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atatatat | 4 years ago

Webapps don't have to be terrible.

Don't let the rushed, incomplete web apps of yesterday scare you away from PWAs!

discuss

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vinay427|4 years ago

I genuinely don’t understand what people are referring to when they use PWA in this context. Do the latest versions of Google office suite apps qualify? How about Outlook in the browser, or maybe TensorBoard or Slack?

I would generally describe all of those listed above as providing a poor experience compared to even a decent native app. Maybe those aren’t what you mean, which is why I’m curious to hear which PWAs aren’t terrible.

crubier|4 years ago

Yes sure... the old song of « these new web apps like Google Docs are terrible, we should go back to MS office 97 ».

Meanwhile, customers clearly and massively choose web apps over more traditional apps. Think of the market share of web/electron apps now: Google docs, Gmail, Slack, Figma and others.

I don’t know why hacker news seems to have this belief that native apps are better, while clearly proven wrong by facts.

The thing is that for a given budget, the development velocity of web based apps is 10x faster than native apps. I’ll get downvoted for that, but that’s the real reason why the web is winning.

tonyedgecombe|4 years ago

>Webapps don't have to be terrible.

Yet they mostly are.

crubier|4 years ago

Wait until you see native apps made by people with the same skills as those who make “shitty web apps”. At that point the word “terrible” does not even apply anymore.

watermelon0|4 years ago

Eh, most PWAs are still slow and have non-intuitive UI.