this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Not native, no thanks.
Actually I highly prefer WefWef because it runs at Native like speed, it’s very well built.
I especially like that it’s a PWA and not a native app, because native apps have too many permissions on your phone and they can have so much access to your data in comparison.
It’s not uncommon in this world for someone to make a nice app, another company to buy it and you don’t even realize while your data is being sold. This could definitely happen to a PWA too but the attack surface decreases.
PWAs are cheaper (in this case free) to maintain too. Apple charges you $100/year to be a developer . Google is more generous $25/lifetime for android. These operating systems change often and keep deprecating stuff, forcing devs to continuously fix unnecessarily broken stuff. This doesn’t happen with PWAs as they follow the web standard.
Well put. From what I can tell the main thing it needs is push notifications. I’ve already added a shortcut on my home screen so it’s as good as a native app to me.
I don’t disagree with you much, except on the part of permissions.
Native apps will always have more access to your data compared to PWAs. PWAs work on the browser’s permission model, whereas native app work on your OS’s permission model. For a malicious PWA app to do something wrong, it needs to not just bypass browser’s permission model, but the OS as well, making it more safer.
On the maintenance side, it’s not just the cost but time as well. You could make a change in your PWA and everyone will have access to the update instantly, whereas you have to do manual steps to get it all the way to a published state and wait some time for approval.
Things are rarely deprecated in the web space, so it’s very unlikely something would stop working, which isn’t the case for native apps where existing features break often. I’ve developed both kinds of apps and my pain has been more with native apps, although sometimes I have no other choice because everyone prefers the native ones for the ease.
Then you need to also develop for Android and iOS separately. Yes there are tools like React Native and Flutter but they’re not super easy to maintain either.
Testing takes time too. While web apps a dev can instantly see changes as they change their code, and debug it easily too, native apps take time to deploy.
Moreover, for an iOS app it’s not just $100 a year, but now you need a Mac computer to build and test it easily as well.