Sounds convenient, but I remember the backlash was so bad from this news, they rushed out a dev SDK to add that support in. Different time. "No Flash" sounded like a WTF, too.
And now developers (not end users) are whining about not being able to do good [sic] PWAs
Edit: Users may not know what a PWA is. But they do know what web apps based on Electron and I have never heard any user say that they love Electron apps and they would really love to have the same experience on mobile
To be fair, they're only whining about PWAs, because Apple artificially locked down all native apps. Apple forced the developer shift, their own preferences didn't necessarily change.
If you could install + sell iPhone apps freely, like you can with OSX / macOS apps, 99% of developer complaints about PWAs would vanish.
Yes because the developers on HN can make good graphical apps using cross platform frameworks unlike the
- Java developers
- every mobile OS provider ever who said the same thing - Palm, Microsoft, Google (dart), RIM and even Apple at one point had the same “sweet solution”
So exactly what is the difference between a “cross platform framework that runs on top of a VM that abstracts the difference in the underlying hardware” in this case of cross platform frameworks and a web app where it runs on a top of a browser that serves the same purpose and also abstracts the underlying hardware that has the same drawbacks?
I imagine users care far more about how bloated and slow Slack, Teams etc are.
Rather than whether they can side-load some apps that don't already exist on the App Store. Which apart from gambling, porn and crypto I can't exactly think what they are.
This is about whether or not people might complain about not being able to side-load apps.
As a significant content category is excluded from the app store, it seems very likely that some people would like to side-load those apps and complain about not being able to do so.
[Edit] Another reason why people might want to side-load is to circumvent restrictions or censorship in authoritarian countries (e.g VPNs).
If you can answer this question for Youtube and TikTok, you have already answered it for porn tube sites as well. Other categories would probably be erotic themed chat apps, social networks and of course games. And the reasons are just as valid or invalid as for the respective non-porn equivalents.
As far as I'm concerned, almost all apps could be websites.
And what do you actually get from the YouTube app that you can’t do from the website especially now that Safari finally supports notifications from the web? The same with chat apps?
I prefer using the Facebook website over the native app because the in app webview doesn’t support ad block.
I often prefer webapps as well, for instance because I can open multiple pages to keep state I meant to come back to.
But all the same reasons why some apps need native features and why some people prefer native apps are just as valid for porn. It’s not my personal preference.
Whenever a family member bitches to me about not being able to buy kindle books through the kindle app I count that as a non-geeky complaint about sideloading :)
