[toadkicker]

Ironically Apple is also the ones who kicked off the entire PWA race because of the lack of an SDK when the iPhone launched. The messaging then was "build for the web, that is better than native" and now its "native or gtfo" and web apps are not preferred. The last 5 years that I've built web versions of apps first, the client told me "look the web app is great, hard to tell its a web app honestly. Except when I want to..." and you all know the rest of the conversation from here.

Firefox, I love you, but you're bringing me down. We need a powerful, semi-native, offline capable architecture for the web. I don't care about the PWA spec, it's quite messy handling the implementation of one. But I do think it has always been the vision that the web is accessible regardless of physical connection to it.

As long as I can remember in this industry we've swung back and forth between "thin" and "thick" clients as if one way is the right way. Microservices over monoliths, etc. It's all the same symptom that naturally we don't want to grapple complexity. This announcement is yet another entry in the cannon of thin vs thick. It's a hard problem and any PM who only cares about optimizing time spent will say everything they can once they've zeroed in on the perceived waste.

[lucasverra]

Apple is helping Amazon et Google to publish their gamestore's on PWA [0].

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/25/21455343/amazon-luna-appl...

[z3t4]

Also ironic is that Apple dont recommend adding web apps to the app store. Eg. wrapping web sites in an app.

[blueblisters]

Apple's love for native apps began - if I remember correctly - with the popularity of jailbroken devices and third party app stores like Cydia that could unleash the full potential of iPhone 1. Until then, Jobs was stubbornly against giving developers access to the native ecosystem and preferred that they develop web applications. I wonder if browsers would be full-fledged VMs by now if we had continued along the web application trajectory.

[zapzupnz]

This seems like a misconception. It's clear that Apple was brewing the SDK for developer adoption and that their crowing about web apps was a stop-gap measure.

Are we really imagining Apple brought out a public SDK, set up the app approval system, certification, all that stuff, updated Xcode to support it all on a whim in under a year (starting with iPhoneOS 2) just because Cydia existed No way, José.

Apple are good but even they can't pull all that out of their ass overnight. Web was clearly a stop-gap because the SDK wasn't ready and iPhoneOS was, at the time, an outlier in purposefully not supporting Java ME apps.

[reaperducer]

Apple's love for native apps began - if I remember correctly - with the popularity of jailbroken devices and third party app stores like Cydia that could unleash the full potential of iPhone 1

As someone who developed a couple of the first round of web apps for the original iPhone, while waiting for the first SDK, I can tell you that this it not true.

To someone evaluating it from the outside using a list of release dates, it may seem logical. But an SDK isn't invented overnight.

[blueblisters]

Hmm you are right I came to that conclusion largely from Apple's original messaging and the change in stance around the time jailbreaking was getting popular.

> As someone who developed a couple of the first round of web apps for the original iPhone, while waiting for the first SDK, I can tell you that this it not true.

Were you given early access to the SDK before release?