Comment by msoad
5 years ago
Google's developer relations team have done a good job convincing web devs that those APIs are pushed by Google to enable "Amazing PWAs", yet we haven't seen them used by any major app. People are choosing to download native apps for more sophisticated applications.
However Google is pushing those APIs because they know tracking people without cookies in future is a big challenge for them and they need new ways of tracking people.
So sad that Google has taken over the web. From the most used browser (Chrome) to the content hijacking (AMP) to the standards (PWA). All to sell you to advertisers.
On Android you can use web apps in Firefox, with content blocking powered by uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger. This is because Android allows real Firefox, engine and all and Firefox implements the web push API.
This gives you unmatched privacy. As I've said elsewhere too, see this Facebook page listing apps that share data with them via FB's SDK and marvel at how privacy friendly your iOS device really is:
https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity
The notion that Apple is not implementing the web push API for example, for privacy reasons, is stupid.
"Your off-Facebook activity is currently turned off."
Seems fine to me?
The problem with having an Android phone is that then you have to actually use the damn thing.
On a more serious note though, in iOS 14 app developers are responsible for any SDK's their app uses including data egress.
If PWAs die, we will be struck with this duopoly in smartphone OS for foreseeable future as native apps are the ones which help them retain their position.
If we want upcoming pure Linux smartphone OS, Sailfish or any other platform which protect the mobile computing from becoming proprietary; we need web apps & PWAs to grow and capture significant market.
Apple's treatment towards PWAs has been well known as PWAs are the only threat for its Appstore monopoly in iOS.
From a developer's point of view, I can see the value in PWAs (for them), but as an end user, I really don't see the benefit of PWAs over native apps. The UX is almost always severely degraded when compared to their native counterparts (even if the feature set is ostensibly identical). Why would I use a Twitter PWA, when the native app provides a much better UX?
Why would I use the Twitter app, when I can get the same out of the PWA and not have to download a hundred meg update every week for "bug fixes and improvements"?
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As a developer who has tried to love PWAs a number of times I don't see the value. Users simply do not like them and for good reason.
Just this last month I have been building an app to manage my pantry (keep track of expiration dates) using QR codes I stick on everything. I built the "app" in VueJS (wanted to sharpen those skills) and did the whole thing in the browser. Scanning QR's and scanning UPCs (to track items) was all done using browser apis. I then tried to use it on my phone and hated dealing with the loss of space to the browser UI and it hiding/showing as I scrolled. It was a terrible experience.
So I migrated all my code over into Quasar (a VueJS framework that will let you build for PWA, SSR, regular web, and Cordova/Capacitor. I told myself I wasn't going to use cordova for this, I was going to stick to the browser and try to make it a homescreen icon. It was still shit. It was a pain to get the app to go fullscreen and not pop webkit views on top of my "app". The nail in the coffin was Apple doesn't let you have camera access when the app is running in that mode (it's really just unacceptable IMHO). I spent <10min getting the cordova app running and it's been smooth sailing ever since.
I still do some development on my laptop in the browsers but I would never run a PWA if I had the option of an app (even a cross-platform web app in a cordova wrapper).
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PWA's or web experiences are "good enough".
I would never use a social network native app, ever, as the category has a history of abusing privacy, poorly utilizing resources or any number of other things.
For business, it's a much easier decision. If I can do what I need to do in a PWA, why futz around with iOS, Windows variants, and multiple versions of Android apps? App Stores are a much bigger PITA than shipping web code, and I don't have the time, budget or care to make a polished user experience for employees.
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Native apps are hard to develop and publish through app stores compared to PWAs, and many users don't have access to Play store.
Web apps are also more strongly sandboxed which is important considering how much of Android install base is running on devices without security updates. (Android devices notoriously stop getting them after only couple of years after device launch, or even sooner)
> From a developer's point of view, I can see the value in PWAs (for them), but as an end user, I really don't see the benefit of PWAs over native apps.
I suspect the bigger demand for PWAs is for non-consumer apps. If you are selling to businesses or building internal apps for a business, often delivering a multi-platform + web app with decent performance/ UX, often a PWA or PWA + Web platform is the way to go.
> Why would I use a Twitter PWA, when the native app provides a much better UX?
This is why I think vertical/ internal apps make a lot more sense for PWAs. If consumers have a choice on what they use, they are going to opt for the faster/ better integrated app and PWAs can't compete. For a purchasing manager, the difference between a cross platform PWA and delivering 2 native mobile apps plus a web app can easily be tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs.
(FWIW, I work on a large SAAS web app/ PWA which obviously colors my perceptions)
The advantage of a PWA might be that it exists compared to the native equivalent that doesn't.
I'm interested in the many quirky apps and niche experiments made by people who won't or can't make cross platform native apps.
It's this stuff I care about. I don't care about whether you faang of choice chooses to go native or not.
Mobile apps are designed to be used on mobiles. But what about web apps? You need many versions of the app, from smart-watches to desktop monitors and smart TV's. And then they will be crippled by the web chrome/shell, so we are stuck with Electron/NW.js apps if you want it to blend in to the OS. What's nice with web apps though is that they are sand-boxed, compared to Electron/NW.js apps that get full system access. What needs to be done is to give better design/layout possibilities for web apps once they are installed on the "shelf/desktop", for example transparency, able to design the top bar, able to have a window menu. Or maybe the future is UI toolkits like Flutter and React Native ?
