[xnyan]

> I think they're very overused

I disagree, native apps on iOS have important abilities that no web application can match. The inability to control cache long-term is alone a dealbreaker if trying to create an experience with minimal friction.

[mircerlancerous]

Service workers allow you to control cache in web apps; you may be a bit out of date.

There are hardware APIs for some stuff that only works in native (cors, raw tcp), but 99% of apps don't need those.

[benkaiser]

I think the parent may be referring to the fact that safari/webkit will evict all localstorage/indexeddb/caches etc after 7 days of not visiting a site. And apparently this now extends to PWAs making it a pretty big blog to building any infrequently accessed PWA that needs to persist user data locally.

[mircerlancerous]

I store my data in the service worker cache, so I guess I'm immune to this issue

[pphysch]

Those same elevated controls are used to steal PII and sell to data brokers. Again, it's the companies that are trying to force apps on their users. If it were genuinely a much better UX, they wouldn't have to do that.

[xnyan]

I don’t think you are correct, but I could be wrong. For example, can you replicate the functionality of TikTok - autoplay unmuted videos as the user scroll down to new videos? It’s the experience that the user expects.

[rpdillon]

I've probably deleted 15 apps from my phone in the past year as I steadily move over to the web for everything.

My chat agent, file transfer tool, Grubhub, Amazon, YouTube, news, weather are all deleted in favor of a set of armored browsers that suppress the trash and clean up the experience. Its been an amazing change, as those companies no longer get a free advertisement on the application grid of my phone, making my use of them much more intentional.

[dwaite]

Sure, once the user interacts with the first video.

If third party native apps were installed and run without user interaction the same as cross-origin redirects, I would expect the same limitations with native apps.

[peaseagee]

I use FB via my web browser (Firefox on Android) and when I look at Shorts, it has this exact functionality. Web browsers on mobile can do this, clearly.

[hermanzegerman]

The Android Browser isn't as crippled as the iOS one. Watch a full screen video on Safari and tap a few times on different places on the screen and you will get a notification about "Typing is not allowed in Full-Screen" or some other nonsense

[kcrwfrd_]

Yes I literally worked on a PWA with this exact feature.

I believe you can see it working on TikTok web as well.

You just can’t have the first video unmuted on initial load, although I wonder if this can be relaxed when user installs a PWA.

[mrguyorama]

I'm sorry but why do you think this can't be done in a website?