Comment by troupo
8 months ago
> This is the result of the inconsistent user experience to which gatekeepers like Apple have been actively contributing through active sabotage of web apps, such that all profitable apps can be more effectively and reliably taxed through Apple's App Store.
If web apps were any good, we'd see a plethora of them on Android. There are none (or very, very, very few).
If web apps were any good, nothing Apple "gatekeeps" would prevent you from building an amazing web app for iOS. The things Apple "gatekeeps" (such as mobile push) would not prevent you from making a smooth fast web app.
And yet here we are.
> if regulators do a proper job and allow web apps to compete on a level playing field
They already are competing on a level playing field. It's not "lack of NFC" or "lack of Bluetooth" or "lack of <another moving goalpost>" that prevent you from having good web apps.
> If web apps were any good, we'd see a plethora of them on Android. There are none (or very, very, very few).
Android also benefits immensely from the store revenue, it's not called a duopoly for no reason.
personally i’ve also seen dev orgs push hard for native apps because they believe it’s better for their skill sets and their future professional prospects snd current comp…
>If web apps were any good, we'd see a plethora of them on Android. There are none (or very, very, very few).
This statement alone is evidence that you didn't understand the crux of the issue. You are also confusing cause and effect. I clearly explained the root causes for that. The reason there are not more web apps is not that they aren't "good" - what does that even mean? what is the criterion for "good" here? If you say that it's because they lack certain features, then you confirmed my point that it's due to active sabotage and denial of equal rights. Be specific, why are they not "good"? There wouldn't be coincidentally a mysterious opposing force that actively prevents developers from improving those aspects, right?
>There are none (or very, very, very few).
X (Twitter) - has PWA
Pinterest - has PWA
Spotify - has PWA
Uber - Hybrid
Starbucks - has PWA
Again, you're confusing cause and effect. It's like actively sabotaging a runner and saying: "See? that runner sucks!!" - Yeah because that runner is being actively sabotaged. You're completely ignoring all the evidence and simply claiming that they are unpopular because they are not "good" when in reality they are unpopular because they have been sabotaged to prevent them from challenging the gatekeeper's taxation funnels.
>If web apps were any good, nothing Apple "gatekeeps" would prevent you from building an amazing web app for iOS. The things Apple "gatekeeps" (such as mobile push) would not prevent you from making a smooth fast web app.
That's not even a coherent argument. Gatekeepers can sabotage competitors in many subtle ways to make the user experience subpar, it's not a 1-dimensional game where only feature parity can be weaponized. It's clear that you are actively refusing to understand the points being made. There is also documented evidence that Apple consistently engaged in practices that made any competing platform a worse experience. Gatekeepers have a conflict of interest and they consistently act in a manner that makes that bias glaring. Gatekeepers are also not morons, they know that it doesn't take much to introduce artificial friction while also maintaining plausible deniability. e.g. see court documents where Apple's engineers admit that they strategically use "scare screens" and that their managers would "definitely like that".
>They already are competing on a level playing field. It's not "lack of NFC" or "lack of Bluetooth" or "lack of <another moving goalpost>" that prevent you from having good web apps.
That's factually incorrect. As previously stated, it's not just a 1-dimensional form of sabotage where only feature parity is being weaponized but any form of artificially introduced friction, while being able to maintain plausible deniability - any of that will get the job done of shutting down any threat to the gatekeeper's taxation funnel. Furthermore, as open-web-advocacy.org states:
- #AppleBrowserBan Apple's ban of third party browsers on iOS is deeply anti-competitive, starves the Safari/WebKit team of funding and has stalled innovation for the past 10 years and prevented Web Apps from taking off on mobile. (https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban...)
-Deep System Integration
Web Apps need to become just Apps. Apps built with the free and open web need equal treatment and integration. Closed and heavily taxed proprietary ecosystems should not receive any preference.
- Web App Equality
All artifical barriers placed by gatekeepers must be removed. Web Apps if allowed can offer equivalent functionality with greater privacy and security for demanding use-cases.
> Web Apps need to become just Apps. Apps built with the free and open web need equal treatment and integration. Closed and heavily taxed proprietary ecosystems should not receive any preference.
That basically already exists on the desktop in the form of Electron apps. Those apps are universally hated because of it.
