? yes i know webusb exists, but having to go to a website to use a peripheral (and give it permissions to that peripheral) is not ideal

2. apps can change on you at any point, potentially maliciously. I'm not naive enough to think the app store will catch this kind of thing every time, but at least you have control over updating apps, and some guarantees that everyone gets the same binary

3. you can kiss any sort of ui-cohesion goodbye

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PWAs can also just disappear if devs get tired of running them or become incapable of maintaining them. In similar situations with native local-first apps, the binary will at least remain on your phone and continue to work for several years, offering better a better opportunity to find and transition to alternatives.

Native apps can also be archived for use with emulators at some point down the road, as we’re now seeing with efforts to emulate iOS 2/3 and some of the earliest iOS apps. Had those apps been PWAs they’d all be gone for good outside of the tiny handful where the dev decided to open source them.

This is when you implement signed local web app components that cannot change unless authorized.

OS cohesion/themes are already kind of a dead idea. These days the priority is cohesion within the app and platform. When I open Discord, it looks basically the same on Android, iOS, Mac, Linux, Windows, and web. If I know where something is on one platform, I can find it on all the others. I don't care that Discord on Mac doesn't look like Spotify on Mac.

The others are also kind of mute points, No one is auditing app updates, and I'm not sure how an app can be more trusted with access to a usb/bluetooth device than a website. they are both 3rd party programs doing the same thing.

One of the plus of platform cohesion is that you don’t have to learn the same thing twice while you’re on the same platform. I know that as soon as I press CMD+<Comma>, I get in the settings of the app. Option+CMD+T, will toggle the toolbar if they have any, and you can customize it to your liking. But today, applications wants you to live in their space, so they make things harder to switch from it. No one cares that Discord on Windows looks the same as on macOS, as most people only use one platform, if you have to hunt for everything as it doesn’t want to use the menubar.

And for app updates, people do. I can hold on on updates until I’m sure it’s good to use. You spend a month not using a web app, and it’s become something alien.

on item 1 the peripheral itself can be the webserver (although that does come at a hardware price)

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