Re:Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps
by the8472 on Sunday November 13, 2016 @03:53AM
(#12942478)
The unilateral updates and URLs pointing to remote content also have downsides.
* it assumes you're online
* features can be removed at any time even if the user relies on them
* link rot
* totally unsuited for sensitive data
Re:Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps
by josephg on Sunday November 13, 2016 @03:22AM
(#12942416)
My point is that the technical problems have been solved. That is to say, there aren't any new, difficult CS problems we have to figure out before we can bring the desktop up to par.
Instead solving this problem will 'just' require tons of work. We need to improve our compilation toolchains to allow native apps to load progressively. We'll need better ways to monitor and analyse application size & performance. We'll need new libraries and we'll need buy in from vendors. And as thats going on we need to convince developers to actually care about this stuff. Again, all these problems have been solved for the web. We 'just' need to backport all that stuff to native apps.
No question there's lots of work to do. But its all (obviously) solvable with code.
> Performance of modern web apps is simply awful compared to their native counterparts
> There aren't any hard technical problems there - we obviously manage it on the web, so its easily possible
"easily?" Didn't you just say we're managing it badly on the web?
It turns out that it's quite difficult to develop an app-like experience that loads from scratch on a cellular connection and is ready for the user to interact in just seconds. The app folks will have it just as bad, if not worse, because they've got no practice.