I can always tell when an app I am using is just a web app bundled for iOS or Android. They never feel as polished or tightly integrated with the host OS; buttons don't look the same, UI paradigms are genericized, platform-specific features (RIP 3D-Touch) are flat out ignored.
I say this as someone who develops web apps for a living: native apps are almost always more fun to use.
The reasons people choose to develop PWA or native have greater impacts on the user experience than the differences between the two.
For example, many predict PWA development will be cheaper for them in the short-term. They are first optimizing product development for short-term cost. That focus impacts the released product more than PWA’s strengths and weaknesses. Others choose PWA hoping for a way to rapidly release and iterate MVPs of experimental business ideas. Again, the rationale has a greater impact on the user experience than the tech. Some expect native stacks will let them more deeply tune and polish the user experience than PWA. Or access richer or more performant device capabilities that PWAs cannot. And, this focus on experience over cost impacts the users’ experiences more than the capabilities of native.
In short, many PWAs feel poorer because of product development goals and constraints that precede PWA. These products were always going to give a poorer experience, regardless of the choice of PWA or native.
I find myself deleting wrapped PWAs. If I need to use the service and am paying, I’ll ping their customer support email. If I’m not, do I really need it? Life is too slow for stodgy apps and hamburger menus on iOS.
But then do user care for apps they don't enjoy to use on a fundamental level ?
My local garbage collection company has an app, and I only need it show me what garbage will be collected today and this week. I use it almost everyday, but couldn't care less if the buttons feel native, or if the UI paradigm is generic.
Having all the resources downloaded on the phone still makes the app faster to open than the web site, and I'd have been 100% happy with a PWA.
If we look at phones as tools, there are hundreds of tasks for which "there's an app for that" but an app built specifically for every platform is just overkill and a waste of resource.
Can someone tell me what PWA even is from user perspective? I think most users just see web and web apps that they can use through their browser and then there is the app store and its native apps. Most people have no idea what the hell is a PWA. Even I don't fully know what it is because I don't really care.
To me there is the web with collapsing non-optimized layouts, annoying forms, "Please login"/"Enter your billing address and credit card information" popups and then there is the perfectly crafted mobile UX with Face ID, Apple Pay etc. that just has all my data and just works.
I have making web and mobile apps for a long time and have never understood what "native" UI even means. No two native apps look the same. And the thing I always notice is that I can't deep link or do a text search on a native app.
You are absolutely correct that most users prefer native apps but I have no actual data on why.
I'm smiling wryly at this comment, because it sounds exactly like what people used to way about Java apps on Windows. You could throw your latest sexy window toolkit at it, but it was never /quite/ native looking enough, and users could always tell.
> platform-specific features (RIP 3D-Touch) are flat out ignored
good riddance.
as someone who uses various operating systems on a regular basis, niche "features" like 3D-touch are an annoyance and force adjustments and break muscle memory every time I switch between systems and UIs, which I do many times every day.
apple's insistence on being special and not using basic keyboard and touch conventions like the other systems do is painful.
This doesn't seem true of everyone, at least for Reddit or Twitter. No matter how many times it tries to get me to install the native app, I'm always going to keep using the web app.
From other comments on Hacker News, I don't think I'm alone? I don't know how many die-hards there are, though.
I'd say power users prefer native apps. I genuinely think the jury is out on whether regular users do. The fact that you're citing something like 3D Touch (which was canned precisely because so few users knew what it even was or how to use it) kind of illustrates the point.
I think this is one of those cases where HN is going to just be an echo chamber audience. We're all power users, the majority of whom demand native apps. But we're not typical.
For one I don't think PWAs will, should or can kill all native apps. But I think they could replace a specific subset of native apps that aren't doing anything particularly ambitious in terms of feature set or UI. The article is pretty long but for me there are two core reasons:
- people are used to getting apps from the App/Play Store. It's a very well understood dynamic. Installing from a web page is strange.
