[alt227]

The original reason apps were popular was because they provided access to device apis such as accelerometer and gps which websites didnt. Think the beer drinking app etc.

Since web apis have caught up and allowed the same functionality, the common perception hasnt shifted back as App Stores have perpetually tried to keep attention so that they keep getting their cut of sales. If everyone knew you could do everything in a wepb page that you can in an app, sales would stop flowing and that is a bad thing for Apple/Google.

Most 'native' apps are just electron wrappers around a webpage these days, so how do you know you 'want a native app', just because it has the convenience of being managed through the app store?

[palata]

> Most 'native' apps are just electron wrappers

Desktop apps tend to be ElectronJS, because somehow Desktop failed. But because ElectronJS sucks doesn't mean that it's impossible to have good desktop apps. I have high hopes that Kotlin multiplatform and Compose multiplatform will make desktop apps cool again.

Then mobile apps are a completely different story: a good mobile app is a lot better than a webapp. At one end of the spectrum, I don't need an app to show a website (this should be visited from the browser). At the other end, I don't want a complicated webapp in my mobile browser, I want a mobile app.

Another thing that web people tend to completely forget is that a webapp is re-loaded every single time. A mobile app is downloaded once and fetches the data, and can sometimes mostly work offline.

I am very, very happy that CoMaps is a mobile app and not a webpage.

[alt227]

Everything you have said here is pretty much incorrect. Are you a coder and do you know how native and webapps work? If not I would do some research rather than assuming, because things you are saying about how webapps work are just not true.

[palata]

You may start by elaborating on why everything I said is incorrect. I can't really engage on "it's wrong, trust me bro".

> Are you a coder and do you know how native and webapps work?

I am, and I do. I am thinking that we may disagree on what a "webapp" is. I meant webapp as "a dynamic webpage that behaves like an app, but in the browser". Not "web tech used to write a desktop app" like ElectronJS. With ElectronJS you ship a desktop app built with web tech. You may also ship a mobile app built with web tech. But that's orthogonal to my point.

My point is that what you load in your browser is not installed. It's fetched at runtime.