[cafed00d]

Why can’t a business be built solely without giving Apple a dime? The web is free — as in freedom and as in gratis. It has a developer tools system funded by hundreds of companies, developers and community members.

There’s hardly any order of dipping, if any.

Why doesn’t the web compete away Apple’s “dips”?

[immibis]

Because Apple limits the viability of non-native apps on its mobile devices? Same reason it refused to allow Flash. It wants you to stay in the walled garden with the expensive fees.

[troupo]

Android has been the dominant mobile OS for over a decade. Additionally, desktop browsers have been a thing since forever.

Where is the multitude of amazing native-like web apps that we keep hearing about?

[johnnyanmac]

> Android has been the dominant mobile OS for over a decade.

worldwide, and not by a large margin. I believe it's 60/40 last I checked.

Among US and a few other first world countries, it's nearly 50/50, with a very small advantadge to Apple. Slashing your consumer base in the biggest markets isn't an attractive proposition.

>Where is the multitude of amazing native-like web apps that we keep hearing about?

well Apple made PWA's harder to do in the EU, so ask them... They're doing what they did to Flash long ago, with much less justification this time around.

[troupo]

> well Apple made PWA's harde

So. Let me get this straight. Android is dominant in the world. In first world countries it's 50/50 (though it's 69% in the EU). There are also desktops where Chrome is dominant.

And yet, somehow, there are still no amazing PWAs[1] that are the future as everyone claims, because somehow Apple prevents you from building them for those dominant platforms.

[1] Don't mention Figma or VSCode before you also mention how much effort went into implementing them.

[talldayo]

> And yet, somehow, there are still no amazing PWAs

There are plenty of great PWAs. People bring them up on a regular basis and you piss and moan when we say Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Mastodon, Pinterest, Uber, Trivago, Starbucks, Dominos, Stitchfix, Adam & Eve or Hotels.com are usable online. You specifically complain because none of these apps are killer features to you. I don't know what to say; clearly they exist and you're trying to minimize the number of apps that technically qualify.

People refuse to take you seriously when you repeat this same tautology. Of course PWAs aren't popular on platforms that deliberately go out of their way to make them infeasible alternatives to a first-party service. It's not my fault that your purview of the technology is arbitrarily limited.

[troupo]

> There are plenty of great PWAs. People bring them up on a regular basis and you piss and moan when we say

1. Funny how "on a regular basis" only comes after prodding these people multiple times, pointing out Android and desktop exists, and wading through numerous complaints how no, it's not true, and Apple prevents PWAs from existing.

Even in this discussion instead of naming PWAs right off the bat you first pretended that Android isn't dominant, and completely ignored Chrome dominance

2. It's also funny how "the amazing great PWAs" are inevitably not that great, are they?

Instead of being great and amazing they are just... "usable online". Each of those significantly much better as native apps. Without fail most of them would be much faster, fluid, less janky and resource-hungry if they were just static sites with links instead of ... whatever they are. Oh yes, they are usable.

> clearly they exist and you're trying to minimize the number of apps that technically qualify.

"Technically qualify". That's a great turn of phrase you used there.

So, we went from "boohoo limits the viability of non-native apps on its mobile devices" to "usable online" and "technically qualify".

I, for one, don't want to use apps that "technically qualify". I want actual fast fluid non-janky and non-resource hungry apps that are a joy to use even if they are the most mundane apps out there. That is precisely why I keep asking: given that Android dominates mobile space, and Chrome dominates desktop platforms, how come the best examples you can come up with barely "technically qualify"?

> People refuse to take you seriously when you repeat this same tautology.

People refuse to accept PWA fanatics when they keep saying grand words with very little to back them app. All you can do is complain about Apple.

> Of course PWAs aren't popular on platforms that deliberately go out of their way

You'd think that PWAs would be great and amazing on platforms that don't have any real or perceived limitations. And yet, all you can come up with is "usable online" and "technically qualify". But sure, do keep complaining how it's Apple who's preventing you from building great native-like experiences on the web.

