PWAs wont replace native iOS apps

Re:PWAs wont replace native iOS apps by PaulHoule on Thursday February 15, 2024 @03:12PM (#39388052)

Can't we just give up on the "Progressive" branding and just say we are making Web Apps? There are just so many things that make "PWA" a bad smell. I mean, have you ever asked a user if they need more spam spamifications in their life? (Yeah, your app does and 95% say "hell no") Personally I find it much easier to find web sites with Safari (until last week I would hit "1" and Safari would automatically show me my RSS reader, now I have a choice of that or my Fraxinus bookmark manager) than it is to find icons on my iPad (there are so many signs of carelessness on both the part of Apple and app makers; the other day I realized part of it is that iOS doesn't draw boundaries around icons so if the colors of an icon are similar to the colors on the background the edges of the icon become invisible which means the icon becomes invisible) I can type "n" in Safari and it fills in Hacker News, if there was a (cr)app to use HN it might have an H for an icon, or maybe a N or another Y and it would be orange: orange icons tend to disappear into the background on my iPad and for any given letter there is some app that uses it for an icon.

We should just have the story that we are making better and better web apps and Apple isn't keeping up with others.

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Re:PWAs wont replace native iOS apps by hot_gril on Thursday February 15, 2024 @03:59PM (#39388761)

I'm also not fond of the PWA branding or the confusion around implementing one.

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Re:PWAs wont replace native iOS apps by gwill on Thursday February 15, 2024 @04:30PM (#39389204)

fyi if you pull down in the middle of any home screen a global search shows up. i just keep one screen of my most used apps then search for all the others

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Re:PWAs wont replace native iOS apps by Shadowmist on Thursday February 15, 2024 @07:13PM (#39391216)

I started doing this after hitting the maximum number of pages. New apps didn’t have anywhere to go and I was forced to use search anyways. The App Library to the right is pretty nice and groups things by category so I don’t have to move icons between pages anymore which was very annoying.

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Re:PWAs wont replace native iOS apps by bbor on Thursday February 15, 2024 @03:25PM (#39388263)

  Yeah, your app does and 95% say "hell no"

For some types of apps, particularly social media ones, the only path forward is those 5% of users that like your app enough to “commit”. And I think that’s what PWAs offer on a practical level — a way to commit to a website and keep it remindable. To say the least your typing-over-tapping preference is not universal, but even so I think both mobile OSs have type-to-search integrated natively now. So I think you can see why it’s a nice reminder, for those people.

Plus, “progressive web app” tells a (well informed) user “this website can use your camera and gyroscope and GPS and such”.

Plus plus, and I think this is the most important: it’s a fun community and a great resume term. It’s no fun to just be a “web developer”, you’ve gotta be a progressive, web3, 3D, local-first, no-js, all-js web developer ;)

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Re:PWAs wont replace native iOS apps by PaulHoule on Thursday February 15, 2024 @03:28PM (#39388305)

I make apps with A-Frame that use the gyroscope and all that and I wouldn't call them "progressive". My goal is to give a "it just works" experience and labels don't help with that.

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