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Comment by cronix | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of funny that PWA was Jobs original vision for iOS apps with HTML5, before they came up with the walled garden cash cow approach.

> “The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today. So developers, we think we’ve got a very sweet story for you. You can begin building your iPhone apps today.” - Steve Jobs/iPhone announcement Jan 2007 at macworld

https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/2019-the-year-of-progr...

What's old, is new again, 12 years later. It's how it always should have been. And guess what? There's no SDK that you need!! ;)

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PWAs make sense today, but back then, they just came too early in the game. The iPhone only had EDGE (2G) networking, it was painfully slow both in terms of throughput and latency. Each HTTP request would take ~300-500ms under optimal cell coverage.

Additionally, unlike modern PWAs, web-apps back then had persistence for data only, so you had to reload the entire application over the network at each launch. People back then loved the switch to native apps because they were extremely snappier.

Worked well for i-mode in 1999 - of course that did do some magic on the protocol level.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode

that doesn't make any sense. All the limitations you mention also applied to apps.

the whole problem is that apple shipped native apps with tons of skeumorphism and animations, so all js frameworks for webapps spend all their efforts to simulate "slide animation on page change" instead of working on hiding the ajax latency or using local storage better.

and in the end, everyone just saw $$$ in using the closed apps from the store.

> PWAs make sense today, but back then, they just came too early in the game.

Seemed to work well enough on webOS for the Palm Pre.

It's not like this went away, though. You could always, and still can, write iOS apps this way. Safari even has the "add to home screen" feature which lets you run these apps without the Safari chrome around them.

Safari/Webkit still lags behind the other browsers, and finally started adding the basic features for PWAs last year.

It's nice that a lot has been implemented, albeit slowly. Though some may still think about Apple incentives.

I.e.: http://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19586219

An idea that was already being explored on Symbian with their WebRuntime actually.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100603124720/http://www.forum....

I feel like the whole Symbian ecosystem disappeared, it's a shame nobody is preserving any of the software, that was 10+ years of tech that is basically gone.

Quite true.

All what is left seems to be Web Archive and these sites.

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/

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