- Apple have helped make the above an even bigger problem that it needs to be by making their 'add to Home Screen' option two menus deep with no way to trigger it as a result of user action.
That's about it, really. I know people are coming to this thread to say PWAs fail because the UI is bad or because they're slow or this or that... I don't buy that argument simply because I know of a ton of slow native apps that have poor UI that are successful. Non-power users don't really care all that much if you're offering functionality they want to use (within reason, of course). I would still love to see a web API for something equivalent to UITableView, though.
> I would still love to see a web API for something equivalent to UITableView, though.
If browsers started shipping support for typical UI widgets like that, I would become much more interested in the web as a platform. Bring Your Own Everything is fine for traditional websites but I strongly dislike it for building something complex enough to be considered an "app".
I don’t think I’ve ever seen installing a PWA as an option. I’ve never been prompted (though I suppose some of those “use our app!” pop ups could be trying to install a pwa, but I think they always take me to the App Store).
As the article mentions (on iOS) the install mechanism is to open the share menu and select “Add to home”.
I don’t open the share menu on random web apps to see if I can install them. The option may as well not exist. I also highly doubt any regular user is aware of the term “PWA”. Why haven’t PWAs killed native apps? No one knows they exist.
As a dev:
The one time I wanted to make a PWA the use case relied on being able to send notifications. The user was on iOS, safari didn’t support it. Dead in the water.
Maybe I’ll revisit it again now that support is finally here.
A number of responses in this thread are crying about companies needing trackers or notifications not working correctly. These are two tiny issues that just doesn't explain why there aren't any competitive PWAs yet.
PWA just aren't as satisfying to use as Web Apps; it doesn't have anything to do with relatively esoteric APIs. Just look at Twitter iOS and Twitter Web. Just moving within the app is clunky, try clicking a tweet; while the native app is full of fast animations the web app is full of empty loading screens. On native videos play quickly and fluently while html5 video can't offer the same seamlessness.
Is there a PWA out there that meets the level of polish of something basic like Twitter native app? If not, users will continue to prefer native apps; especially on mobile. PWAs will only win if they manage to make development so cheap that they kill any incentive to build natively. This is what happened on desktop
Aside from specific missing apis, the biggest problem with PWAs right now is probably that it's a PITA to maintain local state and also sync it with the server unless you use something like pouchdb that's specifically oriented around that.
Once the filesystem storage apis get worked out, it should be much easier to have persistent sql.js, etc. without having to load the whole thing into memory and save it again constantly and without having to resort to complicated stuff like absurdsql.
I think that finally being able to easily have sqlite in pwas will make it a lot easy to maintain local state and sync it without having to have a maintain a completely separate way of handling data for offline use, ideally without having to rearchitect the whole app as "offline first" but instead just optionally allowing offline use when it's installed as a PWA.
This is assuming you want to enable offline use, but for me that's a major thing that justifies making a page into a PWA (otherwise why not just go to the site?).
The following was an interesting sleight of hand to me:
> A PWA can’t read your phone’s contacts, send SMS on your behalf, or access any of your phone’s features that could expose your private information.
Seems almost like a win, right?
But repeat just this part in isolation:
> or access any of your phone’s features
You’re phone has a lot of features that are either unavailable or clunky to use from web tech, that aren’t privacy related per se. I do BLE apps. I do apps that operate equipment when there’s no connectivity or internet around. Or that need tuned performance. Haptic feedback. Custom hare sheets. So on and so forth. I would love to not have to code the same thing m not Kotlin and Swift. We’ve tried. It just fails to execute well in the end.
Because when the duopoly of Apple and Google want to make money through their app stores, they don't want developers not going through their stores, and thus they'll restrict PWAs as much as possible under the guise of privacy. How else are they going to extract their pound of flesh?
you cannot adblock in native apps like you can in web apps. and web apps can never be as invasive.
no matter how good PWAs will be for the consumers, they lack all the user-hostile things producers expect to be able to do. this is why it will never happen, sadly.
> Funnily enough, installing an app directly from a website is both faster and more convenient.
