[marvindanig]

This is bad advice and just plain wrong.

There are horrible slow or just badly built apps written with native stack as well.

Native is worthwhile for “appstore only” businesses. Mostly. For everyone else, a universal web app is the recommended path forward. Anyone who has a web app should absolutely avoid rewriting the same business logic three times over in native languages just for the appstores. It’s a nightmare to maintain and sync up three teams and codebases, not to mention also insanely expensive.

The future is pwa + webassembly + webview, and there’s no advantage of native over web whatsoever.

[simplotek]

> Native is worthwhile for “appstore only” businesses. Mostly. For everyone else, a universal web app is the recommended path forward.

This take is outright wrong. Non-native/webview-based apps are only a tolerable option if your goal is to maximize the number of platforms you cover with the same code base and skeleton crew dev team, at the expense of forcing users to endure subpar user experiences.

[wiseowise]

As someone who spends enough time on iOS, I’ll take well written web app in a browser over well written native app any time. Do you really think that your whatever thing is so important as to justify me going to an atrocious AppStore and downloading yet another >100MB app with no way to block ads or tracking?

Unless you really exercise system API, I don’t want to hear about your CRUD needing native app to “provide best native experience”.

[hakfoo]

I'd argue there are a lot of app experiences that are inherently subpar by being apps.

Plenty of services are simply "good enough" as a web page. I don't need a permanent icon on my phone from the local pizzeria for the once every 3 months I order for pickup. How can you make my experience better with an app? Invent different and weird new checkboxes for the order selection process, or just hope they can poll for tracking data that wouldn't exist inside a browser session?

Apps are also a terrible fragmentation for "transient" interactions where you're starting with a search or other activity, and incidentally brush across the content, rather than starting with a full "I'm going to use an app" mindset. Suddenly the UI changes and flow is broken. (see: any time you search for something and click a Reddit result)

[catiopatio]

Spoken like someone with a vested interest in web development.

The future we should strive for is the best UX for the customer. That’s not achieved through a web stack.

[Joeri]

The feature with the worst UX is the one that’s missing. There’s a trade-off between perfecting features and adding more of them. Fully native app development plants the flag on the side favoring less features with a higher polish. That is not the right choice for the user in every case, even when viewed through the lens of user experience.

[wiseowise]

> That’s not achieved through a web stack.

What is it achieved through? Vendor locked, user and developer hostile native app stacks?

> The future we should strive for is the best UX for the customer.

And that’s web stack with access to system APIs.

[JCWasmx86]

> What is it achieved through? Vendor locked, user and developer hostile native app stacks?

Yes, there is Vendor-lock in, you can't deny that. I don't know what you mean with "user-hostile" and "developer hostile".

I - as user - personally ignore anything web based, if there is a native alternative, as I prefer apps that follow the HIG and use the native toolkit of the platform. Sure I'm just a single person, so this is anecdotal.

> And that’s web stack with access to system APIs.

No I fully disagree. A good UX is only doable, if you use native components and fully follow the HIG. I have not yet encountered a good webapp that is on par with a native app that does exactly this.

Anything web based is good for "one code base - available - but subpar - for many platforms", while native apps are "One code base - one platform, but a great experience" (Given you follow the HIG and use native components)

One extremely trivial example: I don't want to accidentally delete e.g. my files, just because some app thinks switching e.g. "Ok" and "Cancel" around is nice.

While yes, web apps have their uses, but they can't match good native apps even remotely.

[wiseowise]

> Yes, there is Vendor-lock in, you can't deny that. I don't know what you mean with "user-hostile" and "developer hostile".

Anything that locks you in is hostile to you as a consumer.

> I - as user - personally ignore anything web based, if there is a native alternative, as I prefer apps that follow the HIG and use the native toolkit of the platform.

Interface guidelines and toolkit are different matters. You can write native apps that don’t follow HIG and you can write web apps that follow it.

> No I fully disagree. A good UX is only doable, if you use native components and fully follow the HIG. I have not yet encountered a good webapp that is on par with a native app that does exactly this.

What is a good UX?

> Anything web based is good for "one code base - available - but subpar - for many platforms", while native apps are "One code base - one platform, but a great experience" (Given you follow the HIG and use native components)

If I write Apple only web that follows HIG like a bible and adheres to all standards, where does it put me?

> One extremely trivial example: I don't want to accidentally delete e.g. my files, just because some app thinks switching e.g. "Ok" and "Cancel" around is nice.

That’s platform guidelines. Nothing stops me from implementing them in web app or disregarding them in native apps.

> While yes, web apps have their uses, but they can't match good native apps even remotely.

Sure they can, and they do. You probably used them at some point but couldn’t even notice they were web.

[dmitriid]

> You can write native apps that don’t follow HIG and you can write web apps that follow it.

You can't write a web app that properly follows a single OS's HIGs, much less multiple OSs'.

[wiseowise]

Sure you can. Those are interface guidelines. When you start talking about HIG that touch upon specific native elements, we’re back to why vendor lock-in is bad.

[incrudible]

This is a fringe view, in my estimation. Websites do not follow one HIG, people are used to variance. Also, when it comes to Apple, they tend to double down on outright stupid decisions, whereas Android is just a so much of a mess that native does not really mean anything. If you want to make something cool, the basket of native widgets will not get you far either. In general, do not stray away too far from the users expectations (which may well imply not following whatever the HIG says) and they will accept you. The platonic idealists will never be happy under any circumstance, so do not optimize for them.

[dickersnoodle]

>Yes, there is Vendor-lock in, you can't deny that. I don't know what you mean with "user-hostile" and "developer hostile".

IMO it's only "developer hostile" for developers who don't want to have to learn a new OS and languages. This sounds like someone with years of Angular experience who doesn't want to learn React because it'll make all the tricks they've learned getting Angular to behave obsolete. As far as being "user hostile" I've got no idea why that's in there... unless they're just throwing things against the wall to see if they stick, and if that's their intent they picked the wrong forum to do it in.