Sure, the duopoly of app stores and browsers as a disruptor is a big story.
But can I take offense of all this "The biggest story"?
I see it so often, especially here on HN, and it feels overly dramatic. Maybe even self-centered, like; "this is the truth", where somebody went too far in some kind of cool-aid (of the wrong kind). It is not as awful as conspiracy theories, they are even more awful, but the feeling goes in the same direction.
> The implication is clear: browsers unchained can do to mobile what the web did to desktop, where more than 70% of daily "jobs to be done" happen on the web.
This was an actual debate in the early days of app stores. Facebook was the most prominent company that decided to go with an HTML5 app instead of a native one. Doing so was one of the biggest strategic mistakes they've ever made. Zuck's words, not mine. (https://www.engadget.com/2012-09-11-zuckerberg-html-5-facebo...).
Web apps were slower, had issues dealing with the various browsers and saw less use.
It doesn't seem like the author has done any real research here.
There's no technical reason this needs to be true though.
It's wild that I can use a full-featured spreadsheet instantly on the web on my laptop, but on my phone someone wants me to download a 100mb binary to order a pizza.
That is a real problem. But if that problem manifests in web and native software alike, then neither the web nor the app stores directly cause it, right?
"My highly abstract cross-platform framework must be as fast as native code" is not a sane view on this.
A tonne of effort has gone into making spreadsheets work on the web; both in the browsers as well as the spreadsheet apps themselves.
The fact that the web works as well as it does is a huge feat of engineering, but in no way indicative of there being no technical reason that native apps can be better.
The vast majority of apps are just text, images, and buttons. Maybe a video player if you're getting wild. Not really anything that requires processing speed except to just render stuff on a screen and wait for touches. They don't need feats of engineering to run well.
I should have been more specific. There's no technical reason for binary apps to be the dominant form of apps on phones, given that most apps are pretty simple experiences.
No technical reason, but I don't see iOS and Android settling on a standard framework for doing native applications and setting a specification for frameworks (localization, camera capture, audio playbacks, and other apis). The web is great, but only when you treat each page as a documents (interactive). Anytime you break out of this, you find yourself in a whole suit of problems as there is no easy way to fit both experiences in the same application (responsive design is not the solution).
Maybe not enough effort has gone into something as basic as ordering food online. Or rather it's such a simple problem that too many fragmented subpar options exists compared to web spreadsheets.
> There's no technical reason this needs to be true though.
yes, yes there is. HTML/JS is a bastard to parse. it takes a fucktonne of resources to actually figure out how to render a box. Go and fire up a windows 95 box, with 133mhx of pentium III goodness. THen make a VB6 app that animates boxes/shows images.
Look how fucking fast it can do it (and vb6 wasn't a fast language)
Or, more easily, render a web page on the original raspberry pi-b, try and play video in a browser, do some sort of animation.
It lags like a fucker. Use py-game (you know python with its 50% "what fucking type is this?" tax) and you can run animations at 60fps.
The web is slow, its just moore's law has shielded us from it.
It's true, but a current version of a native app has minimum OS version requirements that make running on an old phone impossible. If you're just willing to have the same hardware requirements for mobile web, you've got hardware that can render text and images and buttons just fine.
Animations suck up so much resources. I have a PWA where I wanted a pulsating button with a frosted glass effect. I had to remove it cause it was using 20% of a single CPU core. After removing it the app is only using 6%, just sitting idle, which is about 6% more than any other native app on my Mac.
Nope, gifs only support binary transparency (transparent or opaque).
APNG would let you do frosted glass though. And I was expecting to add "but support is dire" but... actually it's not so bad? https://caniuse.com/?search=apng says 97%, only browsers with no support are legacy (IE and Opera mini), pretty much all browsers have supported it for years.
WebP and AVIF also have animation and alpha channel support, so these are also options.
Caveat emptor though, I don't have much experience with animation and alpha on any of these formats, so I don't know how buggy support is.
You can generate the gif dynamically. Unless you’re doing a lot of resizing, the one time cost of building the gif will amortize quickly across the total runtime of the animation.
Parsing is a tiny fraction of the time that a Web browser spends, and the various native resources are on the same level of complexity. TrueType hinting instructions from the 90s are of a similar complexity to the HTML 5 parsing spec.
> Go and fire up a windows 95 box, with 133mhx of pentium III goodness. THen make a VB6 app that animates boxes/shows images.
This will easily run at the same framerate on a modern Web rendering stack.
> Or, more easily, render a web page on the original raspberry pi-b, try and play video in a browser, do some sort of animation.
Browsers on the Raspberry Pi B weren't accelerated, due to various reasons including Broadcom having (at the time) the worst GPU driver situation imaginable. You should compare against modern accelerated browsers (by "modern" meaning "within the last 20 years on mainstream OS's").
> It lags like a fucker. Use py-game (you know python with its 50% "what fucking type is this?" tax) and you can run animations at 60fps.
Web apps have been able to run animations at 60 FPS for decades. (As an aside, the performance difference between CPython and native code is far more than 50%.)
I haven’t seen any AAA games that are developed to work in a browser. I also believe that a lot of APIs in iOS are not available from PWAs.
If someone invested a lot of time and money into making PWAs work great then there shouldn’t be any technical reasons for why you should choose to develop a native app instead of a PWA. At the moment we are lacking in tooling and language support and also leaving a lot of performance on the table.
I love how easy it is to get up and running with a PWA and most of my front end stuff is using PWAs today. From a technical standpoint it still needs a lot of work from the vendor side though.
> I haven’t seen any AAA games that are developed to work in a browser.
I think Stadia worked over the browser to deliver AAA games. There’s obviously a whole bunch of missing technology needed to deliver (and later patch) huge web apps locally though. Plus annoying browser limits like the hard kill based on memory usage in mobile Safari.
> I also believe that a lot of APIs in iOS are not available from PWAs.
The security model of a store is delegated trust and stewardship. There is someone who will review if applications need capabilities, and will provide business penalties for bad behaviors.
The security model of the web is basically a mix of site sandboxing and caveat emptor. There is no guarantee the web app you hit one minute to the next will be the same code base, or belong to the same owner. For example, the same interface has to get consent for notifications from an advertising site which wants to spam you as your corporate chat app.
Chrome had quite a bit more motivation to ignore this or to create a tiered model with PWAs because of Chromebooks, where the model (originally) was web-only development. Google created quite a few one-off API for their systems, and promoted several Chrome-only API as if they were web standards. Even there, this approach was too limiting and eventually Android compatibility was added.
Apple has started to add some additional app-useful features like notifications, but behind the 'Add to Home Screen' option. One could look at this like promoting a website to an 'app' on the phone, partially because that gives a consistent way for the user to understand permissions and privacy implications for both native and web code.
There are plenty of people who wish there was a better mechanism on iOS than the current add to Home Screen flow, but it is highly unlikely to become more streamlined because of abuse potential.
Games on a browser are nearly impossible to monetize. They are fundamentally different to, say, a pizza-ordering app, which has monetization built-in. One exception could be MMORPGs, but in that case it's extremely difficult to avoid cheating, on a browser.
> It's wild that I can use a full-featured spreadsheet instantly on the web on my laptop, but on my phone someone wants me to download a 100mb binary to order a pizza
Google Sheets is now basically a window-sized canvas element, with its own non-native control libraries. I suspect it is not using browser font rendering.
That puts it effectively back into Windows 3.1 days of bitblt graphics, being driven by a difficult to optimize, dynamic language.
It is indeed wild that desktops are good enough to be able to drive such a thing with such performance. However, there is plenty of reason to rely on native frameworks with modern graphics systems.
I suspect there were radically different levels of engineering and optimization that went into Google Sheets vs a typical pizza-ordering app. Even with the same level of engineering, I suspect the pizza ordering app would be larger due to the need to bundle media like pizza and topping images.
> This was an actual debate in the early days of app stores. Facebook was the most prominent company that decided to go with an HTML5 app instead of a native one. Doing so was one of the biggest strategic mistakes they've ever made.
That was over a decade ago. Back then, Youtube was still using Flash (the HTML5 beta was only around a year old), JavaScript engines were way slower, Chrome was still using WebKit... HTML5 today is not what it was in 2011.
Even putting aside the fact that the web was "slower" in part because of the decisions mentioned in the article that are intended to encourage native app design, it's not a foregone conclusion that the same is true today.
Maybe if Apple didn't purposely deliver a slow, dated browser and force it to be the only one.
The cellphone duopoly is using their power to make sure the web cannot match native. That's how they make their gobs of money that hasn't been subject to real competition. They get a free rake off of the innovation of others.
If you allow web downloads of apps with no store and no scare wall, companies will develop better / native-level browsers. They'll happily chip away at Google and Apple.
With WASM, we have the tech. As soon as it goes multithreaded, it's game over for native apps. (So long as the DOJ clears the runway and forces these companies to allow fair competition and progress.)
I'm thinking that if Python becomes "easy to pick up" to do WASM development, it could go a long way towards helping PWAs thrive. I'm not very familiar with WASM but most tutorials seem to be around C/C++, Rust, or C#, so I wonder if there's something holding back Python + WASM. I only mention Python because of its current popularity and accessibility to the masses.
> so I wonder if there's something holding back Python + WASM
Yes. The problem is that may python libraries involve compilation of c, rust or other native languages that themselves need a WASM toolchain configured to cross compile to WASM correctly, and potentially patches to support the platform.
This toolchain support is coming though. See pyodide.org for one example.
If I understand correctly, WASM only makes sense for compiled languages.
Of course you can run the python interpreter in WASM[1], but that will be at a significant performance disadvantage to the native javascript interpreter, and it's also something that has to be loaded every time you load the website.
But you'll be paying a python->WASM->sandbox tax. Not only that but you then don;t get access to any hardware acceleration, sensors or any other good stuff.
I agree with your overall point, but this really isn’t a fair categorisation of Safari. It’s a fast, modern, efficient browser, and a lot of the stuff it doesn’t support is only supported in Chrome.
I concede it does lag behind Firefox in terms of supported web features, but only very slightly, and if you compare pre-release versions, that gap narrows even more (using the Caniuse browser scores as a rudimentary measure).
The issue with safari isn't its supported features but that it's very buggy and unstable. You never know when they are going to break indexdb, localstorage or some basic CSS rendering primitive again.
And because the browser is also hard coded to the iOS version, it has the slowest update rate of all modern browsers.
Them's citin' words! Are you sure you're as well-versed as you portray yourself to be?
The article which you linked to is from 2012; it pertains to the performance of Facebook's web client in 2010, when run on mobile devices in 2010.
Most apps today can be implemented as progressive web apps, without any user experience penalty. Instead, they are built with tools that lock developers into a platform of one type or another. That's because some handset manufacturers prioritize the platforms that have lock-in, such as the App Store and iMessage, over the platforms that do not, such as the web and RCS. It is not because the web is somehow a bad platform for apps.
If you want FaceTime to call your mom on her headset when your watch detects a spike in your heart rate, then yes, you may want to write a native app to do that. But Sudoku, Pandora and the McDonald's app can live on the web, and so can most of the rest.
> Most apps today can be implemented as progressive web apps, without any user experience penalty
yeah nah,
the FT, the bastion of PWAs because of the "if you have a subscription, we'll take 25% of that thanks" flipped to native almost as soon as the rules changed.
why? because the user experience sucked bollocks. It was slow, memory hog, and a massive massive bollockache to maintain. Don't get me wrong, thats not because they were bad at making the web app, its because the tech isn't up to scratch.
This says they just wrapped their web app in a native app, like a web view, so they could then use system features that their web apps couldn't access. So are you sure you're not using a web app after all? You might be using the same tech as you were before.
How's this for research: In 2011, when Facebook tried HTML5 for their app, an iPhone 4 ran the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark in a little over ten seconds according to Anandtech. Today we stopped using Sunspider because phones and browsers are so much faster there's no point to it, but an iPhone runs Sunspider in ~70ms. 150 times faster! And today we have APIs for camera, storage, video, 3D, notifications, threads, WASM, etc that didn't exist back then either. When developers can save 30% by going with the web, that's a real big incentive to explore the new performance and new APIs the web has today...
That was because Apple had gone out of its way to keep all of the best native functionality available only to native apps. Facebook is not a complicated front-end application (or it wasn't back then), so it should have been possible, but you couldn't even upload photos until iOS 6. It's amazing and audacious that Zuck even attempted it at all, in hindsight.
> Web apps were slower, had issues dealing with the various browsers and saw less use.
Apps like Facebook are constantly preloading data in the background to fill your feed immediately on app launch. 99pct of web apps would not have that need fortunately.
And let's be real, FB went with native apps because they could quietly hide app permissions that a web browser would warn you about with a big scary dialog window. That would be catastrophic for the world's biggest targeted advertising company. They ran a full page ad when Apple started requiring app tracking disclosures on iOS.
Aside from your point about Facebook, "It doesn't seem like the author has done any real research here" is kind of a weird comment to make about a veteran browser dev who's been on web standards committees for over a decade.
Funnily enough, Steve Jobs/Apple didn't even want an app store or native apps to begin with. It was gonna be only preinstalled apps + 3rd party web apps. Hell he had to be convinced to even allow non-Apple 3rd party apps in the first place.
I don't think web apps are the future, but I also don't see why there can't be a more protected mode/sandbox for non app store sourced content to run in. Nobody has solved this yet - why can I visit pretty much any website and (mostly) be completely safe, yet I can't install any old random APK?
Hell, it should be possible to jump from the web into native code with a single click by now, why tf not. The only good thing the app stores are good for is to serve up apps that are "more trusted" (even tho app stores constantly have a couple bad actor apps on em) as well as centralised place to easily find stuff (the reason people use Google).