This only holds true if one directly navigates to the website in question, which I would argue is unusual at best. The next closest thing to searching the App Store/Play Store is searching for the app with Google, where one will be met with pages of results that are likely not helpful, particularly for the type of highly general queries that tend to be used when shopping around for an app (e.g. "recipe app").
Additionally, the App Store and Play Store provide some signal of app quality by way of reviews and ratings, which helps skip over the more obvious clunkers and lemons and filter out the options that don't have the features required. You don't get that with PWAs, making for more time wasted evaluating each PWA in the category.
————
On the question posed by the title, from the developer side of things a factor I don't see discussed as much is that for various reasons, a lot of devs don't want to write for the web ecosystem due to the tech stack involved. If it were easier to opt out of JavaScript and its associated ecosystem in favor of whatever devs prefer instead, takeup of PWAs would be more enthusiastic. WASM is promising for accomplishing this but doesn't seem to be where it needs to be quite yet.
I bet you could ask 10,000 normal (non-developer) users to name a single PWA and you’d get 0 answers. You don’t even have to use the name PWA.
At best, they’ll name websites they visit. Not PWAs.
I’m a dev. I’m not sure I can name one. After 10m of thinking… is Wordle setup as a PWA? I know I’d much prefer a native app to what they have now.
PWAs seem like many other things I’ve seen over the years. The people making something want it. They tell you you want it. But… I don’t.
I’ve never heard an argument that makes me want it. If normal people wanted it at all it would be more popular. Yes you couldn’t have notifications or access Bluetooth/etc. but I use plenty of native apps that don’t do those things. So why hasn’t anything made noticeable inroads?
If Android is 80% of phones worldwide why is it always Apple holding PWAs back?
* You WANT to rent DIVX DVDs! You buy it and then throw it away. You don’t have to rerun it!
* Windows is better with everything designed around touch. You’ll love Windows 8!
* Why have to choose heated seats when you buy your car? You can rent them when you need them!
PWAs haven’t caught on at all. And it’s always someone else’s fault. At this point I’m just flat out skeptical of “demand” that advocates say is out there.
I’m not saying they are never useful or don’t have a place. But I don’t see them ever displacing native apps no matter what changes.
A few examples of what higher authority could translate into:
…
Restrict access to the Push API to installed PWAs. Regular websites wouldn’t be allowed to request access at all. Goodbye BS spam.
…hello every site trying to upsell you to their BS PWA. I expect someone to have the bright idea of refusing to serve you what you’re there for until you do.
> …hello every site trying to upsell you to their BS PWA.
I really can't tell if this is /s or not. It seems to me it happens already. Reddit is a prime offender. Discord. Slack. My bank (at least they have some plausible use for some of my personal info). Maybe it's their app not their PWA, I don't know and don't care. Still mostly BS.
> I expect someone to have the bright idea of refusing to serve you what you’re there for until you do.
Going Native App this early would cost too much to develop and maintain, and because our platform is for publishing, sharing, and discussing web2 and web3 content, our app would require using a webview to render user uploaded html.
Thus might as well use a browser.
Myspace was just a webapp.
Facebook started off as a webapp. Reddit is a webapp. I don't like installing extra apps unless necessary.
Bloatware is annoying to my target user -- Early adopters and innovators.
Thus PWA is the choice for this platform. It guarantees universal accessibility which is really important to our core values of inclusion and universal design.
It's easier to make a webapp that uses the ecosystems' accessibility tools for deaf, blind, and impaired users.
with things like webgl, we can even do lightweight gpu calculations and 3d presentations on a phone browser.
a native app is only necessary for apps that use native functions.
furthermore, until we move past jwt auth for api based apps and backends, platforms will still get hacked.
I use twitter web on my phone instead of the app, for privacy reasons.
Its noticeably more janky, the browser crashes now and then, and the animations aren't as smooth or simply don't exist, also things take longer time to load for some reason.
I think it depends on how the website is designed, but it might also be a general experience of PWAs.
