It’s because if a webview app experience is good, you don’t notice it, you only notice if it’s bad.

A while ago saw a blog link on HN that explained how Apple uses it everywhere and we never notice it because they are done well. Of course I can’t find that link now, I summon the HN gods…

Maybe this https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/inspecting-web-views-in-ma... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30648424?

On mobile the webview app experience is crap and it's immediately obvious that an app is not native. Simply nobody asks customers how they like it. The management assumes that as long as nobody complains and the users don't leave in droves, the experience must be impeccable.

It's often easy to tell, but my concern has shifted from "Why isn't this native? It's ugly/slow" to "Why isn't this a goddamn webpage? It can't justify neither its permissions nor its space".

from the comments:

> Definitely every one of these is sluggish at best on a very modern machine but they are also full of UI annoyances.

> It’s because if a webview app experience is good, you don’t notice it, you only notice if it’s bad.

Aside from Apple’s apps (which imo are noticeably worse than the old ones, but that’s beside the point), what are some good WebView apps on iOS right now?

Somebody scraped the play store and checked the framework, so a list for Android WebView apps, built with capacitor, is here: https://capgo.app/top_capacitor_app/ Maybe an equivalent is there on iOS for the same app...

Sadly i couldn’t find a reliable way to do it on Apple Store, it’s pretty hard to download from the store outside of apple device. If anyone know how i can do it too

It might not be possible but others have scraped just the app store and matched based on Android meta data: https://people.ece.ubc.ca/amesbah/resources/papers/mobilesof...

lichess is really good. Thanks for the info, I'm not surprised to learn it's a webview app, but it is really good.

It doesn't look native but who even cares. I think when a UI sucks or is unintuitive or buggy then "it's not native" is a sort of catchall easy complaint. Native is a crutch. Sometimes it's a good crutch (accessibility etc). But that's more about developer efficiency and bare minimums of polish.

Yes, Apple's apps are really really bad - including the app store. I am not even sure whether that app store can be considered a stand alone app or we should call it part of the OS.

A webview app is by design bad. Webviews were made for one thing - web views.

The app store is the only application that I am aware of that you can't find through spotlight search. You can search the app store directly from spotlight search, but it will never list the App Store as an app. Very annoying.

I just opened spotlight and typed “ap” and App Store came up as the first option.

Thanks for this comment. I was able to fix this issue, finally. Had to toggle the switch in setting> apps> App Store > search and restart my devices. :)

I thought it was some legal thing about App Store competition.

Is this what you mean? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45250759

(In the context of "Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content")

Yes, thank you!

> It stands to reason that Apple wouldn't have developed this feature [liquid glass css property] if they weren't using it. Where? We have no idea. But they must be using it somewhere. The fact that none of us have noticed exactly where suggests that we're interacting with webviews in our daily use of iOS without ever even realising it.

There's some jump from _a property exists_ to _it must be used_, but a massive one from _a property exists_ to _Apple uses it everywhere and we never notice it because they are done well_.

Can you give examples of good webview apps on iOS?

> Apple uses it everywhere and we never notice it because they are done well.

Done well as in: laggy, non-performant, break OS conventions and you can see elements load with the naked eye?

See App Store as an example: https://grumpy.website/post/0RsaxCu3P or Apple Arcade: https://grumpy.website/618 or...

The Arcade video, taking several seconds to load a few low resolution images, causes me pain.

If Apple are using it for the AppStore - then I defo Italy do notice it. The AppStore runs so badly.

I would be interested in any links to Webview apps that run really well, I’ve never seen one that I’m aware of but so many that I am aware of and are bad!

Not really. The difference between high quality web app and native app is very noticeable.

And between average native and average web view - it is night and day.

99% of web apps in desktop browser are laggy. And on mobile it feels like crap.

Sure if you are an expert in top1% you can probably get it working really good. But this is true only for 1 in 100 if not less.

A webview app can be good, but finding one is harder than finding russel's teapot :D

Apple’s app experience has also been going in the toilet for the last five-six years so there’s that. It’s like slowly boiling the frog.

It is immediately obvious when you are using a web view app, as it uses browser layout and non-native controls. And I have never found one to be as intuitive or nice an experience as native controls.