I guess the real problem with sandboxing/permissions systems is that users don't know what's good for them; my Tiktok loving friends would just hit "yes, yes, yes" to any dialog that says "TT wants to know your shoe size".
I am surprised that part of Mozilla's never introduced an Android launcher for progressive web apps.
Given that they already have Firefox on Android and their history with FirefoxOS, I expected this to be a key lever to get app/website developers to consider this as an option.
Are there barriers such as performance or API issues (e.g. double click behaviors) that prevent the webmanifest and other approaches from gaining traction here?
There’s a stack of Blink-only Google specifications that people are pushing as “standard” that are anything but. Both Apple and Mozilla reject them on privacy or security grounds, then get criticised as being “behind” (or in Apple’s case, “deliberately holding back the web”). No, a specification created and implemented unilaterally by Google is not a standard.
Most standards start by being implemented by one browser. I would rather a standard exist based off a real implementation than one thrown out of an ivory tower.
The whole point of standards is that there should be multiple implementations that can support it. Now I do agree with your point on that standards should be based on feedback from implementations but as the above comment said, this is just google making adding features and making standard documents to shift blame on other browser for not implementing them.
To be fair where are the other browser's proposals for giving apps the capabilities they need? Browsers should be shamed for not making an effort to support common use cases that apps need.
Their example of hijacking a BLE keyboard to get passwords seems a bit farcical. I would love to see a PoC of that attack. The API has been available in Chrome for quite a while. I don't think it has been a large attack vector.
All the more reason to use Safari or Firefox, since Chrome is doing something that I don't want any browser to have. (Whenever I install Chrome, I go through and turn off all of the stupid stuff that chrome should never have like web midi, webscsi, webble, etc.)
I am curious what do you mean by Launcher here. Firefox Allows installing app to your android laucher home screen and you can add any website as a shortcut to the homescreen.
Another angle is - "tech reporters" don't want to touch this because some mysterious blacklisting would result and their digital life would slowly come crumbling down. They're afraid to ruffle feathers.
No real justification for conspiracy theories. We have already seen a company fail when betting on PWA to fill in gaps in native app support for their platform - it was called Windows Phone.
It's not outside the realm of possibility for web apps to have as good of an experience as binary apps for most use cases. But Apple has no motivation to make "the good stuff" easily available to web developers.
Letting a webapp capable webpage have an in-page "install this app" button that added it to the home screen would wipe out 50% of app store usage. But as it is, as an "add to home screen" option on the share menu of a webpage, which very few have noticed or understand the meaning of... it keeps web apps from taking off.
Looking at Windows, we’ve got MS Office, File Explorer, Photoshop, Visual Studio, System admin/utilities, Notepad, Paint, Audacity, and so on… If all people actually used were just Facebook and Google Docs then Chromebooks would be far outselling Windows laptops; instead they’re just mildly competetive.
I won’t deny that “the web”, as a platform (especially Chromium) presents a compelling platform to which a good chunk of those apps could be ported (especially the apps which don’t need low-level or low-latency hardware interfaces - but I think you’re underselling the value, and necessity, of things using Win32+WDM/NTDDK instead of HTML+JS.
> It's not outside the realm of possibility for web apps to have as good of an experience as binary apps for most use cases. But Apple has no motivation to make "the good stuff" easily available to web developers.
How’s Apple making web apps bad on literally every platform?
In the browser: a dozen or more things by Google: sheets, docs, gmail, keep, and so on. Jira, Asana, et c. Several graph or diagram-making apps. Notion. There are tons.
Outside the browser: Everything that runs under Electron or is otherwise webtech-based? They're ubiquitous. Slack, Discord, Postman, VSCode, Etcher, and on and on.
> And you don't see how this would be abused by nefarious web sites ?
How is this different from being inundated with requests (really, more of a demand or an absolute requirement) to install the app to view this content?
Yeah, there's no way Apple has any incentive at all to make it easy to install even the (very neutered) PWA experience. Interestingly, it's a lot easier on Android than on iPhone, but Google has always been more open about outside apps and app stores.
> Letting a webapp capable webpage have an in-page "install this app" button that added it to the home screen would wipe out 50% of app store usage
I can hardly wait for my entire Saturday to be taken up by my father being clickjacked into installing an antivirus scam.
If 'install this app ' provides any additional change in the security and privacy model beyond what setting a bookmark does, the page should have zero capability to request/demand such a thing.
I know that sucks for people who want to do application distribution using web technologies. However, people do not understand the ramifications of promoting a site to an app, and those ramifications are full of abuse scenarios.
Well, I can say why I don't expect coverage of this. As far as I know, mobile OSes already allow the user to navigate to whatever web page they want. There's nothing to unblock.
> This, in turn, will enable competitors to replace app stores with directories of Progressive Web Apps.
> Work is also underway to give competing browsers a chance to facilitate PWAs that can install other PWAs. Web App Stores would then become a real possibility through browsers that support them, and we should expect that regulatory and legislative interventions will facilitate this in the near future. Removed from the need to police security (browsers have that covered) and handle distribution (websites update themselves), PWA app stores like store.app can become honest-to-goodness app management surfaces that can safely facilitate discovery and sync.
It's ironic that this article criticises tech media for sleeping on web apps and focusing on app store competition only to envision Web App Stores.
There's no need for app stores on the web. We already have discovery (Hacker News) and search (Google). I could imagine a subreddit specifically for web apps, but is even that necessary?
The author mentions PWA stores like store.app, and some shortcomings:
> PWA app stores like Appscope and store.app exist, but they're hobbled by gatekeepers that have denied competing browsers access to APIs that could turn PWA directories into real contenders.
The author is simply wrong in this case. To make sure I was giving him the benefit of the doubt, I just went to store.app and added Microsoft Loop to my Home Screen in about 5 seconds. It was easier and faster than installing a native app!
PWA install experience is nice and easy on desktop, you're right.
But to be clear, the author is saying that on mobile, especially on iOS, PWA capabilities are crippled.
I say this with some authority, having worked on Microsoft's PWABuilder[0] including its iOS platform. There are a number of significant things not possible on iOS due to Apple's restrictions for web apps.
Things are getting better on mobile, albeit slowly thanks to Apple's feet-dragging mentioned in the author's post.
> PWA install experience is nice and easy on desktop, you're right.
Cool, I've only tried on mobile myself. Here's the iOS experience for anyone who hasn't tried PWApp stores: https://imgur.com/a/2VMbvOp
> …on mobile, especially on iOS, PWA capabilities are crippled. I say this with some authority, having worked on Microsoft's PWABuilder including its iOS platform.
Great project, nice to meet you! I don't think I've hit these pain points as a user. What's your "top 3" of what Apple needs to do to make PWA installation suck less for iOS users?
As a developer, I expect I would do exactly what you recommended in 2021 (https://blog.pwabuilder.com/posts/publish-your-pwa-to-the-io...), which is to distribute web apps on the App Store proper (using PWABuilder, Capacitor, etc.) instead of as a PWA for the benefits (discoverability, "normal" installation experience) you note. Is that still good advice from your perspective?
> "What's your "top 3" of what Apple needs to do to make PWA installation suck less for iOS users?"
It's not so much about installation as it is about app capabilities. Many of the things native apps do easily, Apple makes difficult for web apps. Push notifications is one such thing. (Again, this is changing slowly.)
That said, yes, adding web apps to home screen is quite buried in iOS today.
> "As a developer, I expect I would do exactly what you recommended in 2021 (https://blog.pwabuilder.com/posts/publish-your-pwa-to-the-io...), which is to distribute web apps on the App Store proper (using PWABuilder, Capacitor, etc.) instead of as a PWA for the benefits (discoverability, "normal" installation experience) you note"
It's not an either/or. Personally, I build PWAs and make them publicly available on the web. Then, I publish them to app stores for visibility. Average, non-technical users look for apps in app stores, so that's where you need to be even if you app is built with web tech. This is the advice I gave in 2021, and it still holds true today.
I don't think that's fair, the concept of a "store" with user reviews, changelogs, detailed app information (e.g. permissions) is great. It only becomes a problem when a platform decides to act as a gatekeeper for the entire platform with insane rules & fees.
Furthermore, social media is a really poor way to discover anything unless it happens to go viral. A general-purpose search engine such as Google is entirely suboptimal, as it can only match on keywords on the page. It doesn't address reviews or provide convenient (but optional) payment processing either.
You shouldn't be forced to use one specific store, but their role is nonetheless valuable. Whether it's for apps, books, appliances, or food.
You have something like user reviews with comments on HN or reddit.
Changelogs and permissions are more difficult as they require the app store to control hosting. I don't think any developer would accept that unless there's no other choice, and on the web there is.
Google doesn't have reviews (why not?) but it can crawl every website that links to a web app, like an HN comment page, and use that to figure out what the web app is about.
A web app could provide an RSS feed of updates for scraping by app aggregators. This sounds like a great candidate for addition to the web app manifest format.
Okay, so you don't like stores, but I don't understand why you're ridiculing the author for suggesting what is an obviously valuable idea to many, if not most people?
You can distribute EXEs for Windows, but virtually all game developers use stores such as Steam for their value-add features. Customers don't only prefer this option, they often demand it.
You can distribute binaries for Linux, yet millions of people and servers use Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, etc. repositories.
It's a bit like making the infamous Dropbox comment, except doing it in 2024 with benefit of hindsight, the idea itself has already been validated by billions of users.
But such a store doesn't need to be a dedicated app on the device. It can be a third-party website—indeed; that is how it would make the most sense.
If this were something people were clamoring for, it is likely it would already exist, because the barrier to creating a website for linking, aggregating and reviewing PWAs should be quite low, with the only real challenge being the accumulation of a critical mass of users.
One major caveat is that PWAs don't have all the capabilities of a native app. I think that's the biggest issue people have with this -- if PWAs had full feature parity with native apps, I'd agree Apple's app store monopoly wouldn't be a big deal.
I think there are many reasons why something that people do want might not (yet) exist. For example, a monopolized market where customers don't have many choices. Or like you mentioned, difficulty in competing with incumbent advantage. Or maybe people just don't know what they want (e.g. "faster horses")
Accumulating a critical mass of users is nigh-insurmountable when you don’t own the platform. But also it’s not the only challenge: sustenance is. Google and Apple operate their app stores because they get a lot of value out of them—both because they make their platforms more useful, and because of their absurdly high taxes. But a third-party website that’s essentially just a link aggregator, how is it going to make money? The only realistic ways (advertising/sponsored listings, or charging subscriptions to either side of the marketplace) increase the critical mass required drastically, far beyond what’s realistic.
And indeed, there have been multiple attempts at something like this, because it is something people want—but there’s just no money in it, and so they’ve all failed.
I haven’t used a platform with these for a while, but my recollection of the Google Play Store was that the changelog was completely useless for almost all apps I ever used.
> detailed app information (e.g. permissions)
… which has historically been “it takes all these permissions and there’s nothing you can do about it”, though I gather this has been changing on at least Android, whereas on the web almost none of the equivalents are enabled by default (“connect to the internet” being the most obvious counterexample) and all beyond that must be granted explicitly at time of use.
> It only becomes a problem when a platform decides to act as a gatekeeper for the entire platform with insane rules & fees.
> I haven’t used a platform with these for a while, but my recollection of the Google Play Store was that the changelog was completely useless for almost all apps I ever used.
That is correct, and exactly the same on iOS. The average changelog says "bug fixes and improvements". Might as well be a giant middle finger.
> … which has historically been “it takes all these permissions and there’s nothing you can do about it”, though I gather this has been changing on at least Android
IME iOS does not have this issue because it never shoved all the permissions in a "permissions" tab granting all of them to the application at install. Instead permissions are usually opt-in when requested by the application. So applications have always been incentivised to limit their requirements (you can reject any request, and you can toggle them off afterwards through the setting, all the application can tell you is "I can't work without that dave"). Apple has also increased the number / scope of opt-in permissions over time, increasing the scope of that effect.
What's your point, exactly? All I'm saying is that places which aggregate and curate stuff can be a valuable, depending on the features and experience they provide.
I mentioned a few features I would personally find valuable, you might be interested in a store that only offers content suitable for kids, or some other niche. That's the beauty of open ecosystems.
> … which happens approximately every single time.
You seem confused. I think you need to read this thread again. The discussion was about alternatives to this exact problem. tldr; This can't happen on the web because a PWA store is just another website, much like HN or Reddit.
I think that fails to appreciate the needs and skills of most users. App stores shouldn’t have a monopoly but they’re still necessary. They provide a consistent location and format for finding, installing, updating, and reviewing apps.
Saying “we have Hacker News for discoverability” is especially revealing of the lack of understanding and empathy tech people can often have for the majority of users.
It’s also simply a foregone conclusion. There’s a demand for discoverability and consistency. Whatever fills that demand we could just call an App Store.
You’re just describing an ill-suited App Store called a search engine.
GOG, Steam, and Itch.io exist despite not locking down entire platforms. There must be some sort of demand for a consistent way to discover and access software.
I read somewhere that Windows 98 sold 15 million licences. Add in OEM machines and you've got a base of computer users in maybe the 100-200 million range - most of whom either had to use the device for work (which meant training) or had a level of enthusiasm for computing (which meant self-learning).
Today there are 7-odd billion smartphones out there. Most users just want something that gets things done with as little friction as possible.
Who uses these things and how they use them has changed beyond all recognition.
>Most users just want something that gets things done with as little friction as possible.
It's funny to read this as someone that always dreads having to get a new phone, or install some proprietary app, or reinstall a Windows VM, or sign up to some service, exactly because I know how much friction is going to be deliberately put in my way from every party involved.
