1. The web should be able to control everything (i.e. PWA features not normally found in a browser).
2. Google should control the web (they can index it, track, monetize it, but it has to be on the web).
3. Profit.
Do you think Apple users are super excited at the prospect of most apps turning into battery-draining non-native shitty experiences, instead of using the iOS frameworks? No, they're not.
And push notifications on iOS work as a service, to avoid battery drain, they all go through Apple on a single connection. This is free for all native apps. It can't be implemented for web apps both for technical reasons and because web apps can't be curated, so it'll just be abused like there's no tomorrow.
Have you noticed on the desktop that EVERY SITE asks you for push notifications? This is super annoying and bless your soul if you ever clicked "YES" on any of those. They'll spam you until you die, or eventually ask your nephew to reset your permissions.
EVERY single feature not in Safari, has a reason not to be there. And I'm sick of everyone eating up Google's propaganda and becoming their tools in this. I don't mind Google at all, they should fight for their PoV on all this, and they have a right to expand their business.
But not at the expense of Apple or Apple's users. F that.
Long-time iOS developer here who does not want cross-platform dreck to become the standard. UIKit and SwiftUI are deep frameworks that let you build really great user experiences (if you're willing to put in the work to learn them), and Apple spends a ton of time and money making sure they can work together and build an iOS app that looks and feels like an iOS app, not someone's crappy "web site in a native wrapper" or "several extra layers of abstraction to hide an API and god help you if you need to debug an API problem" approach.
I'm honestly glad to see one dev who cares about their craft and not just "I wanna spit some HTML and boom, it's on all phones".
HN is mostly frequented by developers, and it's so frustrating to see how many of them are outright lazy and don't think about UX but rather about how to get quickest from point A to point B.
Rest assured most phone users are with you all the way. But again, we wouldn't know it reading developer forums.
What you are ignoring (and in a pretty condescending way if I may say so) is that the best allocation of limited resources in the interest of users is not always to create scores of native client apps and device integrations. It's not all laziness.
Sometimes it's politics (I had a colleague leave a job because the new director of development mandated they rewrite their flagship enterprise apps in React Native because he got a song and dance from a React Native trainer/consultant and wouldn't listen to the people who knew what they were talking about).
Sometimes it's different priorities (a meetup buddy of mine some years ago had to write apps in PhoneGap because "We're in the oil bidness, not the app badness").
It isn't always "the best allocation of limited resources", either. Apart from having to do extra work to make the UX close to native (which isn't trivial), using a "cross platform" solution means you've just included a giant third party dependency that you don't control or maintain. Call it FUD if you want to, but in the forty-odd years I've done programming/development that's never been a good bet. If resources are really limited, the best bet is to have a decent design and very clear (reasonable) expectations and pay someone good to execute them.
I still mourn the loss of Windows Phone (aka one of three mobile OS choices) because of the "app gap". Small developers wouldn't invest the time or money into porting their app to the small marketshare. Even worse though, large companies would let their apps flounder, if they had one at all; the Bank of America app was simply disabled rather than being updated.
If the PWA concept had caught on, users on all platforms would have an equally good UX, increasing user choice.
If you visit a site a lot, you want to install an icon for it. If you're willing to install an icon for it, you prefer the quality and speed of a native experience. That's just common sense.
Funny enough I couldn't find a decent native app for HN, so I just placed a link to the site in my folder with social apps. That site is the worst thing in that folder.
I know a couple people who dislike Reddit's degraded web experience to drive users to their app. I haven't installed the app myself. Maybe it's a minority opinion. But supposedly Reddit has 1.6 billion unique visitors per month, and about 120 million app installs.
Judging by their non-degraded desktop site experience, thank god we have the app. Honestly, Reddit is one of those sites that make me think the world has collectively forgotten how to make a sane site. It takes seconds to load, and almost everything you go means looking at animated placeholders for a time, until something happens.
I have a workstation that deals with 3D rendering and huge Photoshop files, or compiling sizable projects with no problem, and my CPU is still pegged to 100% when I browse Reddit.
I shudder at the thought of those same people being in charge of my mobile experience. I don't feel like having to replace my phone battery every 3 months, thanks.
> apps turning into battery-draining non-native shitty experiences
There is no reason why non-native apps should be a shitty experience that drains the battery. That is just a tooling/feature issue.
> Have you noticed on the desktop that EVERY SITE asks you for push notifications? This is super annoying and bless your soul if you ever clicked "YES" on any of those. They'll spam you until you die, or eventually ask your nephew to reset your permissions.
The spam for installing the native app is 10x worse when using a mobile browser.
Google's strategy is simple:
1. The web should be able to control everything (i.e. PWA features not normally found in a browser).
2. Google should control the web (they can index it, track, monetize it, but it has to be on the web).
3. Profit.
Do you think Apple users are super excited at the prospect of most apps turning into battery-draining non-native shitty experiences, instead of using the iOS frameworks? No, they're not.
And push notifications on iOS work as a service, to avoid battery drain, they all go through Apple on a single connection. This is free for all native apps. It can't be implemented for web apps both for technical reasons and because web apps can't be curated, so it'll just be abused like there's no tomorrow.
Have you noticed on the desktop that EVERY SITE asks you for push notifications? This is super annoying and bless your soul if you ever clicked "YES" on any of those. They'll spam you until you die, or eventually ask your nephew to reset your permissions.
EVERY single feature not in Safari, has a reason not to be there. And I'm sick of everyone eating up Google's propaganda and becoming their tools in this. I don't mind Google at all, they should fight for their PoV on all this, and they have a right to expand their business.
But not at the expense of Apple or Apple's users. F that.