Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by troupo 88 days ago
> Yes.

> If your app doesn't work for the wealthiest 50% of users, why go that route?

Why doesn't business hire two teams? One for the amazing native-like PWA, and one for iOS?

> Making a desktop web app work on mobile, just for Android, is a lot of work.

More work than hiring a separate Android team? More work than hiring a team to create a PWA which we've heard continuously for the past 10 years is amazingly easy and native-like?

> Gmail, Office, Docs - they all exist on mobile (as native apps). S

Yes, yes they do. As native apps

> Not in the wealthiest parts of the world, where the money is.

In 10 years you'd think we'd see actual examples of these amazing fast native-like PWAs on Android. All we hear is excuses.

Funnily enough I know of a few. E.g. Foodora's web app is surprisingly good, and it's possible that their "native" app is just running inside a webview, since it's indistibguishable from their website. But even MORE funnily enough, it takes a PWA sceptic to spot good PWA apps when none of the PWA proponents can point to a good PWA to save their life.

1 comments

>> If your app doesn't work for the wealthiest 50% of users, why go that route?

> Why doesn't business hire two teams? One for the amazing native-like PWA, and one for iOS?

You quote me, but missed the exact part where I already answered that question (I presume by accident ;)), so I'll just repeat myself:

> Yes. The web's winning feature is "it works everywhere". If your app doesn't work for the wealthiest 50% of users, why go that route? Making a desktop web app work on mobile, just for Android, is a lot of work. It needs to work on both iOS and Android to make it worthwhile.

For background, this piece by Alex Russell is worth reading:

Platform Adjacency Theory

https://infrequently.org/2020/06/platform-adjacency-theory/