"No you can't just change your phone's service provider", "No you can't unlock your phone's bootloader", "No you can't just boot into a new copy of the OS without signing into a bunch of things", "No you can't install this Windows image on a device without a trusted platform module", "No you can't just install a program from the web", "No you can't just look at all the files on your phone", "No you can't just have an app sync photos from the SD card", "No you can't create a login without giving us your phone number", "No you can't opt out of our 'telemetry'", "No you can't view the video you're paying for without the right OS/browser/monitor/cable".
Coming soon: "No you can't view the URL of the page you're on", "No you can't install an ad-blocker", "No you can't access this site without an attested, locked-down OS-browser stack", "No you can't install a different OS on this PC", "No you can't use a local, unlicensed generative AI model".
I think it's time we reframed the discussion and stopped dumbing users down and pretending that extremely anti-user behaviour is "user-friendly". Using technology used to be challenging because the hardware and software were still being bootstrapped to a point where it was fast, simple and bug-free to use. Now the experience of using technology is to have to navigate some corporate bureaucracy in every direction, which is totally independent of tech limitations.
In a better world, all schools would have computer literacy classes that did more than teach kids how to use Microsoft Office. Actually teaching them how computers work instead of siphoning them into learned helplessness just so big tech can keep on raking in billions.
They can ask on social networks, subscribe to newsletters, watch videos. I don't recall Hotmail or ICQ or Firefox needing an app store for people to find out about them.
I think an interesting approach would be to explore what a store does. A few ways to look at it is to explore what brick and mortar stores do, what they offer both consumers and producers, and to explore why app stores that aren’t monopolies exist. Eg. Gaming.
App stores are an ad delivery system these days. Apple/Google don't make money hosting a bunch of apps, the filthy lucre comes from companies paying to have their apps in the top slot.
Look, my grandmother is not going to browse hackernews so she can download the facebook.
If she could search facebook on google and get a big old < Install > button next to the result, then maybe. But probably that won't happen on Google since they are incentivized not to for their 30% cut
In fact, google does return facebook as the first result when you search for "facebook"[1], and as for the install prompt that's something that facebook itself can show.
Even Apple tried it and they failed and scrambled to launch their own app store after everyone started jailbreaking and using Cydia apps that were so much better than the web apps Apple wanted iPhone users to use :)
And in the end Cydia made Apple develop its biggest money maker ever!
"Failure" here means they didn't manage to join the oligopoly themselves, and went bust instead, as network effects are a zero-sum game.
By that metric, every flavour of Linux has also failed. Yet Linux is also heavily used and actively developed, serving an important purpose where Windows/Mac were not suitable. It helps that computer/server hardware and components are modular and not as tied to a particular OS as phones are.
> This, in turn, will enable competitors to replace app stores with directories of Progressive Web Apps.
The time for PWAs was in about 1998, when WAP was a thing.
Much as I would love a universal bytecode that would allow mobile phones to achieve this, PWAs are not the route to get there. They are a mess of custom, poorly documented and ever changing layers of web bits.
Yes, web assembly exists, yes its about 75% the speed of native. and its not as easy to develop for. I also don't see why phone makers will want to make it that easy. Unless they are forced to provide parity for their APIS, it'll always be second best to native.
But, for the end users, they will look at PWAs and think: "fuck, this has got slow, and its eating my battery" you can spot the react native apps when you use them(yes, yes I know its not entirely the same)
We have been lucky on desktop/laptop that we have added 5 zeros to the available compute, memory, network and GPU capacity. This allows a browser to run slack at the same speed as MIRC, from 2002. You don't have that luxury on mobile. You are limited by battery capacity, unless we suddenly find a way to 100x battery density, it'll be like that for a while.
That being said, the work on breaking the app store dominance is welcome. 25% tax on development is taking the piss. Obviously the "point" of the walled garden was to provide security to the end user, however google fucked that right up, so now its obviously just a cash cow.
But, I want a way to side load apps, I want a second market place. I don't want fucking PWAs on my phone.
75% is a stretch. The last time I tested it, it was ~50% of my native program despite my best efforts, with AOT. Which is still good btw, just not as constantly advertised.
That's pretty good if you ask me! I was using an image encoder that had a WebAssembly SIMD CMake option, which is nice, but it only had half of native performance. I suppose it will continue to improve over time.
Depending on the browser and also when this was WASM SIMD could have been a pessimization. It added first with compatibility in mind and took/is taking awhile to reach full performance potential
Or what about plain ordinary web sites? I’d say that most of the time a brand has no business making an app when they just want to get a message out to people. For instance McDonald’s has an app to order food but why don’t they just make a web site you can order food from? Can it really be easier for end users to use an app that requires an extra installation step? I mean AMZN and Ebay had sites you could order all kinds of things in 1999 and they didn’t even need React.
Web Apps don't require an extra installation step, they merely allow the user to "install" the app -- to pin it to the homescreen and have it open without the browser UI.
To me mobile icons all look the same and it is highly stressful to scroll through pages of them. Even Apple is terrible if you just stop and think. Photos are just a meaningless pinwheel, the Settings are hidden behind a movie poster for The Golden Compass, if I had a Hacker News app it would get confused with all the other apps that have an H or N or Y for their icon or that are colored orange. As it is I can type “n” on my iPad and… it is auto suggested. I type “1” and it suggests my web based RSS reader - why are brands shooting themselves in the foot by getting lost in a maze of twisty icons that all look alike?
What I don’t understand is that I can frequently ‘grok’ icons on my desktop although I hardly ever use them (so much easier to hit the windows button and type 2 or 3 letters and hit enter). Steam will install icons for games I download an instantly I know that’s Atelier Sophie. I use Microsoft’s RDP client for iPad all the time and think it is great but the icon is completely meaningless, it is just some burnt umber wedges that look like the logo of a multimodal shipping company from the 1970s.
Scrolling through the app list stresses me out too, I avoid it and just pin apps I regularly use to the home screens.
Authenticator apps are a great example, I don't use them often enough to pin to home and all are identically named and have generic icons.
Another pain point is the overuse of material design with similar color schemes (it's not just google apps that use this). Half the app list become lost in a sea of red, blue, green and yellow fragments.
I mostly agree with you and that’s why I use a single page with the eight or so apps that I actually use daily. All the rest are in the App Library and I launch them with search. For me, it’s much faster than scrolling and looking for the icon. Typically I only have to type one or two characters to find the app I need.
I did not know you could do that. I think I show how lazy/non-power-user-ish some people can be. On my iphone I rely on "Frequently Visited" web links because I just don't seem to like "Favorites". I don't know why. I don't use bookmarks on my web browser either. So now I moved some web pages onto my homescreen, inside a folder. (It took a long time to figure out how to make a folder.) I will do this with other web pages too. I don't like installing apps unless it is something I wil really use. I stil have far too many. I should probably delete/move to folders several of those.
(And for what it is worth, the (email) inbox on my iphone shows 129,523 message unread)
actually, capitalism 101 teaches that "making more money" and "better for the consumer" are synonymous so long as markets are competitive and operate at the market clearing price, that point which is also best for the producer.
i don't have time to write a treatise, but if we consider capitalism vs socialism/communism to be equivalent to quantum theory vs general relativity, that part of communism (allocation of resources) does not in theory work.
> Can it really be easier for end users to use an app that requires an extra installation step?
Yes it can, because you install it once and it's right there on your home screen, very easy to get to. The friction of typing the website name or dealing with the inherent clunkiness of a mobile site vs the app cannot be understated and it is part of why brands create apps.
Plus, don't forget the notifications they can send, for deals and promotions. That is also why I have several apps for brands installed, because I know I already want to use their products, so the free discount works in my favor. I have the willpower to resist impulsive purchases, personally speaking, but many don't. When a notification pops up announcing "50% off on this sandwich," it's tempting for people who hadn't planned to spend at all that day. They might think they're saving money by spending less than full price, not realizing that spending anything at all is more than they intended. Brands understand this psychology and optimize their strategies accordingly, targeting those who are likely to be swayed into spending when they receive a compelling offer. It is no different than offering flash sales and deals, which work extremely well in the world of marketing.
Exactly how is it easier to “track you” using an application thst is sandbox that you have to explicitly give it permission to have access to your location or other data than it is on to track you on a website where there are literally dozens of ways to track you across different websites?
Ha, go look at all the permissions on Android that you cannot deny. Example, Starbucks app...
Other
Advertising ID Permission
run foreground service
control vibration
run at startup
have full network access
use biometric hardware
view network connections
change network connectivity
prevent phone from sleeping
Play Install Referrer API
view Wi-Fi connections
use fingerprint hardware
show notifications
receive data from Internet
Isn’t using the biometric API still controlled by a secure place on the device where all it gives you back is - did you pass the biometric check?
Advertising tracking is still easier on the web.
The rest of the permissions says a lot about Android and even so.
If PWAs were good enough on Android and it was just mean old Apple holding them back they should be pervasive for the 80% of the population that uses Android
On the other hand I have notifications turned on for basically nothing. Giving up coupons and deals seems a reasonable trade off. But then I basically don’t really frequent places like fast food where coupons are probably most prevalent.
> Can it really be easier for end users to use an app that requires an extra installation step?
It's not, but by making it an App, it forces a user to remember to install it (good mindshare), it takes up space on the homepage (good, free advertising), it gets to track your device id and track you (or, partially track you on iOS), it gets to spam your notification bar with more free advertisements, it gets to hook into your Google Pay / Apple Pay cards automatically, and it forever gets to poll your exact GPS position, while also having easier access to various bluetooth stack stuff (tracking beacons, onboarding devices, etc)
Yes, ~80% of that can be done on the web too, but the app gives you effectively permanent-cookies and permanent-permissions, and people have more practice doing it there.
I don't like it at all, but I get why lots of companies write a webapp, and then shove it into a native app wrapper (whether via React Native, Cordova, Turbo Native, or equivilant). The benefits of the app wrapper and app store, outweigh the drawbacks, for many businesses.
All of the „benefits“ you listed are why I hate native apps with a passion and avoid installing them whenever possible.
I don’t want your mindshare, notifications, spam and all the other bullshit no thanks
I wonder (or maybe just hope) that this might swing back if consumers develop a preference for those businesses that intentionally avoid these and other dark patterns.
No, activism and legislation are the only things that can even potentially hold back these kinds of unethical business practices. There's no way you're going to educate enough of the general public and make them care enough about something like "installing apps in not necessary".
Related to this, if I already know the name of the company, I tend to trust the first result on the App Store far more than the first result on Google.
Anecdotal, Dominos has a website I can order food from and it’s insanely good experience to use it in basically all aspects I can think of.
I love ordering food from them just because the experience is so good. The food is a different story, but man their UX is something everyone else could learn from.
Yes, their UX is beyond good.
Webapps, CLI, order from some vehicle dashboards, Uber-like delivery meet point GPS capture,
but it's pretty important to note that they filed paperwork and patented a pizza tracking progress bar, keeping other pizzerias and apps from utilizing what's essentially the "Slide to Unlock" of any Internet-based food ordering.
It made perfect business sense, even if just to keep someone else from locking them out of the feature...but..had to mention how broken things are, that other pizza chains or stores couldn't/can't/won't offer proper modern order life cycle tracking due to this.
> but why don’t they just make a web site you can order food from?
How will they sniff which smart devices are on their customers' networks, so they can make the next round of unnecessarily frictionless apps, for the next round of devices?
>We have been lucky on desktop/laptop that we have added 5 zeros to the available compute, memory, network and GPU capacity. This allows a browser to run slack at the same speed as MIRC, from 2002.
When I got Internet I was basically in mIRC and Mosaic and it wasn't clear to me at all that the web will be the big thing and IRC a niche one day. Similarly its a bit funny that mIRC survives to this day but the browser of the day died long ago.
Eh, I think those posts really fail to highlight the amount of features more slack has and this comes from am a long-lived IRC user that started on quakenet 25 years ago and still uses IRC today (through IRCCloud), mostly for libera (former freenode).
A very tiny and incomplete list:
- well working secure file transfer
- always on chat history that doesn't rely on you being online or running/buying an irc-bot
- voice and video calls
- threads
- avatars
- added layers of security and authentication (critical for business)
- plugins/addons (everything on IRC had to be implemented with a chatbot and it was quite limited)
- text formatting
- support for longer text messages
It's really an apple to oranges comparison to be honest. Yes, they are both fruits, as in they are both used to communicate, but this is where the comparison ends.
> you can spot the react native apps when you use them
Bullshit. React native uses native components, that is why its called react native. You are likely confusing react native with those other tech stacks that use a webview, like phonegap/cordova, etc, in which you can use react DOM (not native).
And you can spot that when you use them? How, exactly?
I can understand the phonegap/cordova confusion, as they will only ever be styled imitations of the real components so may not look or behave exactly the same - but react native is using native components, so what difference is there to "spot"?
As for example Slack, I'm using Wee-Slack + Glowing Bear (https://glowing-bear.org) and it's very snappy. I don't need a closed-source binary blob on my tablet.
PWA are not as good as apps - and not because of OS vendors restricting APIs.
Honestly this is one of Doctorow's weakest arguments - PWA are part of the enshittification of tech: poor substitutes to full-fledged performant applications, that you never own, that "phone home" all the time, always dependent on someone else... I can get working binaries of old closed source software of yesteryear; I can't get working "open-source" webpages of five years ago, a maze of calls to different web ressources that the Internet Archive couldn't cache correctly, to display fully and correctly.
Because this is a non story, at most an analysis or opinion piece, based on assumptions that are not founded on report-worthy facts or specific sources.
That’s all for “just another guy with a blog on the internet who thinks he knows how journalism works”.
>> Hi, I'm Alex Russell, a Microsoft Partner PM on the Edge team and Blink API OWNER. It is my professional mission to build a web that works for everyone.
Given his conflict of interest, I don't see anyone who would publish this story as more than an educated Op Ed.
> Browsers are the most likely disruptor of the mobile duopoly but you'd never know it reading Wired or The Verge.
