People with limited mouse dexterity. People who hate mice. If you don't browse with the keyboard you don't see the focus state move anyway, so leave it on for people who need it.
I agree with both of you actually, app is great but I don't don't like Material when I see it usually unless it's skinned well enough to not instantly tell it's Material. Something about that default theme...
apple is lagging behind on PWA support but PWA's are definitely coming either way. the reason why apple is lagging on support is because it will take a significant hit on their app store revenues as PWA's remove having to go throw third parties such as apple
The funny thing is that Steve Jobs vision was that all apps would be web apps. Apple don't want to sell apps, they want to sell devices. And for people to buy devices there need to be great app's. The reason why they didn't go with web apps is that you wouldn't be able to utilize 100% of the hardware capabilities. But it seems to get harder and harder to do low level stuff on Apple devices, so maybe they will eventually get to something that is close to web apps... But if PWA's works on other devices too, I don't think Apple would want that.
This always gets spread around HN as some kind of conspiracy theory. The webkit team has implemented many of the features required for PWAs and has many more on their roadmap. In fact there is probably enough there already for PWAs to compete with some classes of native apps.
Well if the PWA experience is good enough then some developers aren't going to list their apps in the app store at all so they can bypass Apple's revenue cut. PWAs also have less access in general and so are more secure/sandboxed.
Most of the revenue made from app stores come from pay to win games (which need native performance) or subscriptions that work across platforms. Many major players that use subscription prices have abandoned Apple’s subscription payments.
Second issue, what are the chances that I would trust some random website with my credit card information?
^ exactly and when there are big benefits to developers like that and the technology is focused on more, the maturity of what it will become is what really excites me
All true except reduced resource consumption, I don't believe that's an universal truth. Some native apps drain a lot of battery because they do more than they should, like the Facebook app spying on you on every conceivable way (and probably also in some inconceivable ones).
Apple will reject your app from the store if you ask for permissions not necessary for it to function. It also gives the user fine grained control and awareness of what the app has access to, for how long, etc.
Some random JS app that can load in whatever it wants after the fact can make no such claim to as much security or privacy.
Whatever JS a page loads it cannot steal all my contacts, browse my filesystem or track my location without me giving permission, so I consider web apps much better than native apps privacy-wise.
It's true that Apple does a better job at protecting the privacy of its users. I'm an Android user and privacy is terrible. I self-limit myself to use the least amount of native apps, using webapps and open-source apps as much as possible. For example right now I'm using Hacker News through it's web interface on my phone.
>Most important thing for me is sandboxing, no abuse of the device's data and sensors. I hate how most native apps invade your privacy.
User abuse is rampant on the Web. For example, those APIs you mention are used to fingerprint machines. If you're genuinely concerned with abuse of privacy, you'd do yourself a huge favor by researching the history and current mechanisms for such abuse by websites and, by extension, PWAs.
I'm well aware of browser fingerprinting, I take my privacy seriously and do my best to protect it.
Both on desktop and mobile I use an array of browser extensions to limit online tracking and fingerprinting. On Android I use Webapps Sandboxed Browser [1] to log in to webapps without leaking the logged in status to other websites.
I feel that with the web I get a fighting chance, while native apps are designed for tracking you.
>Biggest thing for me would be instant installs[...]
That's relative to the size of the thing you're installing, no? Wouldn't it then be comparable to software of the same size being installed on the host system?
>no/much less space taken on local storage.
Isn't this, too, relative to the size of the application or the data it is persisting?
Single codebase for multiple platforms, no app store approvals/revenue share required, openable via a link, works to the webs' strengths, etc. That sort of stuff. It has its own set of disadvantages too of course.
Hasn’t pretty much every Silicon Valley tech company that tried to use single-condensed Cross platform apps essentially come to the conclusion that they’re not worth it, or better than OS-specific codebases and proper separation of UI and logic?
Native is obviously better and always will be. Making cross platform apps is not worth it only if you can easily afford to go native. This is obviously not true for everyone.
>no app store approvals/revenue share required[...]
