Telegram Web, wefwef and Outlook (for work) are doing a fantastic job running on my iPhone SE. Do you think PWA on mobile are the future? Developers could get around the 30% cut for in-App-purchases and publish apps not even allowed in large appstores. Companies could sell phones with alternate operating systems and their users could still access all their favourite apps (yes, I’m dreaming). Wasn’t Steve Jobs original idea of the iPhone about something similar to PWA instead of apps?
Oddly enough PWA / Webapps was the original design intent for the iPhone (before the app store) and why it shipped with for the time the most advanced standards based browser on mobile.
I have yet to experience a PWA that is as quick to load or easy to navigate (smooth scrolling / responsiveness) as a native or hybrid native mobile app.
There always seem to be odd “browser” based glitches from errors from page loads or rubber banding or zoom / cliping of the UI at times.
As a software dev, so much this.
PWAs are super fucking cool, but current web browsers are a SuperFund disaster site, so they make PWAs suck, and PWAs are partially to blame as Google and Apple keep adding features to browsers to mirror their phones’ native features. Every PWA is going to be slower than a native app for the foreseeable future, regrettably, and they’ll always be nothing more than a browser with the decorations hidden.
I hate this reality with a passion, but native apps are faster because it’s an app on your phone and not an app in a browser on your phone.
PWAs are great, because Apple and Google have no say in whether or not you can use them, and they get no cut if you spend money through them (scumbags at Apple taking 30%).
IMO we went wrong as soon as we started trying to turn web browsers into their own mini operating systems. That’s just… not what they were designed to do. The web was designed as a thing that could sent text and links over a network connection. Is the thing that web browsers currently are kind of a good idea? Yeah, sure, but the fact that it’s a web browser seems like exactly what’s led to the “SuperFund disaster”. Everything about the way we’re doing things is terrifyingly hackish and inefficient.