Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

> I'm not even sure why are we, as developers, allowing this to happen — there's usually not any good reason to develop mobile applications at all anymore. It's time to move back to open (web) standards and take control back into our own hands!

In general yes, but if I look at the apps on my phone I have

A mail client, K9, old UI. This clearly can't be replaced by a web app because I'm using it to look at my mail in a few POP3 servers and then I'll download those messages on my laptop (Thunderbird)

OSMAnd, offline maps and trop recording. Can't be web based.

Password manager, with a local dB synced with Syncthing.

Syncthing.

Epub reader, from files stored on my phone.

Photo gallery, for files on my phone. I backup to my laptop with Syncthing.

Banking apps, that I must use for 2FA in the web sites of those banks.

A network scanner, useful to debug networking issues.

Etc.

Of all the apps that are currently installed on my phone the ones that could be web apps are:

Go4Go, to view game records of pro games.

Elementary.

Chwazi.

Those could all run in a browser. A PWA isn't cloud software, it's just software that runs on your browser.

But they would indeed ask for all kinds of permissions. And K9 and the network scanner would get a really scary-looking permission dialog.

Mozilla would cry bloody murder if Google proposed a raw sockets API for the web, for the same reason why they oppose WebUSB & friends.

Google proposed raw sockets back in 2020.

Agree that not everything can be web-based and your list of apps seem to be non-typical if there exists a list of typical apps of course.

This list of apps is very typical for the class of user who chooses F-droid as a repo source.

> OSMAnd, offline maps and trop recording. Can't be web based.

There's no reason this couldn't be browser based.

Offline maps. Browsers tend to delete PWA data without asking the user first, which can be as threat to life and limb in this case.

You can save files and load them from disk. You'll just have to have the user pick the file.

Yeah, but if the phone/browser decides to delete some of the PWA's code to save space, you won't be able to use any maps at all until you connect back to the internet.

Before you say "just download the code to your phone as a file", I'm going to assert that's exactly what an app is ;)

That would be worse than an app.

Chwazi can be a website

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