I'm confused, The Verge has several articles about this hubbub of anti-trust this, Epic v Apple lawsuit that, EU forcing browser choice for iOS, and now Epic v Google and the recent win. There has also been tons of discussion about web apps, new app stores, etc in the comments.
How exactly are they ignoring this story? It feels like it's been at the forefront of their coverage for months now.
>I'm confused, The Verge has several articles about this hubbub of anti-trust this, Epic v Apple lawsuit that, and now Epic v Google and the recent win
right but none of those articles talk about how the -browser- could disrupt this duopoly
>There has been tons of discussion about web apps, new app stores, etc
that's what the article is about. these articles tend to talk about new app stores, but not much else. anecdotally I agree with the author's observation about this. the only time I've heard about PWAs it was from other nerds, not the news media.
I see what you mean. To be honest though, both Wired and The Verge are only really playing catch up to the current zeitgeist. If and when PWA's start being a big thing, we'll see articles show up about it. Even then, it'll only be when some major company makes a splash and being a PWA is the killer feature.
I don't really see The Verge and Wired pushing stories early. It's not that they're asleep, it's just that they're grabbing the stories from social media, converting it into press format, planning articles about it, then releasing.
They're not at the forefront of tech, becoming buddy buddy with the devs, getting that inside scoop. They're just doing broader coverage for the masses interested in tech. Anyone deep into this stuff is already subscribed to various subreddits, reading HN, nerding out in dev Discords, or having arguments on Twitter.
What is so up-to-the-minute about PWAs? They were somebody’s side project from 8 years ago which Google inexplicably didn’t kill. Despite controlling the browser, Google never came out with a reliable and sensible scheme to store files so it’s just another own goal like Windows Phone.
Progressive Web Apps? So I can get spammed by spam spamifications? Or so you can attempt to cache some files by building a Rube Goldberg machine on top of a Rube Goldberg machine?
It would be one thing if they gave you some policy control over the browser’s caching engine or let you download a ZIP file and then look up any file you want in it. But as it is it is another terrible Google side project like Compute Engine or Kubernetes or OKRs that they tried to foist on the world…. At least this time people had some sense and said “Nein Danke” like they do in Germany.
What’s tragic about it is that Google controls a freaking web browser and could have come out with something sensible but not we got a side project API to make a fake web server but no simple and reliable storage mechanism to go with it.
… and we got an astroturf campaign second only to TripleByte sponsoring thousands of blog posts on how “hiring is broken” demanding that Apple implement a side-project API on Safari.
Here’s something that’s kind of obvious but only occurred to me the other day — if you sell apps for $3 or less, the App Store fee costs about the same or less than anyone else is going to charge under the small business program.
It's the opposite. The mobile duopoly disrupted the web platform. Which disrupted the desktop platform which came before it. All of these platforms are still here today and they are competing with each other.
> Reporters and editors aren't software engineers, so the potential of browser competition can remain understandably opaque.
There you go. As a virtual unknown who has fought the good fight against Google and has tried to help make reporters aware of tech/services they hadn’t considered before - well, some people have a hard time thinking about what they’re not used to or don’t initially understand.
One loser could be Microsoft. I found, almost inadvertently, that when Apple essentially bricked Drive on my 2013 MacBook Pro, I could open a new Chrome window (not actually necessary, but neater workflow) and simply run Drive and Sheets there. This was a big eye opener. Especially when it works perfectly on an iPad in an emergency.
I just spent a year and a half building and rolling out a web version of a popular native app. We had to make a lot of compromises to get it out the door.
Native apps can block screenshots. Apple doesn't always like it, but you can plead your case to the reviewers. Web apps don't have an API to prevent screenshotting or to know when one is about to be taken and hide their contents. This is important to protect privacy (nudes) and people have come to expect it.
Know what's interesting? Screenshot protection is available for Encrypted Media Extension (DRM) video if you have Hollywood $$$.
Browsers (on desktop) also have dev tools built in. They make it easy to download any image you can see even if we put all the right click prevention scripts and CSS hacks in the world in place. Imagine having to explain to the privacy protection team that you can't disable dev tools for your site when that's not even an issue on native mobile without extra steps.
Those are platform wide issues, and I seriously doubt the people setting web standards are going to be on board with new standards that keep information (even very, very personal information) from being free.
I've championed the web since 1996. And PWAs may be fine to replace some basic e-commerce and information apps. But the platform needs to make some changes before it can totally replace native apps.
That was my first thought too. My next thoughts were:
- it protects the platform, to some extent, by reducing the number of unwanted screenshots
- it sets a social norm that taking screenshots is unwanted and makes the screenshot taker look extra creepy if they share the image with anyone
- if a platform provides screenshot blocking, and users (who have all seen pictures of one screen taken from another device) value that protection and make decisions about what to post based on it, the company should think long and hard before deploying a version that breaks that assumption
I think it just leads to a false sense of security for most "normie" users. E.g. Snapchat, people think it must give a screenshot notification or whatever, so it is "safe" for nudes.
Well it is quite trivial to save the photos, either by network interception or patching the app etc. , which ordinary users may not even consider.
Not quite related, but I think "deleting messages" falls into a similar problem. It makes end users think they are "safe" or whatever, but the reality is that if a message was delivered to the other parties phone, they could easily have the original text despite any deletions, e.g. a cached notification or similar.
> Apple doesn't always like it, but you can plead your case to the reviewers
Since when? What app does this? SnapChat just notifies the counterparty of screenshots, which is largely "nudes", but no other app I've used actually manages to block my screenshots.
> This is important to protect privacy (nudes) and people have come to expect it.
Well that's unfortunate. I can take any camera and point it at a screen to capture its contents. Any expectation of privacy on that front is artificial and naive
I'm betting the number of people doing it will increase at the same rate as the number of apps blocking screenshots. Also would have a relationship to the expectation of security. If more people believe it's secure then the amount of sensitive content will increase
Wanting to get around artificial barriers seems pretty engrained into human nature
The nuance is basically to drop the “free” - it’s cleaner. Otherwise their business model of sending nudes to random strangers on the internet does not work
We can have a free web or we can have a web that replaces app stores completely. We can't have both.
I personally prefer a completely free & open web, but I understand that means I'm going to be installing binaries for some things. I'd much rather have to download netflix.exe than have the current state of browser drm for example.
Native and web apps shouldn't be able to block (or detect) screenshots. It's MY device. I should be able to screenshot whatever I want.
And you want to disable right click download? Then simply do not upload those images. You do not have the right to take that control away from me as a user.
Why "champion the web" if your whole goal is to take control of users' devices away from them and destroy their freedom in some of the most basic ways?
It's basically why Apple sabotage safari so hard to the point that 'doing anything more than a static page on safari requires tons of workarounds'. (And also why you can only use webkit on iphone)
Companies love apps. They get complete control over what you do(No easy way of viewing source, no modifying the frontend etc) and they can suck up all your data.
Plus browsers are are lagging in terms of say animations and probably always will with the need to build consensus before a new ideas is added. Then adoption can take years.
Not if Apple has its way. They've consistently regressed, failed to implement standards, implemented them brokenly, delayed/delayed/delayed, stated that a feature was bad for privacy|security|performance, etc. Just an endless stream of roadblocks.
For example: photo and file uploads (yes, really! remember "iOS doesn't have a filesystem, so no uploads" which really damaged craigslist because Browse didn't work on iPhone for many years), webrtc, PWA add-to-home, sticky/fixed positioning, scrolling through notch (it worked, and then it didn't), service workers, push notifications, and so much more than I can't even remember (maybe someone else can list their favorites).
Even when eventually we got the features, they were often broken in order to keep pushing people into the App Store.
Does the author REALLY believe that Apple won't instantly drop support for any feature that could seriously disrupt the App Store? Not on your life.
Ironically, Microsoft had tried to kill the web off with Internet Explorer just a few years before, but no one noticed what Apple was doing, because they did it so well... they got 400,000 and then a million apps in their app store, completely bypassing the web altogether.
And as evidenced by your comment on this very technical forum, even now, people still might not have noticed what Apple was doing.
The point is that it was broken on purpose until they finally had to cave to pressure because it was such a pain in the butt. Being able to choose a picture to upload from a phone wasn’t new or hi-tech, and could be done just fine on feature phones where the number pad was 3x the size of the screen and WAP meant wireless application protocol instead of the new thing.
Yes and we all know how Apple “caves in to pressure” and knew they were going to lose sells to Android if they didn’t allow photo uploads from the browser
Yes. One person said "feature X always existed" and the reply was "not until iOS 6", which is corroborated by their link.
Based on what people are saying in that link, iOS existed for something like 6 years before it got working web page picture uploads. Meaning the person saying the feature has always existed was incorrect.
In the grand scheme of things. In a world billions of years old? 3 years isn't much of a delay. And those features, with the small "delay", still weren't "always" available - which was the claim ("the api always had those features").
They wanted their own proprietary network they controlled (MSN). They also wanted people to develop Windows apps with their technologies, not things that worked everywhere.
If the problem is just Apple, then why do modt companies make iOS apps, Android apps and web apps instead of telling Android users to just use the web apps?
It came out in the Epic trial that 90% of App Store revenue came from in app purchases of play to win games. Those apps aren’t going to the web because it’s much easier to convince whales to buy coins and loot boxes using in app purchase than put a credit card on a website.
pay to win games, I can never find a game that has fixed cost and doesn't push advertising or self advertising, you know, an app safe for kids; they all have full screen ads with tricky close buttons
BTW, why is App Store such a shit show? It's 99% crap. Where is the concept of pay to own.
I understand you're referring to the Apple store but in case other non-apple users find this. On the Google Play store at least these are relatively easy to find. Pick your category, games, then scroll the tabs at the top to "Premium".
It's more annoying really. Most companies refuse to let you see their website from android or iOS phones because they want you to download the app. The app... that is just a wrapper for their fucking website anyway.
Not true! Apps enable so much more, notification spam, access to contacts and wifi networks, data collection and privacy invasion.. SO much easier when it's an app!
Also all those banks - if they just had a website they wouldn't be able to enforce that you cannot access your banking from your rooted Android phone. Thanks to the additional power of apps, they can.
>If the problem is just Apple, then why do modt companies make iOS apps, Android apps and web apps instead of telling Android users to just use the web apps?
Because they're forced to in order to do business since Apple controls their platform?
Hell, there was (and still is I think) even all the ridiculous rules around "can't link to a website payment outside of your app" and "definitely can't tell the user it's cheaper not to buy it thru the app where Apple takes a 30% cut"
I distrust Microsoft and Google as much as I distrust Apple, but damn do people give Apple so many passes "yeah well they use that 30% cut to pay for all the security and services they offer!111" you really believe that? How come so many 0-days & other exploits are found by GOOGLE'S project zero? Does Apple not pay enough for their own research into that stuff?
Can you name one retailer that is going to allow you to advertise that you can get something cheaper somewhere else?
Also, really complaining about Apple’s security compared to Android? Seeing that most Apple has been publishing security patches for 10 year old phones and Google abandons its own hardware.
Apple is more than the retailer. Apple owns the whole mall, the fire department, the police, the chamber of commerce, and basically the whole town where most of your family and friends live.
Don't like it? Just move to the only other town there is, and write them letters and visit occasionally. If you don't like it there too, well they say there are other places if you take a long boat ride.
As to Google, despite all their many faults at least they haven't gas lit me claiming I'm holding it wrong.
Congratulations? Apple released a security update for the iPhone 5s released in 2013 early last year.
What about all of the other devices it sold in the last decade.
And Google only sells a tiny fraction of Android devices. What about the other literally 97%
Microsoft hasn’t had a problem keeping PCs updated that it doesn’t sell for a decade. Heck I got Windows updates for my pre-Bootcamp x86 2006 Mac Mini for years after Apple abandoned it
My wife has had to listen to me complain for the last week about what a pain it is to get the absolute orientation of an iPhone from the browser.
On Android you can use AbsoluteOrientationSensor or deviceorientationabsolute event. These will provide a quaternion or Euler angles describing how to rotate the device from the default orientation (flat on the ground, screen up, with the top pointing north) to its current orientation.
The situation on the iPhone has almost reduced me to tears. As far as I can tell, it only provides Euler angles relative to some implementation defined reference frame, along with the actual compass heading. In practice, the Euler angles given are absolute with respect to gravity, but always treat north as the direction the phone was pointed when the first sensor reading took place. To deal with this, you can use the actual compass heading to rotate the relative orientation to the absolute orientation. But this will have problems near the poles, as the Euler angles and heading will give conflicting values. Beyond this the compass heading field is really weird. If you want to experience its behavior for yourself, take the iPhone compass app and starting from flat, rotate the phone 360 degrees through the pitch axis. Notice at what points the heading flips between its start heading and start heading+180. I bet it will surprise you!
Are you saying you have to fight gimbal lock just to find which way to rotate the screen on iPhone? That was a problem on the 1960s lunar missions, no idea it'd happen in such a mundane application
Pretty much. The iPhone browser api only exposes compass data in one dimension, around the z-axis. So there is indeed gimbal lock-like behavior near the axis. Which is crazy since the magnetometer is 3 dimensional.
This is why orientation should always be reported as a unit quaternion (or if you strongly care about using only 3 vs. 4 numbers, using "modified Rodrigues parameters", the stereographic projection of a unit quaternion).
To me it sounds like the solution is "We have detected you're using an unsupported browser, iOS does not allow websites to properly access device orientation and therefore this app cannot function"
I wish I had come to that conclusion a week ago, but I'm in too deep now. It's for a little side project, and it seems like the majority of people I want to show it to have iPhones.
I should have said zenith, not poles. The issues occur when the device is pointed up at the sky or down at the ground.
Edit: Though I would imagine it won't work too well at the poles either!
