Hacker News Reader

Comment by swishman | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills reading these comments. Apps are clearly better for end users.

HTML and css is SUPER slow. It doesn't feel native, it doesn't feel good to use.

You also get so many weird glitches with state refreshing, sessions being cleared, log in not persisting.

Has anyone here actually used a PWA? You can feel that it's slow and clunky. Apps feel SO much better with the native UI, pre-downloaded, much faster etc.

View on HN

You might be taking crazy pills or you've yet to come across an app that's just a webpage inside a web view (a lot of apps these days unfortunately)

For sure, and these apps feel bad. I notice instantly. But they manage local storage, caching, and sessions much better than a PWA anyway

I've found the most consistent indicator of overall app quality to be whether it is extremely small in size. An Android app under a megabyte in size is going to use the familiar, high-performance platform-native UI because it doesn't have room to do anything else. It is gonna do what it says on the tin and nothing else. It won't have ads. It won't phone home. Since it doesn't show ads and doesn't phone home, it's quite likely open source, meaning it quite likely has a GitHub project that I can look into if something goes wrong -- and because it's so tiny, I won't need to spend days trying to figure out how it works.

Or, you know, it's small because it's just a WebView wrapping a website.

> You also get so many weird glitches with state refreshing, sessions being cleared, log in not persisting.

And these don't happen in native apps? Because they somehow have less bugs?

> Apps feel SO much better with the native UI, pre-downloaded

React Native apps are pre-downloaded and have a native UI. Lots of them feel really bad. Not all, though.

You can make fast websites/PWAs just like you can make slow apps.

A web app is limited. Even if it loads fast, it feels clunky. Apps using native components have a much higher ceiling. Users don't care what tech is underneath

> A web app is limited. Even if it loads fast, it feels clunky.

But what about it feels clunky?

HTML and CSS are a lot faster than you want to believe. You can't tell me you've never used a website that isn't slow. Problem is the people making most websites don't care to optimize or profile anything.

Except most "native apps" shipped by most companies are Webviews, React Native, Cordova, Flutter, MAUI, and very seldom written with the native SDKs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com