[0xRake]

trolll

[cafed00d]

Reading the comments is convincing enough to believe there is no viable business to be built on the mobile web. It's great technology, sure; but not a great business. Mobile web apps won't pay the bills for people who build them. It seems worth everyone's time to have those mobile web devs instead build native apps. Ergo, Apple's "dips" are justified costs of doing business.

[dzonga]

on the web - people forget there's google tax.

i.e ads or search engine placement.

countless of public companies have it in their reports that mobile app users generate more revenue compared to web whether desktop or mobile.

and i'm not talking about game companies.

[troupo]

> Why doesn’t the web compete away Apple’s “dips”?

Because the web sucks at building apps? Because the web can barely render a few lines of text and several images without lag and jank? Because the web lacks useful and powerful primitives and controls to build anything but the most primitive UIs? Because...

[rambambram]

The web is more than good enough. There's just a lot of people drinking the kool-aid and believing big tech's subtle and not so subtle messages about the web being shite. Of course the web is shite on devices from companies that compete with the web. They actively undermine it.

[JumpCrisscross]

> web is more than good enough

For content delivery, yes. For deeply-interactive apps, not in my experience: every vendor that went web-only that wasn’t just serving up text, in the end, forced me to a competitor.

[troupo]

In my experience, the only people drinking kool-aid are those claiming that the web is good enough, and failing to deliver web apps that can do anything beyond the absolutely primitive stuff.

With very few notable exceptions which are notable precisely because they are so few.

[throwitaway1123]

The web is absolutely more than good enough for the vast majority of apps. I was playing Quake Live in the browser on a thermally throttled dual core laptop 15 years ago, but the hive mind here at HN will have you believe that the generic social media apps that dominate the charts all need to be "close to the metal": https://apps.apple.com/us/charts/iphone/top-free-apps/36

[troupo]

Just because you played Quake doesn't mean the web is good for "vast majority of apps".

The web can barely display simple text and images without jank because that is inherent limitation of the DOM that you cannot escape (that, and the absolute dearth of useful controls and utilities in the browser).

You could of course build stuff with canvas/WebGPL/WebGPU, but then you have to reinvent the whole world from scratch because those are low-level (and in case of Canvas quite limited) APIs

[throwitaway1123]

> Just because you played Quake doesn't mean the web is good for "vast majority of apps"

It means that at least 15 years ago it was more than powerful enough for all of the 2D Candy Crush style games which make up the overwhelming majority of mobile gaming apps.

> The web can barely display simple text and images without jank because that is inherent limitation of the DOM that you cannot escape

I've seen you repeat this phrase over and over again like a mantra on HN, but without examples I can't really gauge the performance problems you've run in to. The overwhelming majority of jank on the web that I've experienced is due to advertising bloatware (an adblocker is indispensable), and occasionally bad engineering (e.g. someone forgot to make an event listener passive, or isn't debouncing an event) not some inherent limitation of the platform. What are some examples of popular apps that you think require the full brunt of a modern chip? Every M3 iPad review I've watched ends up saying essentially the same thing: "this chip is powerful, but besides Geekbench benchmarks we have nothing to use it for".

[lukeschlather]

One thing I can quantify directly: in Zoom's native Windows app I can reply to a question and share my screen essentially instantly. That is to say I can do like "you can see here" and I've shared my screen before I've finished speaking, in the Google Meet PWA I have to say "here let me show you..." and pause while I wait for the screen share UI to load, I find the button to share the correct screen, and go.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Zoom saves me 5 minutes out of every 30 in meetings, in fact it might be conservative. And this isn't just a question of the chips (though native Zoom does make better use of it) but also display, audio input/output, even global keyboard shortcut handling.

[throwitaway1123]

After some of the CVEs linked to the Zoom desktop clients I wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole [1][2], but I don't want to move the goalposts since we're talking about performance here. It's hard to tell whether or not the disparity is due to a Screen Capture API performance issue, or just bad engineering from the front end team at Google Meet, or even just bad UI design. Hiding features behind buttons and menus will always add a noticeable delay to an action, but that's just bad UI design, not a technical problem.

