[squeral]

For me the great advantage of web apps is that you build a single code base for that can run on any platform (browser). That make it so much easier to maintain so you can focus more on features. If you build a native app for iOS you'll have to build another for Android and so it could be harder to maintain.

[curun1r]

I think you've discovered his point. The advantage that you describe makes the developer's job easier, not the user's.

If you're an iOS user, where the monetary incentive is there for developers to invest the time to build you a native app, you don't care whether that imposes a greater hardship on the developer, because you're not the one affected. You've become accustomed to developers building something specifically for you and you're not willing to throw that away for what is a somewhat compromised experience that makes the developer's life easier.

[notriddle]

As a user, I appreciate web apps because:

1. Web apps typically work everywhere, including on my Android phone, on my Windows machine, on my mom's Mac, and on Linux when I used to use it as my primary desktop platform. I know this without having to look up a compatibility table because I opened it in my browser, and other than mobile-version/desktop-version, web apps work the same way everywhere. Native apps are often platform exclusives, and even if they do work on multiple platforms, they work differently on different ones. Try asking someone who owns a Mac how to use MS Office when you're on Windows.

2. I know how to share web apps with my mom by texting her a link. Even if your native app has a share button, it's in a different place in different apps instead of just "click the address bar and hit Ctrl-C".

3. Web apps almost always work with my browser's password manager, ad blocker, and stuff. Native apps are more of a crapshoot there.

4. Web apps are limited by the browser's sandbox (this is not applicable to native apps on Android or iOS, since they're sandboxed pretty much the same way as web apps, but Windows and Mac are both still playing catch-up).

5. If Linux users didn't have web apps, they'd have no apps at all.

[saagarjha]

> I know how to share web apps with my mom by texting her a link. Even if your native app has a share button, it's in a different place in different apps instead of just "click the address bar and hit Ctrl-C".

On macOS and iOS you iMessage her the App Store link.

> Web apps almost always work with my browser's password manager, ad blocker, and stuff. Native apps are more of a crapshoot there.

And they do this on iOS as well, as long as you use Apple's password manager and ad blocker.

[khedoros1]

> 5. If Linux users didn't have web apps, they'd have no apps at all.

Well, I mean, besides the 10s of thousands in the software repos, sure. The amount of time I spend in web apps on Linux is minuscule.

[kazinator]

Also, all Android apps are Linux apps (when we want to avoocate Linux as having lots of apps) and none of them are really Linux apps (when we want to advocate freedom).

[khedoros1]

Android apps aren't inherently closed; I use a handful from F-Droid, for example. I'd love it if a more open collection of apps could make the Android/Linux experience on my phone as good as GNU/Linux on my PCs (but tailored to the workload that I use my phone for, of course).

[kazinator]

> Try asking someone who owns a Mac how to use MS Office when you're on Windows.

Try asking someone who uses native MS Office to use the equivalent web app.

[judah]

Agreed. As a non-profit, there is no way I'm building separate codebases for each platform. I simply don't have the time or money to do that.

In this sense, the web has already won here: I'm able to take a single codebase (HTML, JS, CSS) and generate apps for 3 major app stores.

[briandear]

Why are you generating apps? Sounds like you need a website. Do your apps use the camera, accelerometer, AR, ML GPS or any other parts of a device? Or is it just a website with the cachet of being “an app.”

Most people releasing apps shouldn’t.

[andai]

You are technically correct.

However:

> You might wonder, “Why even put your app in the app stores? Just live on the opened web!”

> The answer, in a nutshell, is because that’s where the users are. We’ve trained a generation of users to find apps in proprietary app stores, not on the free and open web.

[evolighting]

however in that case there is no "free and open web." It is google's walled garden.