I have the same thoughts. Phones were too slow few years ago, web standards were not mature, so well written native apps were in obvious advantage. Now phones have proper CPUs, lots of RAM, so web apps for many tasks won't be distinguishable from native apps. Web standards are good too.

May be Apple will curate list of blessed websites and allow them to launch background services, using icloud payments, etc. This way they'll continue to have their cut and their control.

5G could help close the gap as well.

People openly booed Steve Jobs in 2007 when he announced that the iphone would only support webapps. Obviously Apple changed their tune, but it would be funny if they started dragging their heels in the other direction.

Apple didn't have the app store and it's 30% rake of all transactional revenue at the time. Jobs was somewhat notorious about being adamantly opposed to something one day and then announcing to the world that Apple had created a best-in-class product that he previously said they would never make. I seem to recall him saying they would never make a tablet device -- that it wasn't so critical to surf the web on the toilet as people seemed to think it was. Until the iPad was ready for launch. And we learned in the Walter Isaacson biography of Jobs that the iPad project existed before the iPhone project did!

Also don't forget his famous comments on no one will watch video on small screens and no need for big phones. I don't think any of his comments were lack of insight, rather it was him playing the market until he was ready.

Come on, so even his mistakes were not mistakes?

I'm not an apply fan by any means, but when they were already working on it internally, while he was publicly trashing the idea -- yes.

Steve would have been trying very hard to avoid the 'Osborne Effect', which was very well known to everyone in the early industry. Osborne portable/luggable computers had a very strong market share and growing, based on the CP/M operating system. They announced that they would be coming out with a DOS-compatible machine, far too early as it turned out. Everyone decided to wait for the introduction of the DOS machine, sales and revenue went to effectively zero, and the company died before it ever introduced the new machine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Computer_Corporation

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-amazing-rise-and-fall-of-...

I'm the first one to criticize apple, but in this case they were clearly privately working on the things he was bashing in public. The only apple product I own is a macbook pro, so not your typical apple fanboy.

Basically yes. This is his famous "reality distortion field."

Indeed. Somehow people even manage to forget that he died of a typically curable cancer because of his hubris.

Pancreatic cancer is serious business. It's not "typically curable" by any stretch. The 5-year survival rate is 1% - 15% depending on how early it's detected.

That said, his holistic approach to treatment didn't help him at all.

He had a neuroendocrine islet tumor, not pancreatic adenocarcinoma. It has a much higher survival rate... as long as you don't try to treat it with acupuncture.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...

The Plus-sized phones didn't launch until after Jobs passed away, iirc.

> A completely different question is whether vendors like Apple will refuse to support something like this because it circumvents the need to deliver via the app store (and the $$$ they collect through the Apple Developer Program) but there's no reason background services and processes can't be implemented in JavaScript.

I could see Apple et al resisting, but wouldn't a store still be useful for discoverability and giving the sense that an app is trustworthy? I agree stores would not be _required_ though, and I think that diminishes the value of a store and therefore the cost of listing your app in one.

I would take an app search engine -- or several of them -- or a curated lists of "new and interesting PWAs" that anyone can create and maintain versus a gatekeeper (or a collection of gatekeepers with differing standards) who demands to be paid before you can appear as an eligible entity for the platform.

I can't imagine why they'd "drag their feet" on doing free work to enable pseudo-apps with "near-native" performance and nonstandard UX.

Snark aside, I've heard very little marketing around PWA that explains why users should want them - almost everything is focused on benefits for developers.

The javascript development community hasn’t exactly shown it has great engineering chops to solve basic problems yet, its a bit soon to be betting the farm on web apps replacing native ones.

Can you tell us a bit about your Xamarin experience?

I want to create an app where the users would be regular mom and pop- my primary users would be windows and Android and a few iOS (iphone).

Would you recommend I go the Xamarin way?

Who is xamarin good for and who not?

I refer to my period as a Xamarin contractor as "bomb technician programming." The biggest advantage of Xamarin is also the greatest source of its problems: anyone who programs C# can start a Xamarin.Forms app and get a proof-of-concept sufficiently advanced to show their boss who will run it up the chain and get it approved as a project. And THEN the devs -- who are awesome web developers -- begin to realize just how much they don't know about mobile and that they've coded themselves into more than a few corners and aren't sure how to get out... and I know this from first-hand experience from my first couple Xamarin projects. There comes a point where you realize that knowing C# is only part of the solution. You wouldn't take an accomplished ASP.NET MVC developer who has only done web work and assign them to an Akka.net or advanced, massively concurrent, highly-multi-threaded Windows Service project and expect them to succeed right away just because it's all C#. Same idea... different platform.

Xamarin is great for people who want to use C# to write mobile apps and know the underlying platforms well enough to know where the landmines are and how to side-step them. There's undeniable time-savings in being able to write non-platform-specific code one time and just link to it from the Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android project. It's also possible to write cross platform apps very, very quickly with Xamarin.Forms if you understand where the issues are there as well...

But it's even faster to just write a mobile web site. When I am asked for my recommendations for a mobile app idea my first question always is: "Can this be done with a mobile web site (which is PWA these days)?" If yes, why go further? If you really want the app store exposure then packing up your PWA as a hybrid app isn't all that difficult so mobile web is still my first choice. It's not unless you have specific, unambiguous needs that mobile web or hybrid cannot handle that going native -- Xamarin or otherwise -- is recommended.

Keep it simple, deliver value, and go home happy and a little richer.

> If you really want the app store exposure ...

thanks. i got a lot out of your comment, but then you lost me when i read that.

i mean, what are the benefits of app store exposure? it's a needle in a haystack. the standard experience after putting an app in the store is crickets. do users pay more attention to app store listings than they do to mobile web sites?

You and I know that, but some managers and companies soliciting mobile solutions only think in App Store terms. For these folks a PWA can be packaged and put in the store. And we can bill it as a value-add. :-)

Thanks for your very helpful and detailed reply.

I take it that you didn't compare xamarin to anything besides pwa- I'm assuming it's your way of saying that anything else you evaluated didn't stand up to xamarin?

Please let us know if there are any helpful getting started pointers and also for pitfalls.

Right now PWA is not something I'm considering although I see how they are the future (and am glad they are)

I’m not exclusive to PWA and Xamarin; React Native is huge right now and Google is pushing Flutter heavily (in order to ease the transition from Android to Fuchsia, but I digress). And Swift/ObjC with Xcode and Kotlin/Java with Android Studio are always solid options and the ones Apple and Google officially recommend if you ask them.

The stacks and options are just tools in a box; I believe in using the right tool for the job (or the tool required for the contract) rather than being a tool about this stuff. But if asked my opinion I will default to PWA until I know there's a feature requirement beyond PWA's growing abilities.