For my use case, I want to know the exact way the phone is pointed in all three axis. Which requires more information than determining the screen orientation (and which I believe can be done as you say). Unfortunately, the term "orientation" seems to be overloaded and used to describe both concepts.
Just out of curiosity because you might know: does the deviceorientation event (without absolute) work on iOS? Because I've just used it for a toy website of mine and have no iPhone to test.
Agreed, the deviceorientation does work fine for relative orientation. I've been able to hack it for absolute orientation. What I am doing is: 1) taking the relative orientation euler angles from the event and converting them to a quaternion for easier manipulation. 2) taking the webkitCompassHeading from same deviceorientation event. 3) Calculating the "relative heading", eg how far the relative orientation is from its fake north. 4) calculating the difference between the relative and actual heading. 5) building a quaternion to describe the bearing difference, eg how far the relative orientation need to be corrected by spinning around the z-axis. 6) Multiply the two quaternions to get the final absolute orientation quaternion.
This does work, though has the issues I mentioned previously, and relies on the undocumented fact the the relative orientation is actually absolute with respect to the down/gravity vector.
maybe at a certain point subjects will stop spending money to enrich the king and will pick something where they at least can install whatever they want
The overwhelming majority of users couldn't care less about this stuff as long as their phones play the content that they and their peers are into right now. If the alternative works well, is easy to switch to and is affordable then maybe they can be persuaded by their more tech savvy friends but if any of those three are compromised then you won't get much adoption.
You're overlooking the important point of the post: He's suggesting that Apple should allow non-Safari browsers (with different engines) to make the browser space more competitive, and media should push the narrative in that direction. That's exactly because Safari not being competitive enough.
I'm not surprised if Microsoft (the author's employer) is quietly preparing Edge for iOS with a non-Safari engine (ex. Chromium.)
Safari's iOS exclusivity and resulting ~18% market share is probably the only reason Chromium based browsers don't have 95+% of the market. Some stick to whatever default they get but I think most would just immediately jump to Chrome(ium), with a very, very small minority like me going for Firefox. The mobile segment doesn't concentrate techy users like the desktop does so Firefox would see even lower (that the current ~3%) figures there.
A world absolutely dominated by Google's control over the browser scares me more than Apple's control over the AppStore.
If you are correct, let's ensure the browser duopoly is broken up first, rather than forcing Apple to open the market for Google to corner it. Then it will truly be a monopoly and all consumers lose.
Why would the Chrome engine being dominant be all that problematic? And as a user, I'd like to make that choice for myself.
Also, Safari wouldn't vanish just because you'd be able to use a different browser engine. I strongly disagree with your "scary" (not scary) scenario: Only a small percentage of users is ever going to change defaults.
The growing number of device/browser combinations in use, legally-mandated web accessibility, as well as the expansion of expected web functionality to essentially require DOM and scripting abilities, including AJAX, made web standards of increasing importance during this era. Instead of advertising their proprietary extensions, browser developers began to market their software based on how closely it adhered to standards.
As soon as one browser dominates, one company gets to dominate how the web works. If you, as a user, want to be able to choose your own browser you should oppose one engine becoming dominant.
Apple's monopoly is currently harming competition/consumers. Why should a potential monopoly that doesn't exist (yet) and doesn't hurt competition or consumers be a higher priority?
As an Apple user and web dev, I like some of their restrictions because I prefer incentive to build native apps for things I do all the time. They’re usually showing a lot more polish and integration.
Every time Twitter or Instagram bring up their custom share sheets I get super annoyed it’s not the default. PWA’s can probably get a lot of that, but a ton of web UX is arbitrary, unique, and more likely to feel janky in ways.
Even for well done web apps, like Notion, it stands out like a sore thumb when parts of the editor don’t work like normal Mac input controls.
I think PWA’s will have a lot of uses, but I don’t want them to take over either or Google get a browser monopoly. It’s bad enough how many devs don’t use anything but Chrome when testing. The web is what it is because it is not beholden to one company like the IE6 days
....how? Just saying "better anti-trust" isn't a usable solution.
Chromium is an open source project. What's the government to do, split the codebase in half/thirds? Chromium got to where it was because of the downstream decisions of developers not wanting to waste months/years of their lives reimplementing something that was already implemented.
"Someone else had already done the laborious legwork with Chromium, let's just use that."
----
If you want to actually solve this problem:
- Purge and ban software patents & copyrights. No entity should have total control as to how to implement efficient H.264 playback in the browser, nor native GPGPU support.
- Rewire human behaviour to inherently fear any market share of > 60%. Humans will continue to want to concentrate around a few choices as a result of network effects.
- STOP WITH WANTING NEW FEATURES. Every new shiny object that you desire will inevitably be replaced by the next shiny object, with only 10% of them sticking around in relatively popular use for any notable period of time. Browser devs, meanwhile, can't have the luxury of dropping support for <rarely used feature X>, and have to keep maintaining each one for some niche case.
----
I've already said my response to this: STOP wanting more features. The number of features that a browser dev has to support right out of the box is the major contributor for there being so few browser engines to choose from.
> There's an argument to be made that the extreme breadth of scope that modern web browsers are obliged to support (in order to gain/retain market share) heavily contributes to there being no worthy contenders against Chromium's web monopoly.
> When you're the leader, you can further widen your lead by bolting on additional functions & features that require at least X amount of effort to implement. Any new contender will have to put in SUM(X effort for each feature) to match feature parity with the existing leader, and existing competitors will have to put in at least X effort to catch up. Existing OSS work can help bridge the gap, but only for what's already been done.
"most would immediately jump" and why is that? because Safari is a subpar experience.
You can try to justify it all you want because "Google Bad" (and not that I disagree at least in spirit) but at the end of the day? Apple is giving users a worse experience as a method to lock them into the App Store and get their 30% cut.
Cool story ad-tech bro. Apple not supporting “features” designed to track/steal data isn’t a subpar experience.
No one is forced to buy an iPhone, just like no one is forced to buy an Xbox which also takes a 30% cut via its locked down online store.
Don’t worry, the M$ CEO will bring back windows phone soon because he now realizes how it can be ad/spyware filled junk like windows 10/11/12 and Solitaire…
Safari, without hesitation doubt or debate, is subpar compared to the alternatives. You can claim "privacy" all you want but at the end of the day Safari is lackluster and neutered to "nudge" people into the Apple Store so Apple can get a 30% cut.
Privacy? Riiiiiight. Apple isn't using it's market place to stifle competition and limit choice out of the kindness of their hearts.
"M$ CEO" yeah... good thing you have IE 2024 installed on phones without the alternatives available that existed on Windows. Nope... you're stuck like a good slave who's $mart enough to not use M$ and instead you get the joy of being a good donator to Apples bottom line instead of Googles.
At the end of the day... nothing in your response changes the fact that Apple limits choices and holds the industry back with Safari which is a shit option that couldn't compete against real options.
"XBox" xbox is a gaming console not a phone. It's tied to a TV and not the center of your life. It also has competition in PS, Nintendo and gaming alternatives like Android and iPhone.
XBox doesn't have shitty safari on it as a core app to force people into the XBox store. You can also load CDs/DVDs into it purchased outside of it. Can you resell iPhone games? No? didn't think so. tons of reasons why "derp xbox" is a bad comparison.
I'm personally okay extending forcing alternative app stores onto XBox... but the scope is different and you know it - no matter that you try to deflect from how shitty Safari is. Your hate of "M$" doesn't make Apple any better.
> and why is that? because Safari is a subpar experience.
I think that's an oversimplification and mostly wrong. People don't uniformly use one reason for things. Some are too lazy to change a default, are used to one browser, genuinely like it, use it reluctantly because the big company developer is doing its best to hobble the competition (hey, here's a challenge, guess which one I'm talking about), or simply think Google (Chrome) is the internet. Based on usage alone compared to Google Chrome every other browser offers a subpar experience right? I don't agree with that. To take the most obvious example, the fact that Firefox allows me full control over the adblocking experience is the single biggest quality of life improvement over Chrome in using the internet.
> You can try to justify it all you want
I didn't "justify" anything. What works for me doesn't have to work for you. Two things can be true at once. My personal data and privacy are a priority for me so Google cheating me out of them trumps any fuzzy argument that doesn't hold water even over a two line comment. Because...
> Apple is giving users a worse experience
Wait, let me try your argument for size. Apple is close to being the biggest phone manufacturer on the planet, as voted by people with their wallets, despite making the most expensive phones. And why is that? Because everyone else offers a subpar experience, right? I voted for Firefox and I'd rather use Safari than Chrome because we have different priorities and definitions of what makes for a good experience.
Sibling comment had the right idea. The only fix for this is one that globally addresses via regulation the issues any company's dominant positions poses.
"mostly wrong" except it's not. Safari is under developed, restrictive and... bad.
"Based on usage" Chrome is doing something right but that doesn't mean better options don't exist. JS exists and is massively popular but that doesn't make it the "best". Most popular also doesn't mean it's not horrible in its own right - like Safari (and JS, etc).
"firefox" You use firefox because it's better... better than what? Safari for one.
"let me try your argument for size" Just because people pay doesn't mean it's better and because it's popular doesn't mean it's better. People buy ripped up clothes at a massive markup because it's "better". You keep saying Firefox is better even though it's not "in" or cool.
Nothing in your response addresses the fact that SAFARI is subpar amoungst its peers because Apple uses that to push people to the App store. Likewise, they "pair bond" stuff to phones so 2ndary markets can't fix their stuff. Not because safari is better... not because their parts are better... because they get 30% on the store and they get the fees for fixing stuff "properly". Same for their custom connectors (which are on the way out)
Your focused on Safari vs Firefox. You're ignoring the forest for the tree.
Apple as a whole can be a better product (arguably, the complete package is "better" because it's more consistent and "secure" and all that than say Android) while also having parts that are worse. Safari is a part that's worse (and as incentive, the 30% cut on app store $$$).
"different priorities" I'm all for better regulation and some places are headed in the right direction (IE: USBC requirements, sideloading requirements, banning google from monopoly practices on their store, etc)... but that doesn't change the fact that safari is the IE of today - forced on customers, ignored by its creator and clearly worse as you admit in your stalwart defense of Firefox.
To add to this... it's not just that they've failed to implement standards: They have actively denied the ability to install alternatives.
It's one thing if Chrome was Chromium and was simply blocked from low level stuff because "reasons"... but that's not where we are.
Chrome, for example, is at its core on the Apple Store a reskinned Safari because alternatives simply aren't allowed.
This isn't a regression and failure to implement standards... this is active activity to lock people into a lesser experience while actively blocking better.
This is worse than IE on Windows as at least with IE on Windows you could install alternatives.
370 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 327 ms ] threadBut can I take offense of all this "The biggest story"?
I see it so often, especially here on HN, and it feels overly dramatic. Maybe even self-centered, like; "this is the truth", where somebody went too far in some kind of cool-aid (of the wrong kind). It is not as awful as conspiracy theories, they are even more awful, but the feeling goes in the same direction.
This was an actual debate in the early days of app stores. Facebook was the most prominent company that decided to go with an HTML5 app instead of a native one. Doing so was one of the biggest strategic mistakes they've ever made. Zuck's words, not mine. (https://www.engadget.com/2012-09-11-zuckerberg-html-5-facebo...).
Web apps were slower, had issues dealing with the various browsers and saw less use.
It doesn't seem like the author has done any real research here.
It's wild that I can use a full-featured spreadsheet instantly on the web on my laptop, but on my phone someone wants me to download a 100mb binary to order a pizza.
A tonne of effort has gone into making spreadsheets work on the web; both in the browsers as well as the spreadsheet apps themselves.
The fact that the web works as well as it does is a huge feat of engineering, but in no way indicative of there being no technical reason that native apps can be better.
Many apps are fine as web apps without any OS support at all.
yes, yes there is. HTML/JS is a bastard to parse. it takes a fucktonne of resources to actually figure out how to render a box. Go and fire up a windows 95 box, with 133mhx of pentium III goodness. THen make a VB6 app that animates boxes/shows images.
Look how fucking fast it can do it (and vb6 wasn't a fast language)
Or, more easily, render a web page on the original raspberry pi-b, try and play video in a browser, do some sort of animation.
It lags like a fucker. Use py-game (you know python with its 50% "what fucking type is this?" tax) and you can run animations at 60fps.
The web is slow, its just moore's law has shielded us from it.
to animate anything, you are looking at 100x cost in power.
This means that you will drain the battery much much faster than with native.
The solution is not using webtools, its making native much more open/portable. you know like java was supposed to be (kinda like how APKs are now. )
APNG would let you do frosted glass though. And I was expecting to add "but support is dire" but... actually it's not so bad? https://caniuse.com/?search=apng says 97%, only browsers with no support are legacy (IE and Opera mini), pretty much all browsers have supported it for years.
WebP and AVIF also have animation and alpha channel support, so these are also options.
Caveat emptor though, I don't have much experience with animation and alpha on any of these formats, so I don't know how buggy support is.
Parsing is a tiny fraction of the time that a Web browser spends, and the various native resources are on the same level of complexity. TrueType hinting instructions from the 90s are of a similar complexity to the HTML 5 parsing spec.
> Go and fire up a windows 95 box, with 133mhx of pentium III goodness. THen make a VB6 app that animates boxes/shows images.
This will easily run at the same framerate on a modern Web rendering stack.
> Or, more easily, render a web page on the original raspberry pi-b, try and play video in a browser, do some sort of animation.
Browsers on the Raspberry Pi B weren't accelerated, due to various reasons including Broadcom having (at the time) the worst GPU driver situation imaginable. You should compare against modern accelerated browsers (by "modern" meaning "within the last 20 years on mainstream OS's").
> It lags like a fucker. Use py-game (you know python with its 50% "what fucking type is this?" tax) and you can run animations at 60fps.