Tech details: Brave browser, Android 12, Pixel 4XL with CalyxOS.
> On paper, PWAs are the perfect alternative to native apps: only one code base to manage, instant updates that require no approval, and no commissions to pay on in-app purchases.
Ask users, and they’ll never volunteer any of those things as something they’re looking for in an app. They might assent when you explain that commissions mean higher prices, or that updates can help security, and neglect to mention the associated tradeoffs.
But they’ll never just go and name those things themselves.
If you want PWA’s to kill native apps, maybe start by looking at what inspires users to want them (or not), instead of what inspires publishers to want them.
I'd be more likely to notice the option to install as PWA even exists if it was in the "Add bookmark" menu because I would already be in the mindset "I want to save this for later".
Being in the Share menu, I'd only see "Add to home" while already in the process of sending to someone else, so I wouldn't have time to check what this is (as it would distract from my goal), and I'd have forgotten the option exists by the time my task (sharing the site) is complete.
PWAs would be great in a world where everyone was good and honest. In that world oh frictionless pulleys and spherical cows no one would ever abuse things like push notifications or background updates.
In the real world, where companies get really mad if they can't literally spy on every action you take, PWAs need a lot of extra permissions lest everyone be victims of fuckery. Every feature that would give PWAs parity with native apps will be routinely abused even by otherwise above board vendors.
I've been working on a project and because I really hate Java I'm trying to get it done with a PWA. There are like ten million annoying things that prevent you from having access to the hardware in easy ways but outside that using a browser for UI is pretty solid for my purposes.
I'm only concerned with one user so I've been able to circumvent those issues by just running code on the underlying *nix subsystem on my phone and talking to the UI over websockets. For certain usecases WebBluetooth is actually enough to control a peripheral and you don't even need a rooted phone, just any android w/ chrome.
A lot of the reasoning behind why phones are so locked down feels like safety theater, there may be good security reasons, but there are also DEFINITELY good business reasons.
It's frustrating, if Android was actually an open platform (at least in the Windows sense LOL) I could do this shit without resorting to weird root-cloaking fuckery that gets broken every update.
This is such an underrated point. I hate it when an app changes on me mid-project without my permission. With native apps I can turn off auto-update and not have to worry about it. Yes, that might put me at slightly more security risk, but I don’t think there are many state actors trying to get me. At this point, the positives of not updating on someone else’s schedule far outweigh the risks for me.
[+] [-] babypuncher|3 years ago|reply
I can always tell when an app I am using is just a web app bundled for iOS or Android. They never feel as polished or tightly integrated with the host OS; buttons don't look the same, UI paradigms are genericized, platform-specific features (RIP 3D-Touch) are flat out ignored.
I say this as someone who develops web apps for a living: native apps are almost always more fun to use.
[+] [-] matchagaucho|3 years ago|reply
I mean, come on. Making me go to an app store and installing an app to do a simple business transaction is not a good user experience.
[+] [-] ylg|3 years ago|reply
For example, many predict PWA development will be cheaper for them in the short-term. They are first optimizing product development for short-term cost. That focus impacts the released product more than PWA’s strengths and weaknesses. Others choose PWA hoping for a way to rapidly release and iterate MVPs of experimental business ideas. Again, the rationale has a greater impact on the user experience than the tech. Some expect native stacks will let them more deeply tune and polish the user experience than PWA. Or access richer or more performant device capabilities that PWAs cannot. And, this focus on experience over cost impacts the users’ experiences more than the capabilities of native.
In short, many PWAs feel poorer because of product development goals and constraints that precede PWA. These products were always going to give a poorer experience, regardless of the choice of PWA or native.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|3 years ago|reply
I find myself deleting wrapped PWAs. If I need to use the service and am paying, I’ll ping their customer support email. If I’m not, do I really need it? Life is too slow for stodgy apps and hamburger menus on iOS.
[+] [-] ska|3 years ago|reply
You've nailed it. Not just fun to use: Users prefer native apps because mostly they are a much better user experience.
