Apple lags behind Chrome in some features which curiously directly benefit Google.
It's not slow, it's not broken. It's a great mobile browser. So stick to reality and not bunch of made up "what ifs".
It's not slow, it's not broken. It's a great mobile browser. So stick to reality and not bunch of made up "what ifs".
Instead of websites asking to send notifications, they are now nagging us to install useless apps that ask to send notifications and clutter our screens. An honest curator would never even allow these apps into their app store.
This is purely a business decision on Apple's part, nothing to do with user interests at all.
Okay.
These "apps" should never be allowed in the app store. They should be websites that get to ask me exactly once whether I want to receive their notifications. Instead they keep pushing and nagging me to install their apps and Apple's policies are encouraging this behaviour.
In some cases, the notifications are useful, but there is no other reason for them to be apps installed on my device.
And you don't have to install any apps. Use the sites if it's the same for you.
Google's strategy is simple:
1. The web should be able to control everything (i.e. PWA features not normally found in a browser).
2. Google should control the web (they can index it, track, monetize it, but it has to be on the web).
3. Profit.
Do you think Apple users are super excited at the prospect of most apps turning into battery-draining non-native shitty experiences, instead of using the iOS frameworks? No, they're not.
And push notifications on iOS work as a service, to avoid battery drain, they all go through Apple on a single connection. This is free for all native apps. It can't be implemented for web apps both for technical reasons and because web apps can't be curated, so it'll just be abused like there's no tomorrow.
Have you noticed on the desktop that EVERY SITE asks you for push notifications? This is super annoying and bless your soul if you ever clicked "YES" on any of those. They'll spam you until you die, or eventually ask your nephew to reset your permissions.
EVERY single feature not in Safari, has a reason not to be there. And I'm sick of everyone eating up Google's propaganda and becoming their tools in this. I don't mind Google at all, they should fight for their PoV on all this, and they have a right to expand their business.
But not at the expense of Apple or Apple's users. F that.
Have you not noticed that EVERY APP asks for push notifications and uses them as a marketing funnel?
HN is mostly frequented by developers, and it's so frustrating to see how many of them are outright lazy and don't think about UX but rather about how to get quickest from point A to point B.
Rest assured most phone users are with you all the way. But again, we wouldn't know it reading developer forums.
Installation, push notifications, etc... are all optional and can be mixed and matched based on what users actually want.
An example would be individual forums are a great use case for PWAs.
Funny enough I couldn't find a decent native app for HN, so I just placed a link to the site in my folder with social apps. That site is the worst thing in that folder.
I have a workstation that deals with 3D rendering and huge Photoshop files, or compiling sizable projects with no problem, and my CPU is still pegged to 100% when I browse Reddit.
I shudder at the thought of those same people being in charge of my mobile experience. I don't feel like having to replace my phone battery every 3 months, thanks.
Sometimes it's politics (I had a colleague leave a job because the new director of development mandated they rewrite their flagship enterprise apps in React Native because he got a song and dance from a React Native trainer/consultant and wouldn't listen to the people who knew what they were talking about).
Sometimes it's different priorities (a meetup buddy of mine some years ago had to write apps in PhoneGap because "We're in the oil bidness, not the app badness").
It isn't always "the best allocation of limited resources", either. Apart from having to do extra work to make the UX close to native (which isn't trivial), using a "cross platform" solution means you've just included a giant third party dependency that you don't control or maintain. Call it FUD if you want to, but in the forty-odd years I've done programming/development that's never been a good bet. If resources are really limited, the best bet is to have a decent design and very clear (reasonable) expectations and pay someone good to execute them.
If the PWA concept had caught on, users on all platforms would have an equally good UX, increasing user choice.
Let websites be websites. If you cripple them without a good technical reason then they become exactly the sort of app you're complaining about.
There is no reason why non-native apps should be a shitty experience that drains the battery. That is just a tooling/feature issue.
> Have you noticed on the desktop that EVERY SITE asks you for push notifications? This is super annoying and bless your soul if you ever clicked "YES" on any of those. They'll spam you until you die, or eventually ask your nephew to reset your permissions.
The spam for installing the native app is 10x worse when using a mobile browser.