As someone who bitterly resents the never ending parade of new web technologies, I’m not too upset. Maybe Apple has also decided enough is enough. The article touches on this by saying apple has other priorities, such as swift, but doesn’t quite come out and ask the big question. Are all these features better? Or newer?
It certainly seems like many of the missing features are in service of web application development, and it’s no surprise that Apple might deprioritize them. This perfectly accords with my own feelings, as I don’t want installable webapps or notifications or local storage – I find web apps uniformly terrible and I wish we could be quit of them.
I still have to bookmark it or whatever, no? There’s something to be said for just in time delivery, but conversely I hate having to wait to download the next article/level/feature in the middle of the experience. I’d much rather have a large app (game) tell me it’s going to download 1GB of data upfront vs having that trickle in sporadically, ruining interactivity.
has better isolation from the OS
I’m not sure exactly what you mean, but that sounds like strictly a negative. Do you not trust the OS? I trust your app server off in cloudland even less.
has native deep-linking
In practice, this doesn’t seem to work well. Given the choice between a photo editing web app with dropbox integration or native apps that interact via my photo library, it’s no contest. Does standardized interop between web sites exist? It seems like this editing web app works with that upload service, but there’s nothing close to mix and match.
I’ll add one more con. Even web sites that are apparently tuned precisely for my phone cock it up. The menu icon will sporadically vanish off screen, or cover up something important, etc. CSS is simply a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad tech for application UI layout. I’ve never had issues with native apps accidentally scrolling the wrong part of the screen or letting UI elements drift over top of other elements.
re: isolation, what I meant was that web apps are properly sandboxed while installing stuff requires you to give access to your OS. I agree with you about CSS though.
You seem pretty entrenched in this position so it’s probably not worth discussing any further.
Web apps are also not platform native, are dreadfully slow, require a network connection, and raise all kinds of ownership and privacy issues. They make the world crappier and I hate them.
more native integration with the OS (advantage going away with more web-native OS features)
I remember being at a conference five years ago where a presenter said exactly the same. The same critique then still applies now: when e.g. Apple introduces a new sensor, say a fingerprint reader, I can use it from day one through the native APIs, while I have to wait years for web standardization to catch up.
Another important point that you did not mention: a native app feels like any other native app (unless developer intentionally circumvented the UI toolkit). A web app feels like whatever custom toolkit is used. Rediscovering UI controls on a per-app basis is no fun!
The speed difference between native apps and web apps is very real. And offline use requires your tabs to be open ahead of time. And web apps always seem to be buggier and worse to me.
Also see this, an excellent read about mobile web apps, and performance concepts in general.
This is a very long article telling me that javascript performs poorly compared to natively compiled C. Writing a performant app is about budgeting how much time you need to render stuff compared to what the user expects. Those are very different concepts.
I suspect people are upset because the current crop of web technologies are terrible and there’s some hope that the new crop are better. (Personally, I think this hope exposes a flagrant failure of pattern recognition, but clearly not everyone agrees.) Thus, a browser which fails to implement new features and forces people to use the terrible old ones is making web developers' lives harder.
The analogy only holds up insofar as IE traditionally lagged waaaaaaay fucking far behind everything. We mustn’t forget that a lot of stuff (in particular CSS) was simply outright broken in IE. The new features are stuff that I can live without – I’m not writing web applications in the sense that’d use those technologies. IE layout was a monstrosity for years. These new web APIs? Not layout, not core tech, very much bonus features.
Still, it’s fun to say that Apple is turning into Microsoft.
I concur, also excellent pun :)
I think any company that has enough power turns at least a little bit evil, Apple, Facebook, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Valve, EA, Ubisoft, Canonical, IBM, eBay/PayPal, etc. I didn’t even include automotive, clothing, pharmaceutical and chemical companies. I can’t even think of a really big company (Not including non-profits, foundations etc.) that I would consider a “good” company. Depressed now, I’m going to go watch Manufacturing Consent, Manufactured Landscapes and John Oliver :(
As someone who bitterly resents the never ending parade of new web technologies, I’m not too upset. Maybe Apple has also decided enough is enough. The article touches on this by saying apple has other priorities, such as swift, but doesn’t quite come out and ask the big question. Are all these features better? Or newer?