[+] [-] makeitdouble|3 years ago|reply
But then do user care for apps they don't enjoy to use on a fundamental level ?
My local garbage collection company has an app, and I only need it show me what garbage will be collected today and this week. I use it almost everyday, but couldn't care less if the buttons feel native, or if the UI paradigm is generic.
Having all the resources downloaded on the phone still makes the app faster to open than the web site, and I'd have been 100% happy with a PWA.
If we look at phones as tools, there are hundreds of tasks for which "there's an app for that" but an app built specifically for every platform is just overkill and a waste of resource.
[+] [-] illuminati1911|3 years ago|reply
Can someone tell me what PWA even is from user perspective? I think most users just see web and web apps that they can use through their browser and then there is the app store and its native apps. Most people have no idea what the hell is a PWA. Even I don't fully know what it is because I don't really care.
To me there is the web with collapsing non-optimized layouts, annoying forms, "Please login"/"Enter your billing address and credit card information" popups and then there is the perfectly crafted mobile UX with Face ID, Apple Pay etc. that just has all my data and just works.
[+] [-] tootie|3 years ago|reply
You are absolutely correct that most users prefer native apps but I have no actual data on why.
[+] [-] kjellsbells|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mklmdlkms|3 years ago|reply
good riddance.
as someone who uses various operating systems on a regular basis, niche "features" like 3D-touch are an annoyance and force adjustments and break muscle memory every time I switch between systems and UIs, which I do many times every day.
apple's insistence on being special and not using basic keyboard and touch conventions like the other systems do is painful.
[+] [-] pjmlp|3 years ago|reply
Either give me a native app, or a pure URL for the system browser.
[+] [-] _hypx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skybrian|3 years ago|reply
From other comments on Hacker News, I don't think I'm alone? I don't know how many die-hards there are, though.
[+] [-] afavour|3 years ago|reply
I think this is one of those cases where HN is going to just be an echo chamber audience. We're all power users, the majority of whom demand native apps. But we're not typical.
[+] [-] beeandapenguin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afavour|3 years ago|reply
- people are used to getting apps from the App/Play Store. It's a very well understood dynamic. Installing from a web page is strange.
- Apple have helped make the above an even bigger problem that it needs to be by making their 'add to Home Screen' option two menus deep with no way to trigger it as a result of user action.
That's about it, really. I know people are coming to this thread to say PWAs fail because the UI is bad or because they're slow or this or that... I don't buy that argument simply because I know of a ton of slow native apps that have poor UI that are successful. Non-power users don't really care all that much if you're offering functionality they want to use (within reason, of course). I would still love to see a web API for something equivalent to UITableView, though.
[+] [-] kitsunesoba|3 years ago|reply
If browsers started shipping support for typical UI widgets like that, I would become much more interested in the web as a platform. Bring Your Own Everything is fine for traditional websites but I strongly dislike it for building something complex enough to be considered an "app".
[+] [-] rablackburn|3 years ago|reply
I don’t think I’ve ever seen installing a PWA as an option. I’ve never been prompted (though I suppose some of those “use our app!” pop ups could be trying to install a pwa, but I think they always take me to the App Store).
As the article mentions (on iOS) the install mechanism is to open the share menu and select “Add to home”.
I don’t open the share menu on random web apps to see if I can install them. The option may as well not exist. I also highly doubt any regular user is aware of the term “PWA”. Why haven’t PWAs killed native apps? No one knows they exist.
As a dev:
The one time I wanted to make a PWA the use case relied on being able to send notifications. The user was on iOS, safari didn’t support it. Dead in the water.
Maybe I’ll revisit it again now that support is finally here.
[+] [-] nemothekid|3 years ago|reply
PWA just aren't as satisfying to use as Web Apps; it doesn't have anything to do with relatively esoteric APIs. Just look at Twitter iOS and Twitter Web. Just moving within the app is clunky, try clicking a tweet; while the native app is full of fast animations the web app is full of empty loading screens. On native videos play quickly and fluently while html5 video can't offer the same seamlessness.
