Hacker News Reader

Comment by mwexler | Hacker News Reader

Funny enough, apps were supposed to be just for Apple. The original conception is that 3rd party tools, games, etc. for the iPhone would just be webapps. (https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-..., etc.)

A few adjustments to the model and here we are with lots of native code and big money... but still, folks requesting updates to the the browser to support more app-ish functionality. I'm glad; the browser can do a lot and we kind of miss that in many mobile contexts.

I also think the elusive "run almost anywhere" is viable in many cases when the browser gets powerful enough. (Of course, I said that about the JVM years ago, so what do I know?)

View on HN

It was also kinda weird because when they announced "the solution is web apps!" they made a big deal that developers could make their web apps just look exactly like native apps. But they never actually released any SDK, stylesheets, or anything to achieve that. In reality everyone had to mimic the look through CSS on their own, and even write absurdly complicated JavaScript libraries to emulate the scrolling.

I guess the main difference is JVM didn't have a workable UI vs the web?

You could do a working GUI with the JVM. But most people demanded Windows desktop apps, and for Windows only you could use .Net and C# for a better experience. Linux community was in big part against Java or Mono because of license and FUD so Python was the winner for the higher level language there.

Firstly let me state that yes, you could make a GUI with Java but it would suck because the GUI toolkits available at the time were just downright awful (and they still are!). Want an app that's super bloated and looks awful (no native controls)? Use Java!

Also, the Linux community wasn't against Java per se (not until Oracle bought Sun anyway) it's just that writing Java was a huge/complicated undertaking compared to say, Python and managing JREs was a huge pain in the ass. The old joke was, "By the time you have Eclipse open I will have completed the program in Python."

Lastly, mono was enormous (and still is)! Talk about bloated! When mono was being most actively pushed on the Linux community back in the day there was just no benefit: For smaller things you had shell scripts and Python. For larger programs you had C/C++, Java, and... Python :D. Why would you go through the hassle (and it was a huge hassle) of using mono when those other languages provided better performance with much lower friction/barrier to entry? It didn't have much of a "selling point" as it were.

From my memory there were anti-mono communities, and anti mono packages that would force a conflict with mono to help people not install mono by mistake. It was not "use Python over C# because Python is better" the message was "Do not use C# because the language is open but the .Net frameworks is not open" and this is true, Mono implemented non open stuff and Microsoft did not offered a guarantee that they support Mono and won't cause troubles from companies using it. Fuck MS, they had a good language and a decent platform in .Net and Silverlight but they had to prioritize what Windows team wants to we are now stuck with JS and Electron.

Sure Java apps start slower then C apps but I am talking about Pro apps, an app you start in the morning when you start your job and close it when you are done, I don't care is a bit slower. I am also playing games in Wine and when I have foudn modding tools in Java that work natively in Linux I thank in my mind the dev that he was not a Java hater.

But yes, Linux communities most of the time did not care to have theyr apps to work or look native in Windows. So today if I would like to make a quick and dirty Linux app with a simple GUI I am not sure what to use, maybe Electron it would probably give me less issues as a dev(but this is personal opinion since I dislike Python syntax and I don't like to go low level if I don't have too)

You had to install the JVM. It often broke or bugged you to update. UI usually felt off or janky, and unresponsive. At the time, Java applets were huge compared to typical web pages, and had crap performance. By the time hardware and connections improved enough to make the last two things less of a problem, JavaScript could do most of the useful things the JVM could with fewer security risks (and hardware was fast enough that that wasn't also so slow that no-one would tolerate it, as it would have been earlier).

[EDIT] Oh, and it had to compete with Flash and Shockwave, which had (barely) fewer issues with plugin breakage, very nice authoring tools (still unmatched, AFAIK?), and, despite having crap performance, still performed better than Java applets. Plus a whole lot more fun things used them so normal people had a motivation to install them.

why would the JVM be involved?

Literally the expectation was you'd be a web app - html + js.

Everyone said that wasn't acceptable so they added native apps, and now everyone says native apps are terrible and everything should be web apps. It seems like apple can't win.

Given how quickly the App Store was introduced (just one year later) I’m betting that they never had the intention to go web-app only. They probably only needed extra time to figure out the experience for both developers and users (from native APIs to permission model to monetization)

Actually, incorrect. According to court documents released from lawsuits, Apple in fact did not plan for the App Store initially, just like Steve Jobs said on stage. It was not until a few months after the iPhone was released that some internal employees convinced Steve to let it go ahead and release an SDK. I can't find the tweet containing a copy of it, but the actual email where Steve gave the SDK a go is on the public record.

https://www.macstories.net/linked/apple-captured-in-a-single...

And what Steve said at the time remain true to this day, there will be two type of Apps, those that get on the App Store with Native performance, and HTML5 Apps without the need of Apple Approval. That was actually asked in an interview in D8 about the power of App Store, before smartphone was ubiquitous. And yet somehow no one at Apple knew what to do after his death.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com