Many didn’t understand what a web app was until recently and now they want nothing else. For starters the speed and ease of deployment can also impact the user experience; people love seeing problems fixed and tweaks made on the fly in reaction to their feedback.
But more than anything they’re thoroughly impressed with the interfaces compared to other shitty desktop enterprise software they use. At the end of the day it’s the same story as with all software: quality often depends more on craftmanship than on the flavor of tool that you’re using. PWAs offer enough means to build beautiful and performant software, with full offline capabilities that can make them nearly indistinguishable from a native app.
I can’t disagree that native apps have advantages in some use cases. For the most part I wouldn’t build something like a graphics editing program as a web app - companies like Figma challenge this, but they’re using techniques at the edge of web dev that go beyond PWA capabilities (eg, WebAssembly), and unless you have an all-encompassing product strategy like they do you’d probably be better off building something like that native.
For many CRUD app use cases however PWAs can be more than sufficient. I’m very bullish about their future, and I wouldn’t be if I hadn’t seen real, happy users, because that's what matters to me the most.
If TikTok was a PWA it couldn't have done a fraction of the tracking it was doing. The irony is that apple is forcing you to use a much more privacy-invasive alternative to PWAs.
This is misleading when the motives of PWA is to make the web browser acquire as much capabilities as a native app. If browsers keep on expanding access to the underlying platform without any regards of the consequences, TikTok would be able to track you more without you ever having to install anything. This would kill the web as we know it because you’ll have to give websites the same trust you give to software when you install them on your computer. We won’t be able to browse the web freely as we do now.
Makes no sense to me.
I pretty much explained everything after the first three words of my comment.
> You have one platform that already allows crazy privacy violations natively,
Give me a single example of an OS for a personal computing device where you don't have to trust what you install.
> and you have another platform that you suspect might some day allow similar levels of privacy violation
No, this isn't speculation, this is the inevitable future of going the PWA route. If browsers expand access to a platform that, as you put it, "allows crazy privacy violations," then it's bound to allow similar levels of privacy violations, plain and simple.
One of the best things about the browser runtime is that it has (or perhaps, had) pretty good isolation from the host platform [1]. This is great for browsing because you can click on a link without thinking twice about it. When that isolation is rendered meaningless, you really have to stop and think about whether you trust the website you're going to visit, just like you would when you install native apps on your device. So get ready to kiss bye-bye to visiting a random blog you saw on HN.
> yet you champion the privacy stance of the first platform
You've made that one up. I explicitly mentioned that you have to trust the apps that you install.
Please note that I'm not hating on PWAs for the sake of it. I just don't want to sacrifice the privilege of being able to browse the web freely because of it.
[1]: I know, there are bugs in the implementation, but they're relatively costly to exploit in a meaningful way, especially at scale
Define "pretty good". Compare the permission model of the browser against the appstores. Think about what their manual review process actually is for 99% of the submissions.
> When that isolation is rendered meaningless
PWSs don't and won't do that. That's your whole argument and it's misleading.
It's a well-known fact. Actually, I'm pretty sure you're aware of this, considering this statement of yours:
> If TikTok was a PWA it couldn't have done a fraction of the tracking it was doing.
As for this:
> Compare the permission model of the browser against the appstores.
What are you even talking about? It has nothing to do with browser isolation.
> PWSs don't and won't do that. That's your whole argument and it's misleading.
That's an interesting assertion but you haven't left me any clue why you think so.
I also notice that you chose to quote a conditional sentence out of my argument, claiming that it was my "whole argument," but I'd also like to add that I did explain the hows and whys that lead it.
> the motives of PWA is to make the web browser acquire as much capabilities as a native app
This is misleading. To get to the point, your argument is that PWAs strive to be just like apps, but run in the browser instead of the OS. This is simply not true.
If you want back the web of old times, just documents and links, then you can pick up any one of such initiatives. Reality however is that PWAs are a successful model: just go to a URL and use it. It runs on a protocol, not some proprietary platform, which gives users enough control (e.g. tracking), while being useful.
I'm confused, because it's supposed to be PWA's major selling point. Google says as much in their documentation [1], as do many commenters in this thread.
> If you want back the web of old times, just documents and links, then you can pick up any one of such initiatives. Reality however is that PWAs are a successful model: just go to a URL and use it.
Don't get me wrong, I don't hate web apps in general. On the contrary, I happily use them on a daily basis. However, I don't like the direction PWA seems to be heading. Acquiring more "native" capabilities is one thing, though I won't be going over this again. Another important point is that it doesn't fit quite well with the "browsing" aspect of browsers. Web apps are nice, but they're hardly the only kinds of websites I visit. I visit quite a lot of random websites every day, many from HN, and I want almost none of these websites spinning up Service Workers or asking me to turn on push notifications. Web apps being more capable is nice, but I don't want them at the cost of a more spammy browsing experience.
I do want the web to be more capable, but careful design and consideration is equally as important when it comes to making the web a better place. I feel that many accusing some browsers of "holding the web back" are overlooking this point.
Re: "holding the web back" 1. Not having push notifications on iOS _is_ sadly a dealbreaker when chosing between creating a native app and a webapp. 2. Android has had this feature for over a decade I think, and it works fine. 3. Apple gets a huge revenue cut from all native iOS apps, and has a general "platform image" it defends.
So there _is_ a huge contradiction, in that apple does obviously hold some key feature back, in the name of privacy, pushing users to use their preferred much more invasive platform.
Do you think native platform APIs are more restrictive?
As an end user, I dread the days PWAs ever go mainstream. They’re horribly inefficient from a power and performance point of view, and never have I come across a PWA with a user experience half as good as native apps (especially on mobile). Until they’re indistinguishable from native apps in terms of user experience, I want nothing to do with them. Beyond that, there’s some very serious privacy concerns as well with PWAs, especially with developers abusing APIs for fingerprinting