Hacker News Reader

Comment by thinkloop | Hacker News Reader

Why can't the pure web replace apps and programs? All the pieces are almost there: hardware acceleration, service workers, notifications, responsive design...

I currently "add to home screen" for most things. I edit my images online, and develop code using cloud9 ide, etc. There are few things I need apps/programs for right now, and that's improving day by day.

iPhone is dropping heavily in world wide market share, but they still have a lot of the wealthy users. There is a non-zero chance they get niched out of prominence by Android (aka every other manufacturer in the world), at which point network effects start encouraging Android-first or Android-only development. There might be a point where Apple needs to double down on the web, and/or maybe kill off apps, like they did flash, to still have the latest "apps".

View on HN

Because it just sucks, browsers were designed for interactive documents, not applications.

No HTML5 UI/UX comes close to what is possible to achieve with native APIs in any platform.

For old dogs like myself, it always seems that younger web dev generations are rediscovering patterns and features we were already doing in native applications during the 90's.

Also solutions like service workers look like some sort of kluge to sort out the problem to do offline applications in browsers.

WebOS, ChromeOS (barely used outside US) and FirefoxOS are all proofs that the experience is substandard.

I take photos miles from where there's cell signal. I write code on the bus while heading to doctors appointments. The web is about as far from a panacea as you can get. It's slow, it's bloated, falls apart when you don't have a connection, useful applications die when the company dies. Were some of the midi devices I use for music "web-based" they'd have probably become doorstops decades ago. A web-based IDE would be horrible for trying to develop code with an intermittent connection. The web is not a good time.

The intermittency issues can be fixed but I agree that the dependency on web app providers and their fickle business models is scary.

The way it works is to funnel all the profits into a few huge conglomerates that benefit from exclusive access to all personal data and train users to never depend on anything that isn't a core product of one of these conglomerates.

Using their 80% margins they can afford to at least give us some time before scrapping software that doesn't look it's ever going to reach 4bn consumers.

The result is stability. Until they all get toppled by the next technology revolution. Years later, regulators will crack down hard on some of the side issues of their former dominance and once again miss the currently relevant issues :)

The main reason I wouldn't want web apps, even if they somehow became as fast and integrated as native apps, to become the standard, is because they automatically update at the developers' whims. Vim won't change unless I make it change.

"Almost there" does not count. It has not just be there but be better at everything. And I will argue it is far far away from even "being here". I am getting tired of repeating this each time, but "web everywhere" folks simply have no idea what native SDKs offer.

    > iPhone is dropping heavily in world wide market share

And taking all the profits. Android being everywhere does not mean that every Android device is being used as smartphone, quite often they are just replacements for a feature phones.

Or on the tablet side, just replacements for televisions.

Because it's a horrible experience.

That's just my anecdotal view, but I have never tried a web based app (electron native app thing or webapp in the browser) that is as great an experience (UX and UI) as the best of the best native apps on Mac and iPhone, and I'm not sure it's possible to push web tech that far without reimplementing everything in the web stack and making it as close to native that we're better off just writing native apps.

EDIT: spelling.

> but I have never tried a web based app (electron native app thing or webapp in the browser) that is as great an experience (UX and UI) as the best of the best native apps on Mac and iPhone

I would say I have never tried a web based app better than average native apps. (Except for GMail, because I don't like the sync feature of mail clients).

What is pure web? As the current state of web it is everything but pure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com