I've done it before on a personal project and I was pretty obsessed with user experience. For example, I changed the way buttons work (because they were natively links with Cordova, which trigger upon tap, not "finger lift", like native buttons). Also, implemented some gestures to e.g. switch between pages (tab-style navigation). While not really in line with system UI (wasn't my goal), I think usability is quite decent.

In case you're interested, the app is named "QuickÖV" - not relevant to anyone outside Switzerland, but just for trying it out: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.billhillap...

I use Voyager, a client for Lemmy, on a daily basis and it’s my favorite mobile (iPad) app. Voyager is the spiritual successor to the Apollo client for Reddit.

https://github.com/aeharding/voyager

The app uses Ionic’s Capacitor, which to my rudimentary understanding is the webview-based upgrade of Cordova. I’ve had far fewer issues with this app than the likes of Bluesky (react native) and Discord (I think also react native but not sure).

The webview approach seems to be the only way for a one-person team to feasible provide a cross-platform app with an app-store presence. Another promising alternative to Capacitor is Tauri Mobile which does essentially the same thing, but mobile doesn’t seem to be a high priority for them.

I installed this on Android, and unless iOS experience is massively different, this is not a good example:

- there's no touch feedback (ripple) on many of clickable components. Some that do have it look non-native, inconsistent and sometimes gets stuck

- the search bar on top app bar in `search` tab looks very non-native and non-standard (it's elevated on top of elevated app bar already)

- the lists look iOS-y, especially settings

- the settings list item has weird glitch where it loses background after touching (but not clicking)

- collapsing comments is pretty choppy (on a Samsung S25 so a pretty powerful phone)

- can't swipe down a bottom sheet (with post options/actions)

- it's just not android-y — the navigation is weird, the design is all over the place,

It's not unusable and it's a good tradeoff for a small team I guess. But this is nowhere near the experience a native app can provide, and has lots of small papercuts that would make for at least a slightly frustrating experience. It is a decent app don't get me wrong, but it's clearly not native

Like GP I haven't experienced many WebView based apps that are great so I had to give this a spin and I have to say it's actually pretty good! I would not have identified this as a WebView app if I didn't already know about it from this comment.

You are comparing web view apps to web view apps. “React Native” has muddied the waters here with intentional misuse of terminology. With React Native you still write a web view app - it just ahead of time compiles to run without the browser view on device. But it doesn’t use any native UI components, which is what “native app” used to mean.

I may have read your comment backwards but it seems rather wrong: react native DOES use native UI components, thats why it has “native” in its name. It’s also not compiled ahead of time per se, you still execute JS in the app (not in webview, yes) , but its mapped to native components

Thank you, it appears I was misinformed and/or conflating my knowledge of how flutter works. Mae culpa.

It does seem that many RN apps do React (not native) components when they need to do something custom, which may explain my sub-par, non-native experience with the RN apps I have used.

Even something “custom” is still a native component. The JSX you write eventually creates native views. Whether or not those views and components match the style and behavior of stock iOS or Android is a different story, and whether or not there are performance bottlenecks due to React Native’s bridge (now in theory no longer an issue because of a big architecture rewrite called Fabric) is another.

Do you use iOS by any chance? On android I've very noticed performance problems. Even in apps like Discord and Instagram. But Google maps and Duolingo are pretty bad at times for example. So it's not webviews that are the common denominator here

Obsidian. In android it's the best markdown editor.

I have experienced the opposite with Zed, which has its own bespoke UI framework - it behaved somewhat unexpectedly and didn't work exactly how I'm used to an UI to behave giving me this uncanny feeling.

This kinda shows you how much effort and experience goes into getting an UI framework right, and the long tail quirks (of which there are a zillion) matter for UX, and while I appreciate they took on the task of breaking away from the browser, it's understandable why someone wants to ship an app on time and budget goes with a web based solution.

Zed isn’t native either. As you said, it uses its own bespoke UI framework with custom widgets.

Sorry if that wasn't clear, that was the point I was trying to make - Zed's UI worked oddly for me in subtle ways that I can't really give an example of right now, but created a sense of discomfort that made me give up on it after a short while.

Well you haven't used the cutting-edge latest breed. Try using Uber in a browser. There's many high-quality apps today where you honestly cannot tell that it's a website running in a browser. There are many many more but I can only think of Uber off the top of my head.