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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

I'm increasingly getting to this point as well. I think modern webtech is incredible in many ways, and if properly used could be pretty great but overall and for the most part we are pretty terrible at it. I've started to dread using SPAs because I know it's going to be sluggish and load megabytes of junk, and will still require frequent page reloads when clicking stuff Even though ostensibly it should not.

There's an exceptional beauty in a simple and lightweight website that is just a load and done. I've started doing more with Phoenix and Alpine for the little bits of client-side functionality required, and have been very pleased with it. The most interesting part though, is that users have also been very pleased. They can't explain why in technical terms, but they know it feels better.

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Yes, SPAs are absolutely horrid. I tried to use HEY Calendar and the iOS app is just so absurdly slow I went back to the native iOS calendar app.

Maybe it speeds up their dev time but a native app should not feel like a (poorly engineered) web app. Every click loads for a second or two and sometimes it hangs for even longer. I grew to dread adding and managing events.

It’s a shame because even though the app made some questionable design choices, it was in general a breath of fresh air in terms of UI.

I’d like to hope that they’ll fix it, but I know they won’t.

When did you try hey calendar? I've never used anything from hey, but saw a lot of griping about its performance, and eventually saw that they apparently addressed the primary issues.

I was recently tasked with building a PWA to escape the play stores. A vitally important feature was notifications for the messaging system.

Hours of research trying to figure out how to deliver a notification through the PWA, even if the application was closed. Eventually I thought it wasn't going to be possible. But I remembered the HEY products were PWAs, and they had an email product. Surely that has the notification feature I'm trying to replicate? It's a paid service.

... no, I couldn't get their notifications to work, even though I enabled all of the proper settings. Crazy.

However, when I was about to give up and abandon the entire project, I had one of those moments, and got it to work.

Did you end up getting notifications working with your PWA? That's something I've worried about

> However, when I was about to give up and abandon the entire project, I had one of those moments, and got it to work.

Yes. So much relief. Although it was a bit more difficult than I thought it would be.

What was the trick?

I used it from launch to… last week? I still have some events on there but I’m done.

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