Webapps were a mistake :(

Almost all phone apps could be a web app

A great native app on an iPhone feels far superior to a mobile website. The gestures, the stack navigator, haptics, scrolling, native ui primitives, etc…

Also iOS accessibility screen reader APIs are way better than the web. Accessibility actions for instance are great.

It doesn't have to be this way though. What you're describing is a result of Apple intentionally prioritizing native over web apps to maintain control of their lucrative walled garden.

There’s no way within web standards to match iOS native api UX. Even on Android where you have chrome as the mobile browser you can’t match it.

Even if you could ship chrome renderer on iOS you won’t be able to make a mobile web app feel as good as an iOS app. The little details, animations, and microinteractions that come with native apps are better, plus there are other less visiual capabilities like background uploads and prefetching. The moment you need something like an in app camera, a native app is going to be so much better.

there are thousands of apps that do not require to be "great native apps". If only Apple invested more on mobile Safari we could have "almost great" web apps and be out of their mafia ecosystem.

I am old enough to remember the days of Internet Explorer, I can tell you that it was not fun. It is a blessing that we can at least deliver some pretty decent web apps today, and we should keep pushing for it.

The frustrating part is that the idea is incredible. Everyone has this piece of software on their computer that lets them run anything as long as there is a server to talk to. I love it. I don't want to have to download a thousand apps, especially not for shopping or banking. Just using a web interface is awesome.

Unfortunately we decided the correct way to provide the functionality was by layering bonkers ass abstractions on top of a system meant to largely display static text and images. In the year 2025 there is absolutely no reason we shouldn't have a unified coding language that allows you to render things in a web browser in a sane way.

At the very least we should have seen a substantial expansion of what HTML is capable of, closer to what HTMX is doing now, with a better way to style everything then fucking CSS. People complain about JavaScript but for my money CSS is the greatest sin.

I think you are missing one thing. HTML, CSS and ekhm EcmaScript are open standards not owned by any single corporation.

Every other toolkit was not gaining adoption because it was shut down by one or the other corporation owning one or the other system. GTK is mostly irrelevant as it doesn’t do mobile.

Web stuff is best we could get away with circumventing corporate greed and ownership.

Even if we nag technically it could have less complexity - in reality not because all it was required to work around corporate bullshit.

Indeed, CSS especially is the root of all web evil. When you understand how it break all kinds of known good software design patterns, and you've seen the Frankenstein monstrosities people build with it enough times, you'll be tempted to do as I've done for a while: banish almost all use of external CSS from my projects.

I use inline styles mostly, with an external CSS file only used for a few very global styles. And I try to only use it very simply, avoiding all kinds of clever tricks that some dev think is the mark of good code.

It is dogshit compared to what?

GTK or QT, Java toolkits?

There is no better cross platform way of implementing applications, especially if you want to do mobile in the same stack.

That is unfortunately true. Our industry settled on the worst possible solution to solve that problem.

Compare how it feels to use an Electron app like VSCode or Discord to a native app like Zed or Sublime. It's night and day, but the latter takes a lot more effort.