Web technology is not suitable for making applications. It was designed to format text documents and that's all it's really good at. That's why we have the web-framework-of-the-week problem, everyone is desperately trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Web apps are janky, fragile and feel out of place on every OS. It's a 'one size fits no one' solution.
>That basically already exists on the desktop in the form of Electron apps. Those apps are universally hated because of it.
Discord and Visual Studio Code are among the most popular apps on mac, those are electron apps. None of that is relevant to the core issue either way. It's not up to Apple to decide any of that, that's what the market and regulators are for. Apple uses and pushes self-serving and false narratives as pretext to engage in anti-competitive business practices.
>Web technology is not suitable for making applications. It was designed to format text documents and that's all it's really good at.
That statement might have been true in 1995, but today it's categorically false.
> Web apps are janky, fragile and feel out of place on every OS. It's a 'one size fits no one' solution.
I've already debunked this manufactured, reductionist and false narrative above.
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I understand where you're coming from, but then I think about my daily work.
All of my documents, my spreadsheets, email, chat, and video calling is all done from my browser. I keep Emacs open for scratch just because I can't quit Emacs and I have a terminal open to run some servers. And this has been my working model for at least the last five to six years.
What's remarkable about it is that web apps are doing almost all of the heavy lifting of my work every day. I thought this was worth noting in the context of your comment that web technology is not suitable for making applications.
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> Those apps are universally hated because of it.
Maybe they are hated by nerds on reddit and hackernews.
I gather most people are just using the apps and have no idea how they’re built.
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> That basically already exists on the desktop in the form of Electron apps. Those apps are universally hated because of it.
I hate a few apps on desktop because they're web apps. Because those specific apps should _not_ be webapps. Other webapps I hate on the desktop _because they use electron_ and maintain yet another browser engine running constantly on my PC--not because they choose to write their UI in HTML and CSS. I don't need 15 browsers running on my computer. Give me a native stub for the taskbar and whatever other functionality is needed, and if you _must_ use HTML then render it in whatever browser I feel like opening the app in. I've got several programs that do this, and they're the best of the bunch (Intel driver assistant, cfosspeed) as they don't have an entire chrome process stack running all the time just in case you maybe want to open their interface (I almost never do).
> If you say that [PWAs] lack certain features, then you confirmed my point that it's due to active sabotage and denial of equal rights
How does that follow?
More generally, do you have any sources for your repeated claims of intentional sabotage? You make accusations of ignoring evidence but you have provided none - unless you're saying that apple has already poisoned the well and anything they do is suspect.
All of your questions have already been answered above, but you clearly didn't have much interest in reading it. I will still elaborate more so you don't even have the chance to delude yourself into thinking that you have any point whatsoever.
Apple has a 10/10 vested interest in the kneecapping of PWAs - why?
A Progressive Web App, if allowed to reach its full, un-sabotaged potential, is the technological manifestation of the Digital Markets Act's goals. So it would be utterly absurd for Apple to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into fighting the DMA, just to let PWAs pass which achieves the exact same goals.
Many of the DMA's mandates are an existential threat to Apple's business model and the PWA is the DMA in disguise:
- DMA mandates Apple to allow alternative App Stores & sideloading i.e. Force Apple to end its monopoly on app distribution. PWAs are sideloading by nature. A user "installs" a PWA directly from the web. The browser is the app store. The open web is the distribution platform. This completely bypasses the App Store.
- DMA mandates Apple to allow alternative payment systems. Forcing Apple to let developers use their own payment processors and avoid the 15-30% commission. PWAs use Open Web payments. It can use Stripe, PayPal, or any other payment processor with standard web APIs. Apple gets a 0% cut.
- DMA mandates Apple to increase Developer & User Choice. Give developers the freedom to choose their tools and give users the freedom to choose their apps without being locked in. PWAs are the epitome of choice. They are built with the most universal, open technologies on earth (HTML, CSS, JS). They are cross-platform by default and free users from being locked into a single company's hardware/software ecosystem.
Why would Apple have ANY interest in nurturing a technology that would voluntarily subject them to the very conditions they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying and legal fees to fight against?
The answer is: They wouldn't and they don't.
