File over app — Steph Ango
In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last.
Link tags: apps
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15 Years Ago, Apple’s App Store Changed Everything. Now It Needs a Reboot.
Whereas I used to get excited about a new app on my iPhone, I now often resent being asked to download an app when I know that the website will work just as well and cause fewer disruptions or take up less space on my phone.
Web Developer Ground Hog Day | Go Make Things
JavaScript is great. I love using it, and it does amazing things. But maybe it’s time we stop repeating these same patterns of development over and over again. Maybe we can use JavaScript more responsibly, and focus more effort on HTML and CSS.
Web Apps on macOS Sonoma 14 Beta
It’s great to see how (progressive) web apps are being supported on both iOS and macOS …I just wish the discovery were better.
Rich Harris: Hot takes on the web 🌶️ - YouTube
I don’t agree with all of these takes-of-varying-spiciness, but Rich Harris is always worth paying attention to.
Defaulting on Single Page Applications (SPA)—zachleat.com
This isn’t an opinion piece. This is documentation.
You can’t JavaScript your way out of an excess-JavaScript problem.
People do use Add to Home Screen – Firefox UX
Oh no! My claim has been refuted by a rigourous scientific study of …checks notes… ten people.
Be right back: just need to chat with eleven people.
A pretty sweet push notification solution for mobile Safari
An entire generation of apps-that-should-have-been web pages has sprung up, often shoehorned into supposedly cross-platform frameworks that create a subpar user experience sludge. Nowhere is this more true than for media — how many apps from newspapers or magazines have you installed, solely for a very specific purpose like receiving breaking news alerts? How many of those apps are just wrappers around web views? How many of those apps should have been web pages?
Web Push on iOS requires installing the web app - Webventures
Instead of doing what the competing browsers are doing (and learning from years of experience of handling Web Push), Apple decided to reinvent a wheel here. What they’ve turned up with looks a lot more like a square.
Why I’m not the biggest fan of Single Page Applications - Manuel Matuzović
I guess the biggest criticism here is that it feels like people who believe in the superiority of single page applications and the entire ecosystem focus more on developer experience (DX) than user experience. That sounds like a dangerous blanket statement, but after all these years, I never had the feeling that the argument “better DX leads to better UX” was ever true. It’s nothing more than a justification for the immense complexity and potentially significantly worse UX. And even if the core argument isn’t DX, other arguments like scalability, maintainability, competitive ability, easier recruiting (“everyone uses React”), and cost effectiveness, in my experience, only sound good, but rarely hold up to their promises.
We’re all trying to find the guy who did this
Imagine the web is a storefront, React is a hot dog car, and here’s Create React App dressed as a hot dog:
HTML is the cornerstone of the web — so why does creating a “React app” produce an empty HTML file? Why are we not taking advantage of the most basic feature of the web—the ability to see content quickly before all the interactive code loads? Why do we wait to start loading the data until after all the client-side code has finished loading?
Pluralistic: Web apps could de-monopolize mobile devices (13 Dec 2022) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
But you can’t have a web app without a web-app-compatible browser, and you can’t get a web-app-compatible browser in Apple’s App Store. The only browsers permitted in the App Store are those based on WebKit, the browser engine behind Safari. This means that every browser on iOS, from Firefox to Edge to Chrome, is just a reskinned version of Safari.
jwz: PSA: Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet
If you’re thinking of signing up to Hive or Post:
If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated browser, or if there is no way to make a new post from a browser, then that program is not a part of the World Wide Web in any meaningful way.
Consign that app to oblivion.
The transitional web | Go Make Things
I’ve smelt the same change in the wind that Chris describes here—there’s finally a reckoning happening in the world of JavaScript frameworks and single page apps.
Why We’re Breaking Up with CSS-in-JS | Brad Frost
I’ve seen the pendulum swing back and forth many times over my years building on the web. I too feel like there’s something in the air right now, and people are finally acknowledging that most single page apps are crap.
But Brad makes the interesting point that, because they were incubated when profligate client-side JavaScript was all the rage, web components may have ended up inheriting the wrong mindset:
So now the world of web components has egg on its face because the zeitgeist at the time of its design didn’t have such a strong focus on SSR/HTML-first/ progressive enhancement. Had web components been designed in the current zeitgeist, things would almost certainly be different.
as days pass by — Farmbound, or how I built an app in 2022
Stuart writes up the process up making a mobile game as a web app—not a native app. The Wordle effect reverberates.
It’s a web app. Works for everyone. And I thought it would be useful to explain why it is, why I think that’s the way to do things, and some of the interesting parts of building an app for everyone to play which is delivered over the web rather than via app stores and downloads.
Worse than LaserDiscs?
Kevin takes my eleven-year old remark literally and points out at least you can emulate LaserDiscs:
So LaserDiscs aren’t the worst things to archive, networks of servers running code that isn’t available or archivable are, and we are building a lot more of those these days, whether on the web or in apps.
“Writing an app is like coding for LaserDisc” – Terence Eden’s Blog
I love this: Terence takes eleven years to reflect on a comment I made on stage at an event here in Brighton. It’s all about the longevity of the web compared to native apps:
If you wrote an app for an early version of iOS or Android, it simply won’t run on modern hardware or software. APIs have changed, SDKs weren’t designed with forward compatibility, and app store requirements have evolved.
The web has none of that. The earliest websites are viewable on modern browsers.
As wrote at the time, I may have been juicing things up for entertainment:
Now here’s the thing when it comes to any discussion about mobile or the web or anything else of any complexity: an honest discussion would result in every single question being answered with “it depends”. A more entertaining discussion, on the other hand, would consist of deliberately polarised opinions. We went for the more entertaining discussion.
But I think this still holds true for me today:
The truth is that the whole “web vs. native” thing doesn’t interest me that much. I’m as interested in native iOS development as I am in native Windows development or native CD-ROM development. On a timescale measured in years, they are all fleeting, transient things. The web abides.
Let websites framebust out of native apps | Holovaty.com
Adrian brings an excellent historical perspective to the horrifying behaviour of Facebook’s in-app browsers:
Somewhere along the way, despite a reasonably strong anti-framing culture, framing moved from being a huge no-no to a huge shrug. In a web context, it’s maligned; in a native app context, it’s totally ignored.
Yup, frames are back—but this time they’re in native apps—with all their shocking security implications:
The more I think about it, the more I cannot believe webviews with unfettered JavaScript access to third-party websites ever became a legitimate, accepted technology. It’s bad for users, and it’s bad for websites.
By the way, this also explains that when you try browsing the web in an actual web browser on your mobile device, every second website shoves a banner in your face saying “download our app.” Browsers offer users some protection. In-app webviews offer users nothing but exploitation.
It’s Time to Build a Progressive Web App. Here’s How – The New Stack
Much as I appreciate the optimism of this evaluation, I don’t hold out much hope that people’s expectations are going to change any time soon:
Indeed, when given a choice, users will opt for the [native] app version of a platform because it’s been considered the gold standard for reliability. With progressive web apps (PWAs), that assumption is about to change.
Nonetheless, this is a level-headed look at what a progressive web app is, mercifully free of hand-waving:
- App is served through HTTPS.
- App has a web app manifest with at least one icon. (We’ll talk more about the manifest shortly.)
- App has a registered service worker with a fetch event handler. (More on this later too.)