It certainly seems like many of the missing features are in service of web application development, and it’s no surprise that Apple might deprioritize them. This perfectly accords with my own feelings, as I don’t want installable webapps or notifications or local storage – I find web apps uniformly terrible and I wish we could be quit of them.
Do you install native apps on your phone?
Exclusively.
What is the difference between an installed app versus installable webapps? https://xkcd.com/1367/
Compared to the native app, the webapp:
There are a few slim arguments I can think for native apps:
I believe in a few years the ‘silly “apps” that are nothing more than a wrapper’ will become indistinguishable from native apps and vice-versa.
Point by point:
All the apps on my phone do that too.
I still have to bookmark it or whatever, no? There’s something to be said for just in time delivery, but conversely I hate having to wait to download the next article/level/feature in the middle of the experience. I’d much rather have a large app (game) tell me it’s going to download 1GB of data upfront vs having that trickle in sporadically, ruining interactivity.
I’m not sure exactly what you mean, but that sounds like strictly a negative. Do you not trust the OS? I trust your app server off in cloudland even less.
In practice, this doesn’t seem to work well. Given the choice between a photo editing web app with dropbox integration or native apps that interact via my photo library, it’s no contest. Does standardized interop between web sites exist? It seems like this editing web app works with that upload service, but there’s nothing close to mix and match.
I’ll add one more con. Even web sites that are apparently tuned precisely for my phone cock it up. The menu icon will sporadically vanish off screen, or cover up something important, etc. CSS is simply a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad tech for application UI layout. I’ve never had issues with native apps accidentally scrolling the wrong part of the screen or letting UI elements drift over top of other elements.
re: isolation, what I meant was that web apps are properly sandboxed while installing stuff requires you to give access to your OS. I agree with you about CSS though.
You seem pretty entrenched in this position so it’s probably not worth discussing any further.
Web apps are also not platform native, are dreadfully slow, require a network connection, and raise all kinds of ownership and privacy issues. They make the world crappier and I hate them.
more native integration with the OS (advantage going away with more web-native OS features)
I remember being at a conference five years ago where a presenter said exactly the same. The same critique then still applies now: when e.g. Apple introduces a new sensor, say a fingerprint reader, I can use it from day one through the native APIs, while I have to wait years for web standardization to catch up.
Another important point that you did not mention: a native app feels like any other native app (unless developer intentionally circumvented the UI toolkit). A web app feels like whatever custom toolkit is used. Rediscovering UI controls on a per-app basis is no fun!
The speed difference between native apps and web apps is very real. And offline use requires your tabs to be open ahead of time. And web apps always seem to be buggier and worse to me.
Also see this, an excellent read about mobile web apps, and performance concepts in general.
This is a very long article telling me that javascript performs poorly compared to natively compiled C. Writing a performant app is about budgeting how much time you need to render stuff compared to what the user expects. Those are very different concepts.
I can’t speak for the OP, but I only install native apps on my phone.
I don’t see the point of silly “apps” that are nothing more than a wrapper around a web site. My phone has a browser, I prefer to use it.
I suspect people are upset because the current crop of web technologies are terrible and there’s some hope that the new crop are better. (Personally, I think this hope exposes a flagrant failure of pattern recognition, but clearly not everyone agrees.) Thus, a browser which fails to implement new features and forces people to use the terrible old ones is making web developers' lives harder.
The analogy only holds up insofar as IE traditionally lagged waaaaaaay fucking far behind everything. We mustn’t forget that a lot of stuff (in particular CSS) was simply outright broken in IE. The new features are stuff that I can live without – I’m not writing web applications in the sense that’d use those technologies. IE layout was a monstrosity for years. These new web APIs? Not layout, not core tech, very much bonus features.
Still, it’s fun to say that Apple is turning into Microsoft.
I have been predicting this for years, and am glad its coming to fruition!
I concur, also excellent pun :)
I think any company that has enough power turns at least a little bit evil, Apple, Facebook, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Valve, EA, Ubisoft, Canonical, IBM, eBay/PayPal, etc. I didn’t even include automotive, clothing, pharmaceutical and chemical companies. I can’t even think of a really big company (Not including non-profits, foundations etc.) that I would consider a “good” company. Depressed now, I’m going to go watch Manufacturing Consent, Manufactured Landscapes and John Oliver :(