[rpastuszak]

Haha, excellent timing:

I opened HN just now because:

1. I got tired of waiting 2h for my app to get notarized because

2. I can't sell it on the AppStore in the EU... because

3. the AppStore Connect page gets stuck at their DSA compliance form (it's been 10 days).

And, to add insult to injury, the whole thing could be a PWA, without any compromises in the UX whatsoever.

I misread the title, but I still posted this comment as an example of confirmation bias* in the orange book for posteriority. Time to step away from the computer!

* (sunk cost fallacy)

[candiddevmike]

I can't sign into Apple without going incognito in Chrome. I put in my email, and it throws and error before asking me for my password. It's not an extension, it's not a cookie, idk what it is.

And then when I do get past he password, it sends a OTP to a Mac Mini I never use and have to tap around to get it to generate a SMS code. No option for external TOTP, and no way to remove the Mac Mini I don't use from OTP without signing out of it.

[andoando]

Ive made an apple developer account, paid $100 and then it kicked me out and after logging in still said I didnt pay yet. I paid again until realizing it actually charged me. It also took me an hour to try and figure out how to get it to send OTP to a phone instead of an old broken macbook.

Google also gives me a ton of issues with having multiple accounts. Go to calendar app with account 2, switch to desktop mode so I can actually click on the meeting invite, now Im logged back into account 1. Similar issues trying to use any other google service and have to use

I don't understand how these kind of things aren't priority #1

[eptcyka]

You cannot even change the password of an apple ID without logging into a macOS or iOS device.

[qingcharles]

I've got this with some sites. How long have you had that Chrome profile? They seem to collect cruft somewhere and it stops some sites from working. On my main Chrome profile I can't use one of my banking sites, any OpenAI site uses 100% of CPU, other sites only hold the login cookies for a few minutes. I've tried disabling every extension.

None of these issues on my other profiles or in incognito.

[shreddit]

I have the exact same problem. It’s saying something about not being able to confirm my identity? I took a look at the dev tools and it’s apparently making a request to a server which returns an error.

It only works in incognito because it’s using a different ip address there…

[echelon]

> the whole thing could be a PWA

Apple neutered the web as best they could to force you to use their rails.

I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks, kids especially, to make animation, games, and mini apps, and deploy them as single binary blobs.

A single swf file could be kept and run anywhere. For the younger generation: imagine right clicking to download a YouTube video or a video game you'd see on itch.io. And you could send those to friends.

You could even embed online multiplayer and chatrooms into the apps. It all just worked. What we have now is a soup of complexity that can't even match the feature set.

[tliltocatl]

Flash was cool, but it was also a spectacular dumpster file. Honestly I'm sort of glad Google&Apple killed it. Yes it was an amazing medium, but it feels almost like Adobe kept thinking about it as an animation studio and didn't care to run it as an application platform with all the concerns it entails (i. e. security). And support of anything that's not Windows, while technically present, was abysmal. HTML5, with all it sins and warts, is a better platform, even if it has much higher entry barrier.

[titzer]

Flash was cool, but the plugin was full of bugs and a constant source of pretty serious vulnerabilities. I too miss the flash games era of the web at times, but it wasn't some utopian thing.

[jodrellblank]

You say the security and battery issues "were solvable", so why didn't Macromedia or Adobe solve them? Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005, the era of Palms, Blackberries, Nokia/Symbian, Windows Phone, Microsoft Tablet PC; mobile devices were not a new surprise by 2005. Adobe did get Flash onto Palm mobile devices and TVs and early Android smartphones, and the experience was poor[1][2] - not just from those two issues; Flash sites weren't designed for mobile or touch or small screens. Customers had a choice of Flash-mobile devices, and preferred iPhones.

