[olex]

The Fastmail client is good when it's up and running, but not as good as well-implemented native apps. The initial startup is much slower, and the iOS / iPadOS app (which is the same webapp iirc) is pretty bug-ridden, with the webview freezing or app not progressing past the loading animation without a close swipe / reopen.

[robertlagrant]

You can definitely make a webview app that starts as quickly as most native thing (sub-1s start). We used Tauri and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

[sgt]

That's a pretty simple view of native app vs web. Web will always have a lot of baggage that native apps simply won't have, layers and layers of abstractions that still needs to load.

It's true that a blank canvas loaded as a web view will start fast, though. But in practice, when web applications grow - performance tends to take a hit, and the developers also tend to be careless with resources.

[zaphar]

Web developers are not magically worse at this than native devs. See: much of the windows OS lately. The performance of a web view app is more to do with the quality of the devs than the platform it's built on.

[sgt]

Generally though, web developers are of lower quality than native app devs. Often little or no consideration to the layers below, and their focus is more on security rather than speed.

[cogman10]

Funnily, I'd say the reason web apps tend to be worse than native apps is because the web is so much more powerful and flexible.

For a native app, I'm often limited to just a small set of components and maybe images I can put on those components. Animations are out of the picture. Configuring colors is sometimes not available but always painful (every component needs it tweaked, there's no universal way to change it). I can't really change things like border margins, rounding, or adding crazy stuff like wobbles or splash effects on click. And really, the more I try to add those things, the worse experience it ultimately ends up being as the OS style and theming moves on. My best bet is keeping everything as close to native styling as possible because that has the best shot of still being usable in windows 20.

Because web apps allow configuration of everything, everything is configured. There are libraries and frameworks that do mass configuration. You can always add 1, 2, or 20 new layers and webdev has abstracted that away into a simple <MyButton /> component. And because of all these capabilities, you need a pretty beefy runtime to be assured you can do them all. Coupled with the fact that this is all also powered by a javascript engine.

[dep_b]

Yet I never had issues doing any design thrown at me using AppKit, UIKit or SwiftUI.

Only storyboards and XIBs were hard to style globally.

All of the flexibility, but a lot faster than web

[sgt]

Although technically speaking, native is much more flexible as you can literally do anything. But yes, most devs will just use standard UI components and that's it. So your point holds.

[rho138]

The downside of the native app is the open abuse of surveillance. Why does Teams _need_ local network access to function on my ipad? Why does outlook want access to bluetooth from my phone?

Users don’t want to have to configure every app to fuck off, and native web apps (the world we _all_ live in) work way better than some hodgepodge of shit baked together by copilot that’s using unsafe calls and/or libraries.

[eyeris]

The Teams conferencing solution probably needs it.

It’s pretty spiffy when it works - it detects whether you’re in the same room as the conferencing device and suggests pre-muting your audio.

[eyeris]

The teams conferencing solution probably needs it. It’s pretty spiffy when it works - it detects whether you’re in the same room as the conferencing device and potentially suggests muting

[rho138]

Or just… mute the audio

[robertlagrant]

> That's a pretty simple view of native app vs web. Web will always have a lot of baggage that native apps simply won't have, layers and layers of abstractions that still needs to load.

Well, as I say, you can definitely have webview apps that start fast and aren't taking ten seconds to do things. Not just blank canvasses.

[stephenhuey]

Yes, I’ve made multiple Jumpstart iOS & Android apps that work with Jumpstart Rails and the speed is awesome.

[nicoburns]

My main gripe with the Fastmail client is that it doesn't work offline. This is of course absolutely possible to do with a webapp, and IMO ought to be a priority for an email client.

[nmjenkins]

Offline support was added in August last year: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/fastmail-works-offline/

[jonpurdy]

I literally switched on "Enable offline support", caching "All mail" offline on my iPhone a few months ago. Tons of free space, only using 4GB for offline.

But when my phone is actually offline (on a plane or elevator) it beachballs when trying to find something.

[nmjenkins]

(I work for Fastmail). That sounds odd – have you contacted our support team so we can look into it? https://www.fastmail.com/support/

[jonpurdy]

I didn't, but I'll do so now. I usually don't bother with support, because I forget that good companies like Fastmail actually have a competent support team.

[SCdF]

Not OP, but I had to change the mail cache from all mail to recent, I think because it couldn't handle how much mail I had? It would often get stuck not syncing, and offline would be unreliable and showing a blank screen. Recent works fine, but it would be worthwhile folks testing more with all mail enabled, especially if they have larger inboxes.

[everfrustrated]

The mobile client now supports viewing emails offline.

[LopovJack]

Even desktop app on Linux and a web app.

[zchrykng]

Got an example of a well-implemented natice app for email? I'm bugged by some bugs with the Fastmail app, but have generally had a better experience with it than any other client I've tried. Search in particular is far better on the Fastmail app.

[Jakob]

I really like Mimestream, which is a native client for Gmail.

Very fast and supports all the usual native macOS keyboard navigation, e.g. shift or command to amend selection in a list.

[zchrykng]

I've heard good things about it, for sure, but I'd argue that it isn't really an Email client. It is a Gmail client as it doesn't work with anything else. Fastmail is in the same bucket, but it is part of my contention about there not being good Email apps generally.

[Barbing]

It’s really tempting - uses their API for that speed.

I’m worried Google won’t like it someday. It’s such a hassle if they shut you off that I want to seem like the most normal user to them. Pay Mimestream, skip ads, avoid Gmail app telemetry… any incentive for Google to permit it longterm? (Like maybe you’d switch to Fastmail if they killed Mimestream… or maybe not!)

[JumpCrisscross]

> Got an example of a well-implemented natice app for email?

Mail.app isn't total shit. It's not great. But it doesn't fumble the basics, like Outlook for Mac, which thinks it's fine to take like 10s to show me my inbox.

[Barbing]

Why does it seem to take so long to get & read one new email?

I can use get new mail or synchronize in Mail.app, but always spoiled by the instantaneous Gmail app notification. Often don’t have patience to wait for Mail.app for 2FA codes (just OCR or manually type from the Gmail notification mirrored on Mac).

Also should back up a bulk of ancient emails clogging the app, might be partially my fault.

[zchrykng]

Mail.app's search is completely and utterly broken in my experience on Macs and on iPhones.

[JumpCrisscross]

Oh yeah. For search I open the browser, usually. But 99% of the time it works without taking a European Commission session to load.

[rstupek]

It looks like Apple is addressing this with the next release of macOS/iOS

[nunez]

iOS Mail app still undefeated 19 years later

[benhurmarcel]

It has its quirks. For example it can’t attach an image without inlining it. Or if the sender has several email addresses saved it can’t show which one sent you a particular email. And it can’t show you which of your email addresses received a given email.

[notwhereyouare]

it really feels like that not progressing past the loading animation all of a sudden has gotten worse. like yea, used to happen like once a week for me, but now it's probably once a day