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by angott 2637 days ago
PWAs make sense today, but back then, they just came too early in the game. The iPhone only had EDGE (2G) networking, it was painfully slow both in terms of throughput and latency. Each HTTP request would take ~300-500ms under optimal cell coverage.

Additionally, unlike modern PWAs, web-apps back then had persistence for data only, so you had to reload the entire application over the network at each launch. People back then loved the switch to native apps because they were extremely snappier.
3 comments
e12e 2637 days ago
Worked well for i-mode in 1999 - of course that did do some magic on the protocol level.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode

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gcb0 2637 days ago
that doesn't make any sense. All the limitations you mention also applied to apps.

the whole problem is that apple shipped native apps with tons of skeumorphism and animations, so all js frameworks for webapps spend all their efforts to simulate "slide animation on page change" instead of working on hiding the ajax latency or using local storage better.

and in the end, everyone just saw $$$ in using the closed apps from the store.

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darpa_escapee 2637 days ago
> PWAs make sense today, but back then, they just came too early in the game.

Seemed to work well enough on webOS for the Palm Pre.

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