Comment by rsynnott
9 years ago
As an iOS user, I'm actually quite glad that websites can't send me push notifications on it. And app loading screens are a feature?
If people _insist_ on making phone apps as websites, there's Cordova and all that. Such apps are never very good, of course. I still haven't seen a website-based desktop/phone app that wasn't a clunky non-native-looking resource-hogging mess.
That exact argument can be applied to native apps. Should native apps have push notifications removed?
Why not? Because they can actually be extremely useful. Such as for receiving emails, Facebook messages, Slack pings, or news updates you've subscribed to. Maybe somebody tweeted you. Any of these apps could work as progressive webapps.
Regardless if the platform is native or web-based, the feature remains opt-in. If you don't want them, then don't subscribe to them.
Yes but supporting the feature encourages developers to make web apps. Why would you want to encourage that?
Why wouldn't you want that? PWAs are seamless (no downloading/installing), allow native features, can be saved offline for later, run in a secure sandbox, and are completely open and cross-platform.
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Push notifications are opt in on every browser that supports them. I'm confident Apple could come up with a process that ensures you only get them if you want them and can easily opt out later.
Right, but as a user experience you get a phone that either annoys you into switching off all the features that can be used to bug you, or annoys you endlessly because you don't know how to switch it off, or doesn't have it on by default - in which case there's little point in implementing it all, because most will not even be aware they can switch it on.
Or you could do some kind of middle-ground like what Chrome is planning, where the user can only be prompted to enable notifications after they've reached some specific level of engagement with the site they're using: https://github.com/WICG/interventions/issues/49#issuecomment...
> If people _insist_ on making phone apps as websites, there's Cordova and all that. Such apps are never very good, of course
I strongly disagree. We use Ionic (which is based on Cordova) for line of business apps, and the results are as good as native apps, but with the benefit (amongst others) of having a single codebase for both Android and iOS.
Hybrid apps aren't a good match for all types of app - games in particular - but they do work well for many others.
Yes, all you're saying is it is possible to make shitty native apps too. So that would explain your results. Native isn't a magic wand, but except for the simplest of things web will not be as good. The cracks still show in things like Google docs and sheets and overall those are pretty good as far as web goes.
> Yes, all you're saying is it is possible to make shitty native apps too
No, that's not what I said at all. I guess you're only going to read what you want to hear...