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Comment by daphneokeefe | Hacker News Reader

I attended the event in person, and overall enjoyed it. But I keep wondering: is the reason Google wants us to squeeze our file sizes and page load time down to the bare minimum because they want to maximize the bandwidth available for more and larger ads?

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No, it's a much larger existential threat. It because they're fighting to keep the web competitive with native apps. The more that the world shifts from the web to native apps, the less people use their web search engine.

I agree. Elsewhere in this thread, @kinlan on the Google Developer Relations team says that their goal is "to make the web experiences better, instant and accessible and available to everyone," and that's true, but Google makes money by making the web better. The more people use the web, the more people use Google search, and the more valuable Google's ads are.

If the web is slow or unusable (especially on mobile in India, for example), then Google search is useless on mobile in India, so nobody will want to buy mobile search ads in India.

And yet Google refuses to allow web apps / PWAs on their Play store.

We don't refuse or disallow. We just don't take an arbitrary URL and list it in the store automatically.

We announced Trusted Web activities https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/10/using-twa which give you a fullscreen surface for web content in an Android App in the store and allow you to offer more integration with the Android operating system (protocol and scheme handling, quick links etc)... I do think this is interesting, I worked on the Chrome Web Store when it launched and the number one complaint was that the experiences "were just bookmarks" and I think Trusted Web activities give us a chance to experiment with deeper web integrations on the host platform before we are able to standardize it.

Trusted web activity is not the same as a PWA. They are not cross platform. Why can't PWAs go through a similar getting process to apps to get onto Play?

The process of getting apps onto Play, is to create an Android app... so I'm not clear on what you mean. Someone will create the tooling that will automatically create this.

Trusted Web activity is just a general way to launch you PWA fullscreen from an Android actitivy.

How does that jive with the fact that Play also has books and movies? Those are not Android apps. There is absolutely no technical reason that Play couldn't also serve as a discovery and installation (i.e. icon on the desktop) mechanism for PWA-compliant applications. Users would never know the difference.

I can categorically say no, that is not the reason. It's to make the web experiences better, instant and accessible and available to everyone.

There needs to be pressure on the entire ad industry (including Google's products) to not hurt the users experience with crappy and bloaty ads the ruin the hard work product teams make to build on the web. I do believe (I am biased as I am on the Chrome team) that the Chrome team want to do the right thing for the users of the web.

I guess we need a kind of CE mark for websites. Some standardisation and an approval mechanism for security and reliability. We wouldn't trust our closest friendss with our banking accounts but we do use websites without any guarantees whatsoever. Software that is vital to us (banking, health, govt stuff) is subject to less regulation than cheese or wine.

And who do you trust to do such certifications? The US government struggled with what was essentially an easy site for Obamacare exchanges. State and local governments are partying like its 1999 for the most part and the “big” enterprises like Equifax, various large health insurers, banks and Yahoo are subject to nearly constant reports of vulnerabilities and hacks.

Really the only people I might trust would be google, but there is a conflict of interest I think considering they have a vested interest in enabling things like tracking.

So who does this “certification?” Hopefully not the same people who call for 8 digit passwords you have to chance arbitrarily every three months or people who’s idea of security comes from circa 1996 Microsoft documentation.

Calm down. I can trust the academicians in the field. Also the world is more than the US. And I'm fed up with having to trust my data with possibly/usually incompetent people (and sometimes one really has to, e.g. my schools online services). Trained staff and mandatory third-party security tests are a nice place to commence. It's nice that on the internet you can hack together a thing and get going, but it's not one's email address the only thing at the stakes. I would like to be able to differentiate between the hack and the proper service. And ATM the only thing we have is intuition and the https in the domain.

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