Web apps have been able to run animations at 60 FPS for decades. (As an aside, the performance difference between CPython and native code is far more than 50%.)
If someone invested a lot of time and money into making PWAs work great then there shouldn’t be any technical reasons for why you should choose to develop a native app instead of a PWA. At the moment we are lacking in tooling and language support and also leaving a lot of performance on the table.
I love how easy it is to get up and running with a PWA and most of my front end stuff is using PWAs today. From a technical standpoint it still needs a lot of work from the vendor side though.
I think Stadia worked over the browser to deliver AAA games. There’s obviously a whole bunch of missing technology needed to deliver (and later patch) huge web apps locally though. Plus annoying browser limits like the hard kill based on memory usage in mobile Safari.
The security model of a store is delegated trust and stewardship. There is someone who will review if applications need capabilities, and will provide business penalties for bad behaviors.
The security model of the web is basically a mix of site sandboxing and caveat emptor. There is no guarantee the web app you hit one minute to the next will be the same code base, or belong to the same owner. For example, the same interface has to get consent for notifications from an advertising site which wants to spam you as your corporate chat app.
Chrome had quite a bit more motivation to ignore this or to create a tiered model with PWAs because of Chromebooks, where the model (originally) was web-only development. Google created quite a few one-off API for their systems, and promoted several Chrome-only API as if they were web standards. Even there, this approach was too limiting and eventually Android compatibility was added.
Apple has started to add some additional app-useful features like notifications, but behind the 'Add to Home Screen' option. One could look at this like promoting a website to an 'app' on the phone, partially because that gives a consistent way for the user to understand permissions and privacy implications for both native and web code.
There are plenty of people who wish there was a better mechanism on iOS than the current add to Home Screen flow, but it is highly unlikely to become more streamlined because of abuse potential.
Google Sheets is now basically a window-sized canvas element, with its own non-native control libraries. I suspect it is not using browser font rendering.
That puts it effectively back into Windows 3.1 days of bitblt graphics, being driven by a difficult to optimize, dynamic language.
It is indeed wild that desktops are good enough to be able to drive such a thing with such performance. However, there is plenty of reason to rely on native frameworks with modern graphics systems.
I suspect there were radically different levels of engineering and optimization that went into Google Sheets vs a typical pizza-ordering app. Even with the same level of engineering, I suspect the pizza ordering app would be larger due to the need to bundle media like pizza and topping images.
That was over a decade ago. Back then, Youtube was still using Flash (the HTML5 beta was only around a year old), JavaScript engines were way slower, Chrome was still using WebKit... HTML5 today is not what it was in 2011.
Even putting aside the fact that the web was "slower" in part because of the decisions mentioned in the article that are intended to encourage native app design, it's not a foregone conclusion that the same is true today.
The cellphone duopoly is using their power to make sure the web cannot match native. That's how they make their gobs of money that hasn't been subject to real competition. They get a free rake off of the innovation of others.
If you allow web downloads of apps with no store and no scare wall, companies will develop better / native-level browsers. They'll happily chip away at Google and Apple.
With WASM, we have the tech. As soon as it goes multithreaded, it's game over for native apps. (So long as the DOJ clears the runway and forces these companies to allow fair competition and progress.)
YC made a good bet here.
[1] https://pokemon.fandom.com/wiki/Deoxys
Yes. The problem is that may python libraries involve compilation of c, rust or other native languages that themselves need a WASM toolchain configured to cross compile to WASM correctly, and potentially patches to support the platform.
This toolchain support is coming though. See pyodide.org for one example.
But if you just want to grab python.wasm from somewhere and run it on the cli, take a look at something like https://github.com/vmware-labs/webassembly-language-runtimes...
Of course you can run the python interpreter in WASM[1], but that will be at a significant performance disadvantage to the native javascript interpreter, and it's also something that has to be loaded every time you load the website.
[1]: https://github.com/pyodide/pyodide
I agree with your overall point, but this really isn’t a fair categorisation of Safari. It’s a fast, modern, efficient browser, and a lot of the stuff it doesn’t support is only supported in Chrome.
I concede it does lag behind Firefox in terms of supported web features, but only very slightly, and if you compare pre-release versions, that gap narrows even more (using the Caniuse browser scores as a rudimentary measure).
And because the browser is also hard coded to the iOS version, it has the slowest update rate of all modern browsers.
The article which you linked to is from 2012; it pertains to the performance of Facebook's web client in 2010, when run on mobile devices in 2010.
Most apps today can be implemented as progressive web apps, without any user experience penalty. Instead, they are built with tools that lock developers into a platform of one type or another. That's because some handset manufacturers prioritize the platforms that have lock-in, such as the App Store and iMessage, over the platforms that do not, such as the web and RCS. It is not because the web is somehow a bad platform for apps.
If you want FaceTime to call your mom on her headset when your watch detects a spike in your heart rate, then yes, you may want to write a native app to do that. But Sudoku, Pandora and the McDonald's app can live on the web, and so can most of the rest.
yeah nah,
the FT, the bastion of PWAs because of the "if you have a subscription, we'll take 25% of that thanks" flipped to native almost as soon as the rules changed.
why? because the user experience sucked bollocks. It was slow, memory hog, and a massive massive bollockache to maintain. Don't get me wrong, thats not because they were bad at making the web app, its because the tech isn't up to scratch.
https://enterprise.ft.com/en-gb/blog/ft-app-now-available-io...
This says they just wrapped their web app in a native app, like a web view, so they could then use system features that their web apps couldn't access. So are you sure you're not using a web app after all? You might be using the same tech as you were before.
Apps like Facebook are constantly preloading data in the background to fill your feed immediately on app launch. 99pct of web apps would not have that need fortunately.
And let's be real, FB went with native apps because they could quietly hide app permissions that a web browser would warn you about with a big scary dialog window. That would be catastrophic for the world's biggest targeted advertising company. They ran a full page ad when Apple started requiring app tracking disclosures on iOS.
I don't think web apps are the future, but I also don't see why there can't be a more protected mode/sandbox for non app store sourced content to run in. Nobody has solved this yet - why can I visit pretty much any website and (mostly) be completely safe, yet I can't install any old random APK?
Hell, it should be possible to jump from the web into native code with a single click by now, why tf not. The only good thing the app stores are good for is to serve up apps that are "more trusted" (even tho app stores constantly have a couple bad actor apps on em) as well as centralised place to easily find stuff (the reason people use Google).
I guess the real problem with sandboxing/permissions systems is that users don't know what's good for them; my Tiktok loving friends would just hit "yes, yes, yes" to any dialog that says "TT wants to know your shoe size".
Given that they already have Firefox on Android and their history with FirefoxOS, I expected this to be a key lever to get app/website developers to consider this as an option.
Are there barriers such as performance or API issues (e.g. double click behaviors) that prevent the webmanifest and other approaches from gaining traction here?
Pretty hard to have a PWA future, if you can't access standard app APIs.
Seems like it would require a big mindset change for Mozilla to get on board with PWAs.
https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/95#iss...
Their example of hijacking a BLE keyboard to get passwords seems a bit farcical. I would love to see a PoC of that attack. The API has been available in Chrome for quite a while. I don't think it has been a large attack vector.
Letting a webapp capable webpage have an in-page "install this app" button that added it to the home screen would wipe out 50% of app store usage. But as it is, as an "add to home screen" option on the share menu of a webpage, which very few have noticed or understand the meaning of... it keeps web apps from taking off.
I won’t deny that “the web”, as a platform (especially Chromium) presents a compelling platform to which a good chunk of those apps could be ported (especially the apps which don’t need low-level or low-latency hardware interfaces - but I think you’re underselling the value, and necessity, of things using Win32+WDM/NTDDK instead of HTML+JS.
How’s Apple making web apps bad on literally every platform?
In the browser: a dozen or more things by Google: sheets, docs, gmail, keep, and so on. Jira, Asana, et c. Several graph or diagram-making apps. Notion. There are tons.
Outside the browser: Everything that runs under Electron or is otherwise webtech-based? They're ubiquitous. Slack, Discord, Postman, VSCode, Etcher, and on and on.
And you don't see how this would be abused by nefarious web sites ?
I already can't stand browsing the web and being inundated by push notification requests.
How is this different from being inundated with requests (really, more of a demand or an absolute requirement) to install the app to view this content?
I can hardly wait for my entire Saturday to be taken up by my father being clickjacked into installing an antivirus scam.
If 'install this app ' provides any additional change in the security and privacy model beyond what setting a bookmark does, the page should have zero capability to request/demand such a thing.
I know that sucks for people who want to do application distribution using web technologies. However, people do not understand the ramifications of promoting a site to an app, and those ramifications are full of abuse scenarios.
> Work is also underway to give competing browsers a chance to facilitate PWAs that can install other PWAs. Web App Stores would then become a real possibility through browsers that support them, and we should expect that regulatory and legislative interventions will facilitate this in the near future. Removed from the need to police security (browsers have that covered) and handle distribution (websites update themselves), PWA app stores like store.app can become honest-to-goodness app management surfaces that can safely facilitate discovery and sync.
It's ironic that this article criticises tech media for sleeping on web apps and focusing on app store competition only to envision Web App Stores.
There's no need for app stores on the web. We already have discovery (Hacker News) and search (Google). I could imagine a subreddit specifically for web apps, but is even that necessary?
> PWA app stores like Appscope and store.app exist, but they're hobbled by gatekeepers that have denied competing browsers access to APIs that could turn PWA directories into real contenders.
But to be clear, the author is saying that on mobile, especially on iOS, PWA capabilities are crippled.
I say this with some authority, having worked on Microsoft's PWABuilder[0] including its iOS platform. There are a number of significant things not possible on iOS due to Apple's restrictions for web apps.
Things are getting better on mobile, albeit slowly thanks to Apple's feet-dragging mentioned in the author's post.
[0]: https://www.pwabuilder.com
Cool, I've only tried on mobile myself. Here's the iOS experience for anyone who hasn't tried PWApp stores: https://imgur.com/a/2VMbvOp
> …on mobile, especially on iOS, PWA capabilities are crippled. I say this with some authority, having worked on Microsoft's PWABuilder including its iOS platform.
Great project, nice to meet you! I don't think I've hit these pain points as a user. What's your "top 3" of what Apple needs to do to make PWA installation suck less for iOS users?
As a developer, I expect I would do exactly what you recommended in 2021 (https://blog.pwabuilder.com/posts/publish-your-pwa-to-the-io...), which is to distribute web apps on the App Store proper (using PWABuilder, Capacitor, etc.) instead of as a PWA for the benefits (discoverability, "normal" installation experience) you note. Is that still good advice from your perspective?
It's not so much about installation as it is about app capabilities. Many of the things native apps do easily, Apple makes difficult for web apps. Push notifications is one such thing. (Again, this is changing slowly.)
That said, yes, adding web apps to home screen is quite buried in iOS today.
> "As a developer, I expect I would do exactly what you recommended in 2021 (https://blog.pwabuilder.com/posts/publish-your-pwa-to-the-io...), which is to distribute web apps on the App Store proper (using PWABuilder, Capacitor, etc.) instead of as a PWA for the benefits (discoverability, "normal" installation experience) you note"
It's not an either/or. Personally, I build PWAs and make them publicly available on the web. Then, I publish them to app stores for visibility. Average, non-technical users look for apps in app stores, so that's where you need to be even if you app is built with web tech. This is the advice I gave in 2021, and it still holds true today.
Furthermore, social media is a really poor way to discover anything unless it happens to go viral. A general-purpose search engine such as Google is entirely suboptimal, as it can only match on keywords on the page. It doesn't address reviews or provide convenient (but optional) payment processing either.
You shouldn't be forced to use one specific store, but their role is nonetheless valuable. Whether it's for apps, books, appliances, or food.
Changelogs and permissions are more difficult as they require the app store to control hosting. I don't think any developer would accept that unless there's no other choice, and on the web there is.
Google doesn't have reviews (why not?) but it can crawl every website that links to a web app, like an HN comment page, and use that to figure out what the web app is about.
You can distribute EXEs for Windows, but virtually all game developers use stores such as Steam for their value-add features. Customers don't only prefer this option, they often demand it.
You can distribute binaries for Linux, yet millions of people and servers use Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, etc. repositories.
It's a bit like making the infamous Dropbox comment, except doing it in 2024 with benefit of hindsight, the idea itself has already been validated by billions of users.
If this were something people were clamoring for, it is likely it would already exist, because the barrier to creating a website for linking, aggregating and reviewing PWAs should be quite low, with the only real challenge being the accumulation of a critical mass of users.
I think there are many reasons why something that people do want might not (yet) exist. For example, a monopolized market where customers don't have many choices. Or like you mentioned, difficulty in competing with incumbent advantage. Or maybe people just don't know what they want (e.g. "faster horses")
And indeed, there have been multiple attempts at something like this, because it is something people want—but there’s just no money in it, and so they’ve all failed.
I haven’t used a platform with these for a while, but my recollection of the Google Play Store was that the changelog was completely useless for almost all apps I ever used.
> detailed app information (e.g. permissions)
… which has historically been “it takes all these permissions and there’s nothing you can do about it”, though I gather this has been changing on at least Android, whereas on the web almost none of the equivalents are enabled by default (“connect to the internet” being the most obvious counterexample) and all beyond that must be granted explicitly at time of use.
> It only becomes a problem when a platform decides to act as a gatekeeper for the entire platform with insane rules & fees.
… which happens approximately every single time.
That is correct, and exactly the same on iOS. The average changelog says "bug fixes and improvements". Might as well be a giant middle finger.