Why on earth would I use a native app for twitter? It's all static content browsing, this has been solved decades ago with the web.
The occasional tweet I may send is just an input field and a file upload maybe.
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Seeing that most revenue on the App Store comes from games, I fail to see how Apple would lose money by suPlotting any of these Apis.
We almost have a duopoly in browsers as well - you have Firefox, and everything else with market share are forks of WebKit.
Name three PWA apps please. I know I've built two PWA POC some time ago (using service workers and Notification API), but I've never use any PWA in the wild.
My last employer (a business to business company) exclusively went down the web app route, with some minimal PWA features, because their clients genuinely preferred not having to go through the app store to install it on their (often personal) phones. Whether they bookmarked the website or "installed" it to their home screen or only used it from their laptop / desktop was entirely up to them, and they never had to deal with the app upgrade hassle.
Tastes vary, I suppose.
> Name three PWA apps please
Fastmail, Facebook, Twitter.
None of them work on iOS due to lacking web push notifications. All of them can work on Android as PWAs and as PWAs they are more secure and privacy friendly (not only due to less permissions granted, but also because you can protect yourself with uBlock Origin et all).
Keep in mind that your personal experience is an anecdote.
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Not sure which region you're from, so I've included the filter for you[1]. These are from famous companies, every major apps uses PWA in some part of their app.
[1]https://developers.google.com/web/showcase/region
Are you talking specifically about add-to-home-screen / offline capabilities? Because PWA is a very broad term, and most descriptions I've seen consider those features necessary to be a PWA.
Ignoring those two, you get damn near every major web app. All of Google's applications, Facebook, Twitter, etc. etc.
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Twitter
Firefox Send
Spotify
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Nah people can just program in Java again.
> However Google is pushing those APIs because they know tracking people without cookies in future is a big challenge for them and they need new ways of tracking people.
Why would it be? They have the search data, they know what you clicked on, they have GA on 60-80% of sites, they have plenty of information, tracking and profiling users isn't the issue. Tracking and profiling users legally is what's hard.
You have to build these APIs before people use them, and a lot of what Google has been building into Chrome is stuff native apps can do, so the use-case is clearly there.
IMO native apps are capable of far more invasive privacy violations than the web is. But for some reason they're given a very free pass by comparison.
Native apps are not handling my bank account passwords. They're also not collecting data about my consumer behavior with the goal of displaying more ads. This is a big difference.
> Native apps are not handling my bank account passwords.
You're conflating browsers (Chrome, Firefox, etc) with user applications. User applications are still not handling your bank passwords.
> They're also not collecting data about my consumer behavior with the goal of displaying more ads.
lol? Absolutely wrong here.
> They're also not collecting data about my consumer behavior with the goal of displaying more ads
This is my original point. They 100% absolutely are. Look at some of the ad and tracking frameworks for native apps. Somehow no one cares.
They're given a very free pass because it's incredibly easy to block a native app from sending data back or even connecting to the internet at all.
You have a lot more control over something that's running locally than something running serverside that simply using the client to harvest data.
It's even easier to block a web app - just don't visit its web address.
A native app sits on your device, executing all kinds of code, sometimes without your knowledge. With PWAs, the code is more or less open source - all the JS is there for you to inspect - even after obfuscation, you can see the network requests being made in the dev tools of any browser.
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Well, because native apps are intended to be trusted. They do not have a motivation to invade your privacy: proprietary apps are usually paid upfront and risk their future clients, open source can be inspected.
Instead, the overwhelming web business model is "free to use" (akin to f2p in games). That means ads and other monetization side channels become the priority of the app, not the app itself.
And that is for trusted web apps. Let's not even talk about the fact that you are executing random code every time you visit any webpage. That just does not happen with native apps.
That's not true at all! Free native apps abound. Web apps tied to subscriptions are also plentiful.
Open source is neither here nor there: both web sites and native apps can be open source. In fact, the web is unique in allowing you to actually inspect the source that is running on your machine, you have no way of verifying that the code in an open source repo is what actually runs inside your iOS app.
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Never trust what they say, Google is known to offer so called "free" services for your good, ultimately people realize they are paying with their private data.
Rhe fact that people don't realize PWAs are the next push by Google to regain control is shocking.
The number of hackernews threads calling out Apple for not supporting PWAs is just as insane.
Interesting thought. I wonder if there's a genuine threat of google "AMP-ifying" PWAs. And by that, I essentially mean Google using their properties to exert control over PWAs, just as they have with web articles and other content. Given Google's virtual stronghold over the web, I'd assume so.
I don't really understand: the PWA APIs are W3C APIs, they're not created by one company. Mozilla fully supports them.
Just because they're standards doesn't mean they aren't standards written and promoted chiefly by Google. Mozilla also has pushed back on some of them, despite the fact that... Mozilla supporting them isn't a good argument since most of their revenue also comes from, you guessed it: Google.
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