> "Ryan Lawler of TechCrunch wrote in 2012 "Jobs was right", adding Android users had poor experiences with watching Flash content and interactive Flash experiences were "often wonky or didn't perform well, even on high-powered phones".[9] Mike Isaac of Wired wrote in 2011 that "In [our] testing of multiple Flash-compatible devices, choppiness and browser crashes were common", and a former Adobe employee stated "Flash is a resource hog [...] It's a battery drain, and it's unreliable on mobile web browsers".[10] Kyle Wagner of Gizmodo wrote in 2011 that "Adobe was never really able to smooth over performance, battery, and security issues".[11]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash

[1] https://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9692/palm-joins-adobe-fl...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/ere0c/how_does_flash_...

[ajross]

> I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks

Capcut and Roblox would like words. No, that's kinda just wrong. Content generation for non-technical folks has never been easier or more effective. Flash is just something nerds here remember fondly because it was a gateway drug into hackerdom. Some of us are older and might feel the same way about Hypercard or TurboPascal or whatnot.

[thisislife2]

Macromedia Flash was indeed a beautiful, innovative piece of software. HTML 5 still doesn't match its features vis the ease and usability that Flash offered in creating and deploying content online. But after its acquisition by Adobe, it just ever so slowly went downhill. It should have been open sourced.

[antod]

"Run anywhere" was getting pretty stretched long before it was killed, Linux support was orphaned, old, buggy, vulnerable and hard to run in contemporary browsers.

I was stoked to watch Apple nail the coffin shut, and see it consigned to history along with Java applets.

[teaearlgraycold]

On the other hand you're okay with Adobe having that level of control over the web?

Maybe one day we'll see a JS/WASM framework that is just as portable.

[marcosdumay]

Just like Microsoft before them.

But flash specifically deserved to die.

[raw_anon_1111]

This myth that Apple “killed” Flash on mobile should die. When Flash finally came to Android in 2010-11, it required a phone that had a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM and barely ran on that.

The first iPhone came with 128MB RAM with a 400Mhz CPU, it couldn’t even run Safari smoothly. If you scrolled too fast, you would get a checkerboard while you waited on the page to render. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.

Adobe was always making promises it couldn’t keep. The Motorola Xoom was suppose to be the “iPad Killer” that could run Flash , Adobe was late leaving the Xoom in the unenviable position that you couldn’t go to the Xoom home page on the Xoom at launch because it required Flash.

[epistasis]

I use PWAs on iOS and they're pretty great. That was the original plan for apps on iOS, before Apple was pressured into creating an app store.

[ajross]

A PWA on iOS is just a cached web page. Safari remains pretty crippled with regards to the APIs (bluetooth, usb, filesystem, etc...) that make local apps attractive in the first place. Apple is fine with letting people cache web pages, they're not fine with stuff that might displace the app store.

[graemep]

Who pressured Apple and why?

I had nor even heard of app stores before then IIRC unless you count Linux repos.

[pcl]

Have you built a PWA solution for it? If not, why not?

[rpastuszak]

Oh boy, I have I've been working with offline-first web apps since the late 2000s... then the particular app I have in mind has been used as a PWA for the past 6-7 years.

I really, really, love building stuff for/on the web. When working with founders/clients we'd often start with building the MVP as a PWA, because of how easy it is to iterate and test. (https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/web-and-feedback-loops/)

That said, some reasons off the top of my head in random order:

- seemingly small but UX critical features breaking or not working at all (wake, audio, notifications, scroll breaking).

- most of the users don't know/haven't been taught they can install a site or assume that PWAs are inherently worse

- PWAs are harder to monetise (no super easy way to let the user pay a lifetime licence for the app, customers want super easy, and that's not for me to judge)

- critical, but non-obvious to a non-technical person (and thus difficult to explain) features are unstable or janky on iOS when running standalone/via home screen (example: wiping offline storage every few days).

In some ways things work better than, say 10 years ago, but at the same time there's the *unpredictability*. I really don't want to worry about my app breaking in some impossible to fix way next year. Not, when the app is meant to pay my rent.

Performance was rarely an issue, discounting experiments like running image recognition inside a "service worker" in JS, on iPhone 7 for an AR game I was messing with. That was in 2016 (before Pokemon Go came out and kind... of dumbed down the idea or AR).

[zahlman]

> the orange book

?