Comment by llm_nerd
8 months ago
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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>Ignoring that almost all of these orgs are also building web apps
Poorly, but yes. You can say they have something reseming a web app.
>several of the major frameworks can share the majority of code with PWA apps.
But as we should all know, it's not enough to press a button and deploy perfectly. You gotta fix all thr quirks, and that's where most of the budget for a dedicated team back in the day went. Not so much these days.
>Yet despite Android making up like 75% of the market....almost no PWAs have any traction at all. It's almost like it isn't Apple's fault.
75% isn't enough when targeting 100% of the market. And this decade isn't a good example of how companies are trying to win customers over with quality and care.
>Can you cite what you're talking about?
Straight from the horses' mouth: https://developer.apple.com/support/dma-and-apps-in-the-eu/
Can't get more term-Y than "you can't do this here".
>It isn't Apple's fault, as boring and constant as that cry is.
It's not apples fault in the same way it's not their fault Flash died. they didn't land the killing blow, but they sure did slice some limbs off.
You seem too obsessed with thinking that there's this "android exclusive "market to appeal to to really understand my argument on how app development and support actually works in practice, so I'll leave it at that metaphor.
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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.
>Apps are normally made semi cross-platform nowadays
"normally" is carrying a lot of water there. While the back-end is shared, obviously, a large number of orgs have two distinct fully native development projects for the platforms. There are zero empirical metrics I can cite, but in my experience the cross platform thing is a minority. Cross platform tooling is often the talk among the aspirational "One day I'm going to write a novel, and then a hit app" sorts, but it just doesn't dominate in the actual industry.
But if it did, Flutter dominates the cross-platform world, and what do you know, Flutter can generate PWA apps.
>But even aside from Apple's lack of support
Apple has supported PWA for a couple of years. It was a lazy excuse by cheerleaders who had nothing factual, but Apple supporting PWAs didn't move the needle at all. Because it turns out that a billion Android devices not being targeted with PWAs had literally nothing to do with Apple.
React Native is pretty typical now. Of course it's not magic, but it gets you most of the way there.
You don't need a service worker if that's all you want to do. You just need a manifest.
Oh, this used to be a requirement to make the app installable in Chrome but seemingly got removed around 2023: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53594466/are-service-wor...
Idk about iOS
> 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.
>Um... bluetooth? USB? Sensors?
Ah yes, the 0.001% of apps. That's clearly why PWAs have made zero inroads, even on Android where Google keeps tossing in poorly considered, completely non-standard APIs.
> Ah yes, the 0.001% of apps
A small fraction of WEB PAGES, not "apps". Like half the apps installed on my phone have some behavior not purely connected to internet communication!
You just don't think that's a problem and like installing apps from the store and using iOS as your only gateway to the world and think "browsers" are crufty and silly. But that's a taste issue not a technical one. "Because I don't personally like it" makes an extremely poor argument against the embrace of open standards.
Basically you're the person in 1998 arguing for Win32 apps everywhere and that the HTML/JS/Java platforms were inherently inferior. How'd that philosophy work out?
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