Apple's actions are not those of a company with simply "low interest". They are the actions of a profit-maximizing gatekeeper actively defending its most lucrative business against an existential threat. Every bug, every delayed feature, and every artificial limitation imposed on PWAs on iOS is a calculated strategic move in this defense. The brief, hostile removal of PWA functionality in the EU was not an outlier, it was Apple showing its true face when it thought it could get away with it.
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> This statement alone is evidence that you didn't understand the crux of the issue.
I do
> You are also confusing cause and effect.
I don't
> I clearly explained the root causes for that.
You didn't. You went on a rant about "public perception" and your own experience building mobile web sites.
> If you say that it's because they lack certain features, then you confirmed my point that it's due to active sabotage and denial of equal rights.
See. Again with the rant.
> Be specific, why are they not "good"?
E.g. Reddit's mobile web site loads every post in 3+ seconds. And reloads the full page when you click on a subtree in the comments.
When you scroll through Twitter, it will just randomly load a bunch of stuff and replace your content losing your scroll position. Same with going back from a tweet to the timeline.
Most websites take multiple seconds to display text-only information with broken layouts, layout shifts, and multiple loading states.
To quote myself from 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34517503
--- start quote ---
Features HN developers think are missing from the web to deliver an experience "as polished as a native app": notifications, prompt banners, link interception, Chrome-only non-standards like bluetooth etc.
Features actual users think are missing from the web to deliver an experience "as polished as a native app": actual native-like experience: responsiveness, smooth animations, polished usable and accesible controls, maintaining scroll position and location in the app, fast scrolling through large lists, no loading states for the simplest actions...
I mean, people people keep bringing up Twitter's objectively bad web app as an example of one of the best PWA apps... Have these people never seen an actual native app?
--- end quote ---
> There wouldn't be coincidentally a mysterious opposing force that actively prevents developers from improving those aspects, right?
There is no such entity. Besides, Google invested hundreds of millions of dollars into PWAs, and there are still so few that people can point to even on Android.
> X (formerly Twitter) - has PWA
Yup.
We have really complex web applications like Photopea.
They work fine performance-wise. The example of Reddit’s website being shit is just pointing out that Reddit’s website is shit.
Google maps web applications also works really well. Both Photopea and Google Maps are far more complex than reddit.
At this point I am sure reddit’s website is shit so people are forced to use their app so they can track users better. Not because of some underlying limitation of web technologies.
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ht>> I clearly explained the root causes for that.
>You didn't. You went on a rant about "public perception" and your own experience building mobile web sites.
I have no time to engage in your shallow kind of tit for tat, where I do all of the work and you simply respond with infantile one word responses with zero elaboration or outright denial, misrepresentation or just repetition of already debunked narratives. I will still briefly debunk the parts where you put in at least some minor effort of trying to substantiate.
For a more elaborate analysis:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44692287
>> Be specific, why are they not "good"? > E.g. Reddit's mobile web site loads every post in 3+ seconds. And reloads the full page when you click on a subtree in the comments. When you scroll through Twitter, it will just randomly load a bunch of stuff and replace your content losing your scroll position. Same with going back from a tweet to the timeline. Most websites take multiple seconds to display text-only information with broken layouts, layout shifts, and multiple loading states.
Those are some specific apps that have bad implementations, not an inherent limitation of the technology, so it's irrelevant to the bigger picture. I asked you for the specific technology. That's like me saying "Give me a specific reason why electric cars will never be a viable technology as you claimed" then you respond with "This specific brand has an electric car with this specific issue". It's such a transparent strategy of deliberately missing the point.
> --- start quote ---
Features HN developers think are missing from the web to deliver an experience ... --- end quote ---
All of those are issues that have already been fixed, so I don't get why you would bring up your severely outdated comment. It also contains aspects for which I clearly explained why and who is to blame for those.
>There is no such entity. Besides, Google invested hundreds of millions of dollars into PWAs, and there are still so few that people can point to even on Android.
I already responded to this in many different comments:
"Google is the primary champion of PWAs, they have a vested interest in its success. The reason I focused on Apple is because its actions are one of a profit-maximizing gatekeeper actively defending its most lucrative business against an existential threat that is PWA. Every bug, every delayed feature, and every artificial limitation imposed on PWAs on iOS is a calculated strategic move in this defense of its walled garden that makes maximum taxation possible."
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