Software was distributed long before those walled gardens came into existence. It is as possible as ever to install native software on your machine without having to go through a "store."
>openable via a link[...]
I don't follow. Do you mean a hyperlink from within a browser? I suppose, if one really wanted, it wouldn't take much effort to create such a thing for launching their native applications, but why would that be an advantage: "links" to open applications have existed as icons and various other actions for as long as graphical UIs have been in existence.
>works to the webs' strengths
What does this mean? What advantages do PWAs have, garnered from the Web, that native applications are unable to tap in to?
What’s the likelihood that people are going to put their credit card information into some unknown website compared to using Apple/Google for payments?
Every “advantage” you mentioned is better for the developer not the user. That’s why PWA’s will never take off.
> What’s the likelihood that people are going to put their credit card information into some unknown website compared to using Apple/Google for payments?
Outside of HN's bubble, people do that all the time. Or at worst they will use PayPal or an equivalent to make payments.
It’s outside of the HN bubble that people are less trusting of random websites.
If people were so willing to make payments on random websites, merchants wouldn’t be falling all over themselves to use Amazon’s marketplace and sell their self published books through Kindle.
Not to mention that micropayments on the web has been the holy grail that no one has found in over two decades.
Apple was the first to make $0.99 payments over the internet feasible with iTunes back in 2005. There is much more friction to buying something on the web than just clicking on buy from Amazon/Apple/Google.
> If people were so willing to make payments on random websites, merchants wouldn’t be falling all over themselves to use Amazon’s marketplace and sell their self published books through Kindle.
People fall all over themselves to use Amazon's marketplace because
- it has a lower barrier to entry to setting up and managing a store themselves
- it has a built-in audience they can access without trying to hustle their proprietary domain name into the public consciousness (SEO is hard)
What on earth gives you the idea that it has anything to do with people's willingness or lack thereof to make payments on random websites?
> There is much more friction to buying something on the web than just clicking on buy from Amazon/Apple/Google.
Again, low-friction payment platforms that aren't "use Apple/Google's in-app payment SDKs" are readily available in 2020. PayPal is one such, Flutterwave is another (in sub-Saharan Africa), etc. In fact, I use those far more in a month than I've ever used Apple or Google Pay.
because
- it has a lower barrier to entry to setting up and managing a store themselves - it has a built-in audience they can access without trying to hustle their proprietary domain name into the public consciousness (SEO is hard)
So the same advantages that using the App Store had over going to random websites and installing J2Me apps back in the day....
Again, low-friction payment platforms that aren't "use Apple/Google's in-app payment SDKs" are readily available in 2020. PayPal is one such, Flutterwave is another (in sub-Saharan Africa), etc. In fact, I use those far more in a month than I've ever used Apple or Google Pay.
You realize Apple has had more users payment information on file than any other company since the iTunes heyday than maybe Amazon?
Cross platform support is nice for users as well. I have a number of apps that I can't use on my desktop which is quite annoying. When I use a PWA I know that I can access it from whatever device I am on.
This is just an incredibly odd statement. First of all, if such layouts are rendering on your machine then of course native applications are also capable of such a feat. Web browsers capabilities are limited to the resources being made available on the host machine. The same goes for any software running on the machine.
And second: Qt.
>- Until SwiftUI web front end was way more advanced in terms of reactive programming of UIs
On iOS they do. On Android 99% of users won't use a different store.
> Cross-platform frameworks exist for native applications.
Nothing really good though. Best ones are RN and Flutter which do not get you there 100%.
A PWA will consume less memory and will be smaller than a RN or Flutter app.
> Same goes for native applications
Not on iOS.
> if such layouts are rendering on your machine then of course native applications are also capable of such a feat
Theoretically, yes.
> And second: Qt.
Remind me again how much a QT license costs?
> I don't understand what you mean here.
For the last 10 or so years UI development for the web has gone from archaic jQuery imperative DOM manipulation to a new paradigm with data binding and reactive data.
UI data binding in the native world exists but is extremely complicated and tedious. AFAIK the only thing that is similar to what we have now in web dev is SwiftUI.
