Hacker News Reader

Comment by westoque | Hacker News Reader

alternatively you can get away from the app size bloat by using X as a PWA (progressive web app). in iOS, this would use safari as the app container and you would just have the assets to download for dependencies. it's sad however that apple is now trying to kill PWAs. i wish people would use PWAs more as this actually makes it easier to build apps.

View on HN

Are they? That's a shame considering they were basically pitched by Apple originally, or so is my understanding, all the way back to Steve Jobs.

I assume them trying to kill them is more about total control of apps on their platform. I think its a huge mistake if they kill them off.

just basing my assumptions on:

- https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/08/apple_web_apps_eu/

- https://itnext.io/apple-wants-to-kill-pwas-0895be2e497b

i really hope they don't as it does provide an acceptable alternative to native apps. not everyone has a mobile team that can build native. imagine a small team just making a web app could now also provide a similar experience and value for mobile out of the box.

With a 220 MB app size, this seems incredibly likely to be a remedy, yes!

Why is this post down voted? Do people disagree or think this so wrong? Why are you down voting?

While I don’t vote and I don’t necessarily disagree, I think that going for the web version of Twitter is probably the wrong decision unless one of the following is one of your primary concerns:

* Your phone has so little free space on it that you use the web version, and periodically clear any data it builds up in your browser

* You are concerned with the increased tracking area that the app exposes

* You run web extensions that alter the Twitter experience

For most other usecases (features, battery life, accessibility) the website is probably the wrong choice. I suspect this will remain the case until the native app gets an inevitable rewrite when X decides they don’t want to maintain it anymore.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com