[coldtea]

Thank god for Apple's lacklustre support for PWAs.

Else iOS would be like macOS, with every second app from a major vendor people need to run (for work, school, banking, etc) would be the equivalent of an Electron monstrocity.

Apparently that's the dream of the author.

[joemelonyeah]

Funny that the reverse has already happened due to Apple's lackluster support of PWAs. PWAs run with the system's browser engine, unlike Electron apps that ship with their own customized Chromium engine. Each app is only a few megabytes tops, unlike the hundreds of megabytes of bloat native apps tend to take up nowadays.

[coldtea]

The static megabytes on disk are not a problem [1], the runtime, battery, and memory overhead from them being written in JS+DOM is.

[1] never got anywhere near close to run out of space on iOS because of apps (at 50+ apps installed). Besides the big offenders space-wise are not general apps and their code dependencies, but games with huge asset libraries.

[themoonisachees]

... Are you somehow under the impression that means companies won't go back to how it was before and simply package their website as an electron app for iOS? This is the reason PWAs were invented in the first place, to avoid every app shipping an entire browser when the user-selected one was right there, if only it presented the app like an app and not a website.

Companies aren't going to magically switch to a ios-compatible framework or language, it's cheaper to keep just web devs and hire one guy that knows how to package an electron app.

[coldtea]

>... Are you somehow under the impression that means companies won't go back to how it was before and simply package their website as an electron app for iOS?

I'm not sure there that many doing "add to home screen PWAs" in the first place, for them to be "going back".

"Add to home screen PWAs" were used by users (not many either) for convenient access to this or that website they've used, but weren't ever a major app delivery use case in iOS. So, I see the whole post more like much ado about nothing.

And while companies do just package webkit (or use system webkit) + some web app framework as iOS native apps, iOS still encourages developing proper native apps.

Which I'm all for. If Slack, VS Code and co could be forced to create fully native apps on the desktop too, I'd jump at the chance of replacing their Electron stuff with those.

[WA]

Many many apps are made with JS, HTML and CSS and run in a thin wrapper on top of WKWebView (Cordova, nowadays Capacitor). It is Electron sans a browser engine and has been around forever. Support for PWAs don't change a thing about how apps are developed at all. They only change how apps are deployed. Hence, your whole point about "better quality apps by banning PWAs" is completely wrong.

[coldtea]

>Many many apps are made with JS, HTML and CSS and run in a thin wrapper on top of WKWebView (Cordova, nowadays Capacitor). It is Electron sans a browser engine and has been around forever.

I know, I already covered all that.

>They only change how apps are deployed. Hence, your whole point about "better quality apps by banning PWAs" is completely wrong.

I didn't say banning PWAs will result in better quality apps in general. I said:

(1) "Add to home screen PWAs" are not that used in the first place.

(2) "PWAs wrapped as native apps" are, but iOS encourages native apps more.

(3) Giving more parity to PWAs (going the opposite route of the current removal) will encourage them to be used more, which I don't particularly like, for the same reason I don't like Electron (including iOS wrapped-PWAs).

[WA]

Fair enough. Regarding (3): The alternative to Electron-Cordova-Wrapper-JS apps is not "native app" but "no app at all". Most people think about flashy apps that probably should be native. You mentioned Slack. But many apps are just stuff that don't have to be an app in the first place, like apps for specific hotels, bus tickets in a local city, app for the local library etc.

These (web) apps as PWAs would offer a better interface and more capabilities than a pure in-browser web app, but they lack the resources to provide a truly native app.

Banning PWAs doesn't encourage native apps, but even shittier web apps. I'd bet 90% of web apps wrapped in Cordova are there only because they need a) local storage and b) push notifications.