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by szasamasa 857 days ago
I can assure you now it is totally possible to create the same standalone UX on iPhone from the web more securely than using a native app... if Apple is forced to allow at least other browser engines to use web capabilities securely (just like they could do this on macOS or any OS is capable)

is it easy to create good web UX, not... most web desgners are not real programmers and most websites are terrible, I do not really use many web apps but plenty of them might be terrible now, too

but it all comes down to the developer behind the product... if you get less native offerings in the future (there are areas where native is better, it is actually also a good bot protection to require native apps) then your good programmers simply deliver good web apps to you and it actually will be the same UX only cheaper

interestingly enough, if everybody has to pay the apple tax and it is the user who pays it in the end, developers may just stay by native, no competitive pressure

one area is that smaller innovative apps from even sole developers may never come to realisation because it is expensive to pay android and ios developers...

I just checked lichess... it is a mixed website that is not responsive (on smaller screens terrible) but uses webassembly for stockfish, that is a plus

still one of the biggest expense is 1 or 2 app developers, if they did not get 500k donations they might not even exist because of app store restrictions... that would be a loss

actually they should have just invest that money to create a responsive design and maybe some offline functionality and they could deploy "apps" on iPhones and Android and actually on all desktops... but you might just want to use lichess as tabs there, one tab for analysis, one for broadcasts etc...

that is a good example how we might lose great small projects like lichess... and why we only have 2 greats chess sites, one getting 100 million dollar from subscriptions... it is simply difficult to create a cross platform solution even if the stockfish ai is free and open source

one monopoly creates others...