[vinay427]

I genuinely don’t understand what people are referring to when they use PWA in this context. Do the latest versions of Google office suite apps qualify? How about Outlook in the browser, or maybe TensorBoard or Slack?

I would generally describe all of those listed above as providing a poor experience compared to even a decent native app. Maybe those aren’t what you mean, which is why I’m curious to hear which PWAs aren’t terrible.

[crubier]

Yes sure... the old song of « these new web apps like Google Docs are terrible, we should go back to MS office 97 ».

Meanwhile, customers clearly and massively choose web apps over more traditional apps. Think of the market share of web/electron apps now: Google docs, Gmail, Slack, Figma and others.

I don’t know why hacker news seems to have this belief that native apps are better, while clearly proven wrong by facts.

The thing is that for a given budget, the development velocity of web based apps is 10x faster than native apps. I’ll get downvoted for that, but that’s the real reason why the web is winning.

[bob1029]

> I don’t know why hacker news seems to have this belief that native apps are better, while clearly proven wrong by facts.

I dont know how accurate this take is... I am currently explaining to our customers why we are shitcanning native iOS and UWP apps in favor of HTML5.

What device interaction is demanding everyone continue using native apps? We have no trouble with camera, barcode scanning, signature capture, etc in the browser.

You can literally mortgage a house on a webapp these days without touching a single piece of paper.

Other advantage of webapp is that it's a LOT harder for the vendor to fuck you over with OS updates. For our B2B product this is a massive deal.

[hulitu]

Web is not winning. It is forced down your throath. Google "apps" are terrible. My former employer tried to use them but stayed with MS Office. Office PWAs are horrible. If 365 is a PWA why does an xlsx openned in sharepoint a different look (no ribbon, other fonts) than an xlsx opened in Excel 365 ? And MS Teams looks like an incompleted CS assignment for a first year college student.

[crubier]

15 years ago I used exactly zero web apps in my daily work and life. Today I use exclusively web/electron/react native apps: VSCode, Slack, Google Docs (which I’m perfectly happy with), GitHub, Figma, Miro, etc. And my retired mum also uses web apps while she used none 15years ago: Facebook, Facebook Mobile, Gmail, etc. And clearly these cases are representative of a large part of the population, judging by the revenue of companies with Web tech based UIs. So yes, web tech is winning.

[vinay427]

> these new web apps like Google Docs are terrible, we should go back to MS office 97 ».

I didn't say that, and quite frankly, this almost sounds like a disingenuous interpretation of my comment. As I said, I'm genuinely curious if there's some PWA standard or threshold that provides a great experience.

> while clearly proven wrong by facts.

Which facts, exactly, contradict my poor experiences with the PWAs I named? I don't see an argument in your comment, let alone facts, that make this case.

[crubier]

The fact that the majority of successful software have UIs based on web technologies contradicts the narrative that “web UIs are terrible”