Telegram Web, wefwef and Outlook (for work) are doing a fantastic job running on my iPhone SE. Do you think PWA on mobile are the future? Developers could get around the 30% cut for in-App-purchases and publish apps not even allowed in large appstores. Companies could sell phones with alternate operating systems and their users could still access all their favourite apps (yes, I’m dreaming). Wasn’t Steve Jobs original idea of the iPhone about something similar to PWA instead of apps?
Oddly enough PWA / Webapps was the original design intent for the iPhone (before the app store) and why it shipped with for the time the most advanced standards based browser on mobile.
I have yet to experience a PWA that is as quick to load or easy to navigate (smooth scrolling / responsiveness) as a native or hybrid native mobile app.
There always seem to be odd “browser” based glitches from errors from page loads or rubber banding or zoom / cliping of the UI at times.
As a software dev, so much this.
PWAs are super fucking cool, but current web browsers are a SuperFund disaster site, so they make PWAs suck, and PWAs are partially to blame as Google and Apple keep adding features to browsers to mirror their phones’ native features. Every PWA is going to be slower than a native app for the foreseeable future, regrettably, and they’ll always be nothing more than a browser with the decorations hidden.
I hate this reality with a passion, but native apps are faster because it’s an app on your phone and not an app in a browser on your phone.
PWAs are great, because Apple and Google have no say in whether or not you can use them, and they get no cut if you spend money through them (scumbags at Apple taking 30%).
IMO we went wrong as soon as we started trying to turn web browsers into their own mini operating systems. That’s just… not what they were designed to do. The web was designed as a thing that could sent text and links over a network connection. Is the thing that web browsers currently are kind of a good idea? Yeah, sure, but the fact that it’s a web browser seems like exactly what’s led to the “SuperFund disaster”. Everything about the way we’re doing things is terrifyingly hackish and inefficient.
What’s Superfund? Google is giving me environmental stuff.
A SuperFund site is a place in the United States that has been so severely polluted that the government actually doing something about it to protect people (a rarity).
Generally, these are places where nuclear, chemical-manufacturing, or oil-refining accidents have occurred, like the Hanford Site or Times Beach, MO.
Ah so you’re saying browsers are so bad they’re Superfund disaster sites?
Yeah, you can’t go in them to do anything unless you are highly trained with specialized tools, and it’ll take decades to get even minor improvements completed, because of the sheer effort it takes not to make things worse.
I’m using wefwef right now and it is surprisingly good.
Tbf wefwef is by FAR the best PWA I’ve seen. It feels native.
I’d put Phanpy up there as well.
I tried searching for phanpy but all I got was Pokémon. What am I missing?
Lol, sorry, I should’ve been a bit more specific by pointing out it’s a Mastodon client:
It can’t be as efficient as native apps. So no, I am against it being a standard. I don’t want unnecessarily resource hungry things.
Apple and Google can maybe instead collaborate together for a protocol for Android and iPhone to ease the process of multi-platform apps.
That makes no sense. Native apps are full of tracking and analytics garbage you can’t easily block not to mention ads. Most are just react native anyways if cross platform. PWAs you can at least block all the nasty stuff and honestly I doubt anyone would notice a difference in performance. I’m sorry you’ve had a bad experience though.
I’m pretty sure the overhead of a web renderer is considerably more than any analytics library loaded in the app unless it’s particularly bad code.
Not really. A proper PWA is cached locally and assets loaded just once just like a normal app.
It’s much harder to hide bloat in a PWA. That alone is worth it for me when it comes to most apps. I have a bunch of PWA’s instead of their native apps.
I don’t have any installed, but I’m curious to try them. Can you list some you use?
I’m not sure so far. I’ve been using wefwef but it doesn’t feel very responsive, scrolling is smooth but there’s a small delay when tapping on anything.
I love the 2 I currently use regularly, Wefwef and Lichess. The biggest advantage is how easy it is to install compared to a native app not on play store. I’m all for wider adoption!
I only use wefwef at the moment, but I love it. It’s faster and looks a lot better than the other iPhone clients I’ve tried so far.
If there is going to be a standard it should be a compiled language with some sort of common ui framework. Basically like js+html+css but compiled and cross platform. It’ll never happen, though
Flutter?