> … which has historically been “it takes all these permissions and there’s nothing you can do about it”, though I gather this has been changing on at least Android
IME iOS does not have this issue because it never shoved all the permissions in a "permissions" tab granting all of them to the application at install. Instead permissions are usually opt-in when requested by the application. So applications have always been incentivised to limit their requirements (you can reject any request, and you can toggle them off afterwards through the setting, all the application can tell you is "I can't work without that dave"). Apple has also increased the number / scope of opt-in permissions over time, increasing the scope of that effect.
I mentioned a few features I would personally find valuable, you might be interested in a store that only offers content suitable for kids, or some other niche. That's the beauty of open ecosystems.
> … which happens approximately every single time.
You seem confused. I think you need to read this thread again. The discussion was about alternatives to this exact problem. tldr; This can't happen on the web because a PWA store is just another website, much like HN or Reddit.
Yikes. What about the other 99.9% of phone users? Google is a terrible choice for finding PC apps today, let alone phone apps.
Those people can discover web apps on other websites.
Saying “we have Hacker News for discoverability” is especially revealing of the lack of understanding and empathy tech people can often have for the majority of users.
It’s also simply a foregone conclusion. There’s a demand for discoverability and consistency. Whatever fills that demand we could just call an App Store.
GOG, Steam, and Itch.io exist despite not locking down entire platforms. There must be some sort of demand for a consistent way to discover and access software.
I read somewhere that Windows 98 sold 15 million licences. Add in OEM machines and you've got a base of computer users in maybe the 100-200 million range - most of whom either had to use the device for work (which meant training) or had a level of enthusiasm for computing (which meant self-learning).
Today there are 7-odd billion smartphones out there. Most users just want something that gets things done with as little friction as possible.
Who uses these things and how they use them has changed beyond all recognition.
It's funny to read this as someone that always dreads having to get a new phone, or install some proprietary app, or reinstall a Windows VM, or sign up to some service, exactly because I know how much friction is going to be deliberately put in my way from every party involved.
"No you can't just change your phone's service provider", "No you can't unlock your phone's bootloader", "No you can't just boot into a new copy of the OS without signing into a bunch of things", "No you can't install this Windows image on a device without a trusted platform module", "No you can't just install a program from the web", "No you can't just look at all the files on your phone", "No you can't just have an app sync photos from the SD card", "No you can't create a login without giving us your phone number", "No you can't opt out of our 'telemetry'", "No you can't view the video you're paying for without the right OS/browser/monitor/cable".
Coming soon: "No you can't view the URL of the page you're on", "No you can't install an ad-blocker", "No you can't access this site without an attested, locked-down OS-browser stack", "No you can't install a different OS on this PC", "No you can't use a local, unlicensed generative AI model".
I think it's time we reframed the discussion and stopped dumbing users down and pretending that extremely anti-user behaviour is "user-friendly". Using technology used to be challenging because the hardware and software were still being bootstrapped to a point where it was fast, simple and bug-free to use. Now the experience of using technology is to have to navigate some corporate bureaucracy in every direction, which is totally independent of tech limitations.
Annual PC shipments are still around a quarter-billion units...
They've been over 200 million each year for the past 30 years. Peaked at 364 million in 2011.
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook
And in the end Cydia made Apple develop its biggest money maker ever!
By that metric, every flavour of Linux has also failed. Yet Linux is also heavily used and actively developed, serving an important purpose where Windows/Mac were not suitable. It helps that computer/server hardware and components are modular and not as tied to a particular OS as phones are.
The time for PWAs was in about 1998, when WAP was a thing.
Much as I would love a universal bytecode that would allow mobile phones to achieve this, PWAs are not the route to get there. They are a mess of custom, poorly documented and ever changing layers of web bits.
Yes, web assembly exists, yes its about 75% the speed of native. and its not as easy to develop for. I also don't see why phone makers will want to make it that easy. Unless they are forced to provide parity for their APIS, it'll always be second best to native.
But, for the end users, they will look at PWAs and think: "fuck, this has got slow, and its eating my battery" you can spot the react native apps when you use them(yes, yes I know its not entirely the same)
We have been lucky on desktop/laptop that we have added 5 zeros to the available compute, memory, network and GPU capacity. This allows a browser to run slack at the same speed as MIRC, from 2002. You don't have that luxury on mobile. You are limited by battery capacity, unless we suddenly find a way to 100x battery density, it'll be like that for a while.
That being said, the work on breaking the app store dominance is welcome. 25% tax on development is taking the piss. Obviously the "point" of the walled garden was to provide security to the end user, however google fucked that right up, so now its obviously just a cash cow.
But, I want a way to side load apps, I want a second market place. I don't want fucking PWAs on my phone.
To me mobile icons all look the same and it is highly stressful to scroll through pages of them. Even Apple is terrible if you just stop and think. Photos are just a meaningless pinwheel, the Settings are hidden behind a movie poster for The Golden Compass, if I had a Hacker News app it would get confused with all the other apps that have an H or N or Y for their icon or that are colored orange. As it is I can type “n” on my iPad and… it is auto suggested. I type “1” and it suggests my web based RSS reader - why are brands shooting themselves in the foot by getting lost in a maze of twisty icons that all look alike?
What I don’t understand is that I can frequently ‘grok’ icons on my desktop although I hardly ever use them (so much easier to hit the windows button and type 2 or 3 letters and hit enter). Steam will install icons for games I download an instantly I know that’s Atelier Sophie. I use Microsoft’s RDP client for iPad all the time and think it is great but the icon is completely meaningless, it is just some burnt umber wedges that look like the logo of a multimodal shipping company from the 1970s.
Authenticator apps are a great example, I don't use them often enough to pin to home and all are identically named and have generic icons.
Another pain point is the overuse of material design with similar color schemes (it's not just google apps that use this). Half the app list become lost in a sea of red, blue, green and yellow fragments.
(And for what it is worth, the (email) inbox on my iphone shows 129,523 message unread)
Yes it can, because you install it once and it's right there on your home screen, very easy to get to. The friction of typing the website name or dealing with the inherent clunkiness of a mobile site vs the app cannot be understated and it is part of why brands create apps.
Plus, don't forget the notifications they can send, for deals and promotions. That is also why I have several apps for brands installed, because I know I already want to use their products, so the free discount works in my favor. I have the willpower to resist impulsive purchases, personally speaking, but many don't. When a notification pops up announcing "50% off on this sandwich," it's tempting for people who hadn't planned to spend at all that day. They might think they're saving money by spending less than full price, not realizing that spending anything at all is more than they intended. Brands understand this psychology and optimize their strategies accordingly, targeting those who are likely to be swayed into spending when they receive a compelling offer. It is no different than offering flash sales and deals, which work extremely well in the world of marketing.
Other
Advertising ID Permission run foreground service control vibration run at startup have full network access use biometric hardware view network connections change network connectivity prevent phone from sleeping Play Install Referrer API view Wi-Fi connections use fingerprint hardware show notifications receive data from Internet
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Vibration_A...
Isn’t using the biometric API still controlled by a secure place on the device where all it gives you back is - did you pass the biometric check?
Advertising tracking is still easier on the web.
The rest of the permissions says a lot about Android and even so.
If PWAs were good enough on Android and it was just mean old Apple holding them back they should be pervasive for the 80% of the population that uses Android
They even block you from using their app if you didn't get it from the play store. I don't know any other app that even checks for that.
Clearly it's just a vehicle for data collection and nothing else
It's not, but by making it an App, it forces a user to remember to install it (good mindshare), it takes up space on the homepage (good, free advertising), it gets to track your device id and track you (or, partially track you on iOS), it gets to spam your notification bar with more free advertisements, it gets to hook into your Google Pay / Apple Pay cards automatically, and it forever gets to poll your exact GPS position, while also having easier access to various bluetooth stack stuff (tracking beacons, onboarding devices, etc)
Yes, ~80% of that can be done on the web too, but the app gives you effectively permanent-cookies and permanent-permissions, and people have more practice doing it there.
I don't like it at all, but I get why lots of companies write a webapp, and then shove it into a native app wrapper (whether via React Native, Cordova, Turbo Native, or equivilant). The benefits of the app wrapper and app store, outweigh the drawbacks, for many businesses.
Yes, their UX is beyond good. Webapps, CLI, order from some vehicle dashboards, Uber-like delivery meet point GPS capture,
but it's pretty important to note that they filed paperwork and patented a pizza tracking progress bar, keeping other pizzerias and apps from utilizing what's essentially the "Slide to Unlock" of any Internet-based food ordering.
It made perfect business sense, even if just to keep someone else from locking them out of the feature...but..had to mention how broken things are, that other pizza chains or stores couldn't/can't/won't offer proper modern order life cycle tracking due to this.
How will they sniff which smart devices are on their customers' networks, so they can make the next round of unnecessarily frictionless apps, for the next round of devices?
I war running mIRC in 2002. Slack is worse.
Yes! It's still a functioning application on Windows! I use it from time to time.
A very tiny and incomplete list: - well working secure file transfer - always on chat history that doesn't rely on you being online or running/buying an irc-bot - voice and video calls - threads - avatars - added layers of security and authentication (critical for business) - plugins/addons (everything on IRC had to be implemented with a chatbot and it was quite limited) - text formatting - support for longer text messages
It's really an apple to oranges comparison to be honest. Yes, they are both fruits, as in they are both used to communicate, but this is where the comparison ends.
All those were solved problems 25 years ago, they just needed a basic level of tech literacy to achieve.
Bullshit. React native uses native components, that is why its called react native. You are likely confusing react native with those other tech stacks that use a webview, like phonegap/cordova, etc, in which you can use react DOM (not native).
I can understand the phonegap/cordova confusion, as they will only ever be styled imitations of the real components so may not look or behave exactly the same - but react native is using native components, so what difference is there to "spot"?
It's not PWA's fault as a set of Web APIs. This is due to abusing these Web APIs by lazy/ignorant web devs, who create monsters like Slack instead of e.g. Let's Chat (https://browsingthenet.blogspot.com/2015/05/slack-is-so-slow...).
As for example Slack, I'm using Wee-Slack + Glowing Bear (https://glowing-bear.org) and it's very snappy. I don't need a closed-source binary blob on my tablet.
Honestly this is one of Doctorow's weakest arguments - PWA are part of the enshittification of tech: poor substitutes to full-fledged performant applications, that you never own, that "phone home" all the time, always dependent on someone else... I can get working binaries of old closed source software of yesteryear; I can't get working "open-source" webpages of five years ago, a maze of calls to different web ressources that the Internet Archive couldn't cache correctly, to display fully and correctly.
This isn't Doctorow. I went and searched, here's the article I think you're referencing
https://doctorow.medium.com/web-apps-could-de-monopolize-mob...
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/password_...
You don't have to agree with him, but he's certainly qualified to write things like this.
>> Hi, I'm Alex Russell, a Microsoft Partner PM on the Edge team and Blink API OWNER. It is my professional mission to build a web that works for everyone.
Given his conflict of interest, I don't see anyone who would publish this story as more than an educated Op Ed.
I'm confused, The Verge has several articles about this hubbub of anti-trust this, Epic v Apple lawsuit that, EU forcing browser choice for iOS, and now Epic v Google and the recent win. There has also been tons of discussion about web apps, new app stores, etc in the comments.
How exactly are they ignoring this story? It feels like it's been at the forefront of their coverage for months now.
right but none of those articles talk about how the -browser- could disrupt this duopoly
>There has been tons of discussion about web apps, new app stores, etc
that's what the article is about. these articles tend to talk about new app stores, but not much else. anecdotally I agree with the author's observation about this. the only time I've heard about PWAs it was from other nerds, not the news media.
I don't really see The Verge and Wired pushing stories early. It's not that they're asleep, it's just that they're grabbing the stories from social media, converting it into press format, planning articles about it, then releasing.
They're not at the forefront of tech, becoming buddy buddy with the devs, getting that inside scoop. They're just doing broader coverage for the masses interested in tech. Anyone deep into this stuff is already subscribed to various subreddits, reading HN, nerding out in dev Discords, or having arguments on Twitter.
It would be one thing if they gave you some policy control over the browser’s caching engine or let you download a ZIP file and then look up any file you want in it. But as it is it is another terrible Google side project like Compute Engine or Kubernetes or OKRs that they tried to foist on the world…. At least this time people had some sense and said “Nein Danke” like they do in Germany.
What’s tragic about it is that Google controls a freaking web browser and could have come out with something sensible but not we got a side project API to make a fake web server but no simple and reliable storage mechanism to go with it.
… and we got an astroturf campaign second only to TripleByte sponsoring thousands of blog posts on how “hiring is broken” demanding that Apple implement a side-project API on Safari.
Unfortunately my next app is going to cost $9.99
There you go. As a virtual unknown who has fought the good fight against Google and has tried to help make reporters aware of tech/services they hadn’t considered before - well, some people have a hard time thinking about what they’re not used to or don’t initially understand.
Native apps can block screenshots. Apple doesn't always like it, but you can plead your case to the reviewers. Web apps don't have an API to prevent screenshotting or to know when one is about to be taken and hide their contents. This is important to protect privacy (nudes) and people have come to expect it.
Know what's interesting? Screenshot protection is available for Encrypted Media Extension (DRM) video if you have Hollywood $$$.
Browsers (on desktop) also have dev tools built in. They make it easy to download any image you can see even if we put all the right click prevention scripts and CSS hacks in the world in place. Imagine having to explain to the privacy protection team that you can't disable dev tools for your site when that's not even an issue on native mobile without extra steps.
Those are platform wide issues, and I seriously doubt the people setting web standards are going to be on board with new standards that keep information (even very, very personal information) from being free.
I've championed the web since 1996. And PWAs may be fine to replace some basic e-commerce and information apps. But the platform needs to make some changes before it can totally replace native apps.
> This is important to protect privacy (nudes) and people have come to expect it.
Considering you can just, ya know, take a picture of it, this doesn't seem important at all.