Is there a PWA out there that meets the level of polish of something basic like Twitter native app? If not, users will continue to prefer native apps; especially on mobile. PWAs will only win if they manage to make development so cheap that they kill any incentive to build natively. This is what happened on desktop
[+] [-] resoluteteeth|3 years ago|reply
Once the filesystem storage apis get worked out, it should be much easier to have persistent sql.js, etc. without having to load the whole thing into memory and save it again constantly and without having to resort to complicated stuff like absurdsql.
I think that finally being able to easily have sqlite in pwas will make it a lot easy to maintain local state and sync it without having to have a maintain a completely separate way of handling data for offline use, ideally without having to rearchitect the whole app as "offline first" but instead just optionally allowing offline use when it's installed as a PWA.
This is assuming you want to enable offline use, but for me that's a major thing that justifies making a page into a PWA (otherwise why not just go to the site?).
[+] [-] enos_feedler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slimebot80|3 years ago|reply
There's your answer!
[+] [-] travisgriggs|3 years ago|reply
> A PWA can’t read your phone’s contacts, send SMS on your behalf, or access any of your phone’s features that could expose your private information.
Seems almost like a win, right?
But repeat just this part in isolation:
> or access any of your phone’s features
You’re phone has a lot of features that are either unavailable or clunky to use from web tech, that aren’t privacy related per se. I do BLE apps. I do apps that operate equipment when there’s no connectivity or internet around. Or that need tuned performance. Haptic feedback. Custom hare sheets. So on and so forth. I would love to not have to code the same thing m not Kotlin and Swift. We’ve tried. It just fails to execute well in the end.
[+] [-] cercatrova|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leeoniya|3 years ago|reply
you cannot adblock in native apps like you can in web apps. and web apps can never be as invasive.
no matter how good PWAs will be for the consumers, they lack all the user-hostile things producers expect to be able to do. this is why it will never happen, sadly.
[+] [-] scarface74|3 years ago|reply
It came out in the Epic trial that 80% of App Store revenue comes from games and in app purchases.
[+] [-] kitsunesoba|3 years ago|reply
This only holds true if one directly navigates to the website in question, which I would argue is unusual at best. The next closest thing to searching the App Store/Play Store is searching for the app with Google, where one will be met with pages of results that are likely not helpful, particularly for the type of highly general queries that tend to be used when shopping around for an app (e.g. "recipe app").
Additionally, the App Store and Play Store provide some signal of app quality by way of reviews and ratings, which helps skip over the more obvious clunkers and lemons and filter out the options that don't have the features required. You don't get that with PWAs, making for more time wasted evaluating each PWA in the category.
————
On the question posed by the title, from the developer side of things a factor I don't see discussed as much is that for various reasons, a lot of devs don't want to write for the web ecosystem due to the tech stack involved. If it were easier to opt out of JavaScript and its associated ecosystem in favor of whatever devs prefer instead, takeup of PWAs would be more enthusiastic. WASM is promising for accomplishing this but doesn't seem to be where it needs to be quite yet.
[+] [-] MBCook|3 years ago|reply
At best, they’ll name websites they visit. Not PWAs.
I’m a dev. I’m not sure I can name one. After 10m of thinking… is Wordle setup as a PWA? I know I’d much prefer a native app to what they have now.
PWAs seem like many other things I’ve seen over the years. The people making something want it. They tell you you want it. But… I don’t.
I’ve never heard an argument that makes me want it. If normal people wanted it at all it would be more popular. Yes you couldn’t have notifications or access Bluetooth/etc. but I use plenty of native apps that don’t do those things. So why hasn’t anything made noticeable inroads?
If Android is 80% of phones worldwide why is it always Apple holding PWAs back?
* You WANT to rent DIVX DVDs! You buy it and then throw it away. You don’t have to rerun it!
* Windows is better with everything designed around touch. You’ll love Windows 8!
* Why have to choose heated seats when you buy your car? You can rent them when you need them!
