Actually, sites in Chrome can work fully offline today using Service Worker (http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/service-worker/introd...). And they can get users to add the site to their homescreen, so they have the full icon+offline experience (https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/increasing...).
Service Workers are also in Firefox Nightly right now, but are hidden behind an about:config flag until the feature is fully baked.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...
http://caniuse.com/serviceworkers
There's also the Application Cache, which has been fully supported in the stable versions for a while now.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Using_the_...
http://caniuse.com/offline-apps
And of course, FF for Android has an "Add to Homescreen" button too.
Re:Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
by hackcasual on Thursday September 24, 2015 @11:12PM
(#10276181)
Application cache is a fucking nightmare. Service Worker's can't come soon enough.
Re:Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
by stephengillie on Thursday September 24, 2015 @08:45PM
(#10275825)
Most apps are delivering content, so they also fail when offline.
Yes, there are a number of apps that cache some data locally, but I believe they're in the minority. Even casual games have to check in with a database and retrieve a couple datapoints about your progress, your in-app purchases, and what powerups are available to you.
On iPhone, this is what "reading list" is for.
Re:Goodbye, Native Mobile Apps
by saint_fiasco on Friday September 25, 2015 @08:40AM
(#10277770)
All desktop browsers have a "save page" feature.
Surely the mobile browsers can do that too?
Did you run metrics to find out how many people are going to miss offline?