- it protects the platform, to some extent, by reducing the number of unwanted screenshots
- it sets a social norm that taking screenshots is unwanted and makes the screenshot taker look extra creepy if they share the image with anyone
- if a platform provides screenshot blocking, and users (who have all seen pictures of one screen taken from another device) value that protection and make decisions about what to post based on it, the company should think long and hard before deploying a version that breaks that assumption
Well it is quite trivial to save the photos, either by network interception or patching the app etc. , which ordinary users may not even consider.
Not quite related, but I think "deleting messages" falls into a similar problem. It makes end users think they are "safe" or whatever, but the reality is that if a message was delivered to the other parties phone, they could easily have the original text despite any deletions, e.g. a cached notification or similar.
Since when? What app does this? SnapChat just notifies the counterparty of screenshots, which is largely "nudes", but no other app I've used actually manages to block my screenshots.
(It's not the app I worked on but it's out there as an example)
Well that's unfortunate. I can take any camera and point it at a screen to capture its contents. Any expectation of privacy on that front is artificial and naive
There's a difference in scale.
Wanting to get around artificial barriers seems pretty engrained into human nature
Tech people aren't the primary audience for those applications.
I personally prefer a completely free & open web, but I understand that means I'm going to be installing binaries for some things. I'd much rather have to download netflix.exe than have the current state of browser drm for example.
And you want to disable right click download? Then simply do not upload those images. You do not have the right to take that control away from me as a user.
Why "champion the web" if your whole goal is to take control of users' devices away from them and destroy their freedom in some of the most basic ways?
Got it.
Companies love apps. They get complete control over what you do(No easy way of viewing source, no modifying the frontend etc) and they can suck up all your data.
Plus browsers are are lagging in terms of say animations and probably always will with the need to build consensus before a new ideas is added. Then adoption can take years.
For example: photo and file uploads (yes, really! remember "iOS doesn't have a filesystem, so no uploads" which really damaged craigslist because Browse didn't work on iPhone for many years), webrtc, PWA add-to-home, sticky/fixed positioning, scrolling through notch (it worked, and then it didn't), service workers, push notifications, and so much more than I can't even remember (maybe someone else can list their favorites).
Even when eventually we got the features, they were often broken in order to keep pushing people into the App Store.
Does the author REALLY believe that Apple won't instantly drop support for any feature that could seriously disrupt the App Store? Not on your life.
The web API always allowed you to choose photos from your camera roll.
And Steve Jobs ensured that Flash uploaders popular at the time could never work on the iPhone, either.
Example: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/4104/is-it-possibl...
Ironically, Microsoft had tried to kill the web off with Internet Explorer just a few years before, but no one noticed what Apple was doing, because they did it so well... they got 400,000 and then a million apps in their app store, completely bypassing the web altogether.
And as evidenced by your comment on this very technical forum, even now, people still might not have noticed what Apple was doing.
What next, complaining about 8.3 character filenames on Windows 3.1?
when ASCII went from 6 bits to 7, they should have redefined 0x41-0x5A to lowercase. the 70s and 80s would have been so much nicer.
Based on what people are saying in that link, iOS existed for something like 6 years before it got working web page picture uploads. Meaning the person saying the feature has always existed was incorrect.
Why would they need that?
It came out in the Epic trial that 90% of App Store revenue came from in app purchases of play to win games. Those apps aren’t going to the web because it’s much easier to convince whales to buy coins and loot boxes using in app purchase than put a credit card on a website.
pay to win games, I can never find a game that has fixed cost and doesn't push advertising or self advertising, you know, an app safe for kids; they all have full screen ads with tricky close buttons
BTW, why is App Store such a shit show? It's 99% crap. Where is the concept of pay to own.
[1] https://nobsgames.stavros.io/
Also all those banks - if they just had a website they wouldn't be able to enforce that you cannot access your banking from your rooted Android phone. Thanks to the additional power of apps, they can.
Hell, there was (and still is I think) even all the ridiculous rules around "can't link to a website payment outside of your app" and "definitely can't tell the user it's cheaper not to buy it thru the app where Apple takes a 30% cut"
I distrust Microsoft and Google as much as I distrust Apple, but damn do people give Apple so many passes "yeah well they use that 30% cut to pay for all the security and services they offer!111" you really believe that? How come so many 0-days & other exploits are found by GOOGLE'S project zero? Does Apple not pay enough for their own research into that stuff?
Also, really complaining about Apple’s security compared to Android? Seeing that most Apple has been publishing security patches for 10 year old phones and Google abandons its own hardware.
Don't like it? Just move to the only other town there is, and write them letters and visit occasionally. If you don't like it there too, well they say there are other places if you take a long boat ride.
As to Google, despite all their many faults at least they haven't gas lit me claiming I'm holding it wrong.
What about all of the other devices it sold in the last decade.
And Google only sells a tiny fraction of Android devices. What about the other literally 97%
Microsoft hasn’t had a problem keeping PCs updated that it doesn’t sell for a decade. Heck I got Windows updates for my pre-Bootcamp x86 2006 Mac Mini for years after Apple abandoned it
On Android you can use AbsoluteOrientationSensor or deviceorientationabsolute event. These will provide a quaternion or Euler angles describing how to rotate the device from the default orientation (flat on the ground, screen up, with the top pointing north) to its current orientation.
The situation on the iPhone has almost reduced me to tears. As far as I can tell, it only provides Euler angles relative to some implementation defined reference frame, along with the actual compass heading. In practice, the Euler angles given are absolute with respect to gravity, but always treat north as the direction the phone was pointed when the first sensor reading took place. To deal with this, you can use the actual compass heading to rotate the relative orientation to the absolute orientation. But this will have problems near the poles, as the Euler angles and heading will give conflicting values. Beyond this the compass heading field is really weird. If you want to experience its behavior for yourself, take the iPhone compass app and starting from flat, rotate the phone 360 degrees through the pitch axis. Notice at what points the heading flips between its start heading and start heading+180. I bet it will surprise you!
I'm fairly sure that he doesn't have particularly much faith in Apple, no: https://infrequently.org/2022/06/apple-is-not-defending-brow...
But they're not counting on Apple's good heart; they're counting on regulators. From the article:
> Apple will, of course, attempt to delay the entry of competing browsers through as-yet-unknown strategies, but the clock is ticking.
I'm not surprised if Microsoft (the author's employer) is quietly preparing Edge for iOS with a non-Safari engine (ex. Chromium.)
A world absolutely dominated by Google's control over the browser scares me more than Apple's control over the AppStore.
Also, Safari wouldn't vanish just because you'd be able to use a different browser engine. I strongly disagree with your "scary" (not scary) scenario: Only a small percentage of users is ever going to change defaults.
The growing number of device/browser combinations in use, legally-mandated web accessibility, as well as the expansion of expected web functionality to essentially require DOM and scripting abilities, including AJAX, made web standards of increasing importance during this era. Instead of advertising their proprietary extensions, browser developers began to market their software based on how closely it adhered to standards.
As soon as one browser dominates, one company gets to dominate how the web works. If you, as a user, want to be able to choose your own browser you should oppose one engine becoming dominant.
Every time Twitter or Instagram bring up their custom share sheets I get super annoyed it’s not the default. PWA’s can probably get a lot of that, but a ton of web UX is arbitrary, unique, and more likely to feel janky in ways.
Even for well done web apps, like Notion, it stands out like a sore thumb when parts of the editor don’t work like normal Mac input controls.
I think PWA’s will have a lot of uses, but I don’t want them to take over either or Google get a browser monopoly. It’s bad enough how many devs don’t use anything but Chrome when testing. The web is what it is because it is not beholden to one company like the IE6 days
....how? Just saying "better anti-trust" isn't a usable solution.
Chromium is an open source project. What's the government to do, split the codebase in half/thirds? Chromium got to where it was because of the downstream decisions of developers not wanting to waste months/years of their lives reimplementing something that was already implemented.
"Someone else had already done the laborious legwork with Chromium, let's just use that."
----
If you want to actually solve this problem:
- Purge and ban software patents & copyrights. No entity should have total control as to how to implement efficient H.264 playback in the browser, nor native GPGPU support.
- Rewire human behaviour to inherently fear any market share of > 60%. Humans will continue to want to concentrate around a few choices as a result of network effects.
- STOP WITH WANTING NEW FEATURES. Every new shiny object that you desire will inevitably be replaced by the next shiny object, with only 10% of them sticking around in relatively popular use for any notable period of time. Browser devs, meanwhile, can't have the luxury of dropping support for <rarely used feature X>, and have to keep maintaining each one for some niche case.
----
I've already said my response to this: STOP wanting more features. The number of features that a browser dev has to support right out of the box is the major contributor for there being so few browser engines to choose from.
(Copied from a previous comment I made before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37733053)
> There's an argument to be made that the extreme breadth of scope that modern web browsers are obliged to support (in order to gain/retain market share) heavily contributes to there being no worthy contenders against Chromium's web monopoly.
> https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....
> When you're the leader, you can further widen your lead by bolting on additional functions & features that require at least X amount of effort to implement. Any new contender will have to put in SUM(X effort for each feature) to match feature parity with the existing leader, and existing competitors will have to put in at least X effort to catch up. Existing OSS work can help bridge the gap, but only for what's already been done.
You can try to justify it all you want because "Google Bad" (and not that I disagree at least in spirit) but at the end of the day? Apple is giving users a worse experience as a method to lock them into the App Store and get their 30% cut.
Don’t worry, the M$ CEO will bring back windows phone soon because he now realizes how it can be ad/spyware filled junk like windows 10/11/12 and Solitaire…
Privacy? Riiiiiight. Apple isn't using it's market place to stifle competition and limit choice out of the kindness of their hearts.
"M$ CEO" yeah... good thing you have IE 2024 installed on phones without the alternatives available that existed on Windows. Nope... you're stuck like a good slave who's $mart enough to not use M$ and instead you get the joy of being a good donator to Apples bottom line instead of Googles.
At the end of the day... nothing in your response changes the fact that Apple limits choices and holds the industry back with Safari which is a shit option that couldn't compete against real options.
"XBox" xbox is a gaming console not a phone. It's tied to a TV and not the center of your life. It also has competition in PS, Nintendo and gaming alternatives like Android and iPhone.
XBox doesn't have shitty safari on it as a core app to force people into the XBox store. You can also load CDs/DVDs into it purchased outside of it. Can you resell iPhone games? No? didn't think so. tons of reasons why "derp xbox" is a bad comparison.
I'm personally okay extending forcing alternative app stores onto XBox... but the scope is different and you know it - no matter that you try to deflect from how shitty Safari is. Your hate of "M$" doesn't make Apple any better.
I think that's an oversimplification and mostly wrong. People don't uniformly use one reason for things. Some are too lazy to change a default, are used to one browser, genuinely like it, use it reluctantly because the big company developer is doing its best to hobble the competition (hey, here's a challenge, guess which one I'm talking about), or simply think Google (Chrome) is the internet. Based on usage alone compared to Google Chrome every other browser offers a subpar experience right? I don't agree with that. To take the most obvious example, the fact that Firefox allows me full control over the adblocking experience is the single biggest quality of life improvement over Chrome in using the internet.
> You can try to justify it all you want
I didn't "justify" anything. What works for me doesn't have to work for you. Two things can be true at once. My personal data and privacy are a priority for me so Google cheating me out of them trumps any fuzzy argument that doesn't hold water even over a two line comment. Because...
> Apple is giving users a worse experience
Wait, let me try your argument for size. Apple is close to being the biggest phone manufacturer on the planet, as voted by people with their wallets, despite making the most expensive phones. And why is that? Because everyone else offers a subpar experience, right? I voted for Firefox and I'd rather use Safari than Chrome because we have different priorities and definitions of what makes for a good experience.
Sibling comment had the right idea. The only fix for this is one that globally addresses via regulation the issues any company's dominant positions poses.
"Based on usage" Chrome is doing something right but that doesn't mean better options don't exist. JS exists and is massively popular but that doesn't make it the "best". Most popular also doesn't mean it's not horrible in its own right - like Safari (and JS, etc).
"firefox" You use firefox because it's better... better than what? Safari for one.
"let me try your argument for size" Just because people pay doesn't mean it's better and because it's popular doesn't mean it's better. People buy ripped up clothes at a massive markup because it's "better". You keep saying Firefox is better even though it's not "in" or cool.
Nothing in your response addresses the fact that SAFARI is subpar amoungst its peers because Apple uses that to push people to the App store. Likewise, they "pair bond" stuff to phones so 2ndary markets can't fix their stuff. Not because safari is better... not because their parts are better... because they get 30% on the store and they get the fees for fixing stuff "properly". Same for their custom connectors (which are on the way out)
Your focused on Safari vs Firefox. You're ignoring the forest for the tree.
Apple as a whole can be a better product (arguably, the complete package is "better" because it's more consistent and "secure" and all that than say Android) while also having parts that are worse. Safari is a part that's worse (and as incentive, the 30% cut on app store $$$).
"different priorities" I'm all for better regulation and some places are headed in the right direction (IE: USBC requirements, sideloading requirements, banning google from monopoly practices on their store, etc)... but that doesn't change the fact that safari is the IE of today - forced on customers, ignored by its creator and clearly worse as you admit in your stalwart defense of Firefox.
Except they didn't. Apple relied on their browser ban on iOS, on users not being able to set a default browser for 14 freakin' years.
Sorry, this is their own fault. Safari could be competitive, but if it turns out it isn't, it's on Apple and no one else.
It's one thing if Chrome was Chromium and was simply blocked from low level stuff because "reasons"... but that's not where we are.
Chrome, for example, is at its core on the Apple Store a reskinned Safari because alternatives simply aren't allowed.
This isn't a regression and failure to implement standards... this is active activity to lock people into a lesser experience while actively blocking better.
This is worse than IE on Windows as at least with IE on Windows you could install alternatives.