PWAs haven’t caught on at all. And it’s always someone else’s fault. At this point I’m just flat out skeptical of “demand” that advocates say is out there.
I’m not saying they are never useful or don’t have a place. But I don’t see them ever displacing native apps no matter what changes.
[+] [-] egypturnash|3 years ago|reply
…hello every site trying to upsell you to their BS PWA. I expect someone to have the bright idea of refusing to serve you what you’re there for until you do.
[+] [-] fn-mote|3 years ago|reply
I really can't tell if this is /s or not. It seems to me it happens already. Reddit is a prime offender. Discord. Slack. My bank (at least they have some plausible use for some of my personal info). Maybe it's their app not their PWA, I don't know and don't care. Still mostly BS.
> I expect someone to have the bright idea of refusing to serve you what you’re there for until you do.
Again, this is /s right? It's real.
[+] [-] azeemh|3 years ago|reply
Going Native App this early would cost too much to develop and maintain, and because our platform is for publishing, sharing, and discussing web2 and web3 content, our app would require using a webview to render user uploaded html.
Thus might as well use a browser.
Myspace was just a webapp. Facebook started off as a webapp. Reddit is a webapp. I don't like installing extra apps unless necessary.
Bloatware is annoying to my target user -- Early adopters and innovators.
Thus PWA is the choice for this platform. It guarantees universal accessibility which is really important to our core values of inclusion and universal design.
It's easier to make a webapp that uses the ecosystems' accessibility tools for deaf, blind, and impaired users.
with things like webgl, we can even do lightweight gpu calculations and 3d presentations on a phone browser.
a native app is only necessary for apps that use native functions.
furthermore, until we move past jwt auth for api based apps and backends, platforms will still get hacked.
[+] [-] scarface74|3 years ago|reply
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/10/facebook-apple-app-store-mos...
[+] [-] jacooper|3 years ago|reply
Its noticeably more janky, the browser crashes now and then, and the animations aren't as smooth or simply don't exist, also things take longer time to load for some reason.
I think it depends on how the website is designed, but it might also be a general experience of PWAs.
Tech details: Brave browser, Android 12, Pixel 4XL with CalyxOS.
[+] [-] slimebot80|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nunez|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swatcoder|3 years ago|reply
Ask users, and they’ll never volunteer any of those things as something they’re looking for in an app. They might assent when you explain that commissions mean higher prices, or that updates can help security, and neglect to mention the associated tradeoffs.
But they’ll never just go and name those things themselves.
If you want PWA’s to kill native apps, maybe start by looking at what inspires users to want them (or not), instead of what inspires publishers to want them.
[+] [-] notriddle|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wildpeaks|3 years ago|reply
Being in the Share menu, I'd only see "Add to home" while already in the process of sending to someone else, so I wouldn't have time to check what this is (as it would distract from my goal), and I'd have forgotten the option exists by the time my task (sharing the site) is complete.
[+] [-] giantrobot|3 years ago|reply
In the real world, where companies get really mad if they can't literally spy on every action you take, PWAs need a lot of extra permissions lest everyone be victims of fuckery. Every feature that would give PWAs parity with native apps will be routinely abused even by otherwise above board vendors.
[+] [-] plaguepilled|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thot_experiment|3 years ago|reply
I'm only concerned with one user so I've been able to circumvent those issues by just running code on the underlying *nix subsystem on my phone and talking to the UI over websockets. For certain usecases WebBluetooth is actually enough to control a peripheral and you don't even need a rooted phone, just any android w/ chrome.
A lot of the reasoning behind why phones are so locked down feels like safety theater, there may be good security reasons, but there are also DEFINITELY good business reasons.
It's frustrating, if Android was actually an open platform (at least in the Windows sense LOL) I could do this shit without resorting to weird root-cloaking fuckery that gets broken every update.
[+] [-] exabrial|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] croes|3 years ago|reply
Not even from the user
[+] [-] thewebcount|3 years ago|reply