Comment by josephcsible
8 months ago
I wish Apple and Google would make rules to the effect of "if your app's entire functionality could be done in a regular website or PWA, then you can't put a native app on our stores".
8 months ago
I wish Apple and Google would make rules to the effect of "if your app's entire functionality could be done in a regular website or PWA, then you can't put a native app on our stores".
> if your app's entire functionality could be done in a regular website or PWA, then you can't put a native app on our stores
A very silly threshold, since this would knock out probably 95% of the app store, including games, since "websites" are extremely capable these days, with full 3d graphics, etc. Then, each time safari added a new modern browser feature, more would get knocked out.
I think that's a little overstated. Part of a game's functionality is performance and native controls. A website can technically do those things, but the JS and WGL requirements will significantly hamper performance, and getting a browser to hand over native, first-class control of the device to the website is largely impossible and usually ends up an awkward mess.
And that little asterisk would end up getting abused by pretty much everyone. After all, we wouldn't be able to add the same functionality to the website because the developers we employ for this are only proficient in `<native language here>`.
By-intent, it would definitely be a big chunk of the apps out there, but I would argue that's a good thing. I don't want an App for every brand I interact with, especially since I know what they're doing (harvesting my data to sell to brokers to make a fraction of a penny more per transaction).
Why is that a bad thing? Wouldn't we be better off with all of them being PWA's?
It's not a bad thing for users. It would reduce the ability of Apple and Google to extract revenue from their stores though, so they're motivated to do the opposite.
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Gotta love the HN bubble. Users want apps, not PWAs.
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Given how much it seems Apple detests PWAs, I don't ever see this happening. One can dream.
I feel like Apple is some lazy target for people to point to why PWAs have little uptake.
Android has long had PWA support. Almost no one uses it at all. In fact iOS users have long had significantly high web browser usage than their Android compatriots.
"It's because iOS doesn't support it...somehow. Despite entirely separate bases that could be served in entirely different ways, it's actually Apple's fault"
A couple of years ago Apple pretty much fully supported PWAs, including push notifications. Still negligible uptake on either iOS or Android. It turns out that it was the PWAs vs the Apps all along, and had nothing to do with Apple. The web and the average web technology stack has turned so toxic -- those enormous frameworks that yield an atrocious user experience -- that people prefer the app.
Still though, somehow Apple's fault. Increasingly such adherents have to reach to successively more niche weird Google additions to Chrome to justify why somehow Apple is to blame. Because Apple doesn't support the new half-baked AdBlastNoBlock3000 API that Google jammed into Chrome. Etc.
It's just weird. At some point people need to be a bit more honest with themselves about why apps are preferred over PWAs or even just basic websites when an app is avialable.
>Android has long had PWA support. Almost no one uses it at all.
Yes. Because if you're making a mobile app you want to target the two major platforms. If IOS's PWA's suck, you're not going to try and make a PWA for android. So it's a negative feedback loop.
>Despite entirely separate bases that could be served in entirely different ways,
differnt ways costs money. So often it isn't done. They pick a framework that launches to all targets and deviate as little as possible. We're long past the days of having two dedicated teams trying to appeal to android users vs ios users. They are all simply "users".
>A couple of years ago Apple pretty much fully supported PWAs, including push notifications.
They pretended to while changing a bunch of develop terms to make it hard to actually use the PWA's. They "fully supported" PWAs the same way they "complied" with the DMA.
Besides, adoption takes a few years. You can't make a half-hearted update and expect changes overnight.it takes a few years to really see the results.
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Apps are normally made semi cross-platform nowadays. Not much point in maintaining a PWA that's effectively an Android-only app.
But even aside from Apple's lack of support, the PWA standard seems kinda bad. Weird boilerplate like the serviceworker.js even if all you want is to make it addable to home screen.
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> reach to successively more niche weird Google additions to Chrome
Um... bluetooth? USB? Sensors? Basically anything dealing with external hardware is a huge hole. I can configure and flash my QMK keyboard from my phone or laptop just by following a shortened URL.
I mean, sure. "Web Sites" work great on Safari! But Apple cares deeply that "Apps" have broader capabilities than the browser, and it does it by crippling progress with PWAs.
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then they can't charge their app tax!
What you probably envision but didn’t say is that this would be in a world where a website could be a first class citizen and behave more like an app. Mobile browsers don’t have e to be so shitty.
Apple almost sort of do. If you have a website and put an app on the App Store, it must have functionality that beyond what the website already offers.
It's sort of the opposite: Developer have to shrink the websites' functionality to obey this rule.
Usually they don’t, though. They add one iOS feature instead.
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