Ask HN: Will there be resurgence of webapps instead of app store?
2 points
1 hour ago
| 2 comments
| HN
Transatlantic ties are at the poorest level. Across the world, govts are wanting to reign in control (for good/bad). Rest of the world also wants data protection (at least in paper) and everything hosted locally. Is dependency on AppStore and PlayStore to reduce? Will the web move towards browser (with the caveat that the most popular one is still from USA)?
duxup
1 hour ago
[-]
The driver for apps in my experience is that companies want to have an app, it's not even a technical thing much of the time, many I work with would do fine with a website / pwa and such. I'm not sure that is changing.
reply
austin-cheney
51 minutes ago
[-]
I sure as hell hope so. I cannot stand the private gardens that are the app stores. But, there are some problems to solve.

* Illusion of portability. Web apps need to be less of web sites and yet still appear as portable as phone apps. Commercial web site apps still feel like private gardens hoarding your private data. Seriously, is there is any real privacy benefit comparing Facebook versus the Apple App Store.

* Web apps tend to be shiny in appearance but heavy and clunky under the hood. We need to get away from this unnecessary abstraction layer framework bullshit. If you ask the developers about it you get back first person pronoun based answers like you are talking to autistic people or small children. This is a huge cause of complaint from everyone on the planet that isn’t a web developer.

* In the early days of the web the motto was “content is king”. This has not been true for a very long time, and yet the powers that be still try to force it. Most people just want better software, as in an application that accomplishes something more than saying something. This is what makes the app stores so dramatically better for most users, but web developers still haven’t gotten that memo.

reply