> but also display, audio input/output, even global keyboard shortcut handling.

I personally have never had a display or audio hiccup that I could attribute to a browser limitation. I don't even own a device with a display powerful enough to max out Youtube.com's 8K video resolution limit. I'm not sure why you've had issues with keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard events are well established and widely supported [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20387298

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=zoom+vulnerability

[3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/KeyboardEve...

[troupo]

> Of course PWAs aren't popular on platforms that deliberately go out of their way

Strange how we went from "The web is absolutely more than good enough for the vast majority of apps" to "majority of mobile gaming apps."

> I've seen you repeat this phrase over and over again like a mantra on HN, but without examples

I mean, almost every single web "app" out there suffers from this. The DOM isn't built for highly dynamic interactive applications. It's a system to deliver static text and images.

> What are some examples of popular apps that you think require the full brunt of a modern chip?

Now you're pretending I said something I didn't.

However, it's funny how the amazing fast web sites that are more than enough for the majority of apps struggle with even the most basic tasks even on maxed out machines. I mean, Slack's app needs up to 20% of CPU even on an M* Mac (last I tried it was M1 Max IIRC) to render a few animated emojis.

It's a single example, but it's quite representative of the state of the Web.

[throwitaway1123]

> Of course PWAs aren't popular on platforms that deliberately go out of their way

You've got your signals crossed. That was another commenter who wrote that statement [1].

> Strange how we went from "The web is absolutely more than good enough for the vast majority of apps" to "majority of mobile gaming apps."

We didn't go from one thing to another. I addressed a subset of the app market: gaming apps. Just like your Slack example addressed a subset of the app market: chat apps.

> I mean, almost every single web "app" out there suffers from this. The DOM isn't built for highly dynamic interactive applications. It's a system to deliver static text and images.

This is not a technical argument, it's a philosophical one. The council of browser elders never convened to proclaim that web browsers are only meant to deliver "static text and images", that's just your philosophical viewpoint. In fact, Apple is currently pushing WebXR to support the new Vision Pro, so apparently they didn't get the memo about "static text and images" [2].

> Now you're pretending I said something I didn't.

You said that the web is not performant enough. CPU speed is a pretty big component of performance.

> I mean, Slack's app needs up to 20% of CPU even on an M* Mac (last I tried it was M1 Max IIRC) to render a few animated emojis.

Slack's desktop app or Slack's web app? If you're talking about the Electron app, well then yeah bundling Chrome is never going to win efficiency awards, but now you're pretending I said something that I didn't. I'm not defending Electron apps. Everytime I discuss the web on HN someone does a bait and switch and starts talking about Electron. Don't conflate Electron with the World Wide Web.

If we're talking about chat apps, then I've watched high definition streams on Kick, Twitch, and YouTube where the chat is streaming in over Websockets faster than I can read it. The human brain at that point becomes the actual performance bottleneck. But tell me more about how the web can only handle a few lines of text (by commenting on a website).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40891602

[2] https://webkit.org/blog/15443/news-from-wwdc24-webkit-in-saf...

[redwall_hp]

Quake Live also required an NPAPI browser plugin. So it wasn't a web application any more than for delivery and loading the binaries it had download.

[throwitaway1123]

Plugins like Flash, Silverlight, and NPAPI were common at the time, but anything running in a web browser is still a web application. It feels like you're making a distinction without a difference [1]. Either way, the web can performantly do what Quake Live did back then without plugins today, and it can certainly handle the Flappy Bird and Angry Birds style apps that people are playing on mobile devices today. Just take a look at some of the Unity WebGL and threejs demos.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_without_a_differen...

[johnnyanmac]

the web isn't shit per se. But it's horrible in the one way it matters to business; it is very hard to monetize web content compared to apps. That's a small part of why flash games quickly gave way to mobile.

But it's hard to deny there are quite a few technical shortcomings. Shortcomings only just now starting to dimish as WebASM/WebGPU gain traction.