BigPete
Klaas Pieter AnnemaThis may sound strange coming from a professional iOS developer but:
Why is this not a website is the most important question of our time.
Corvus
divVerent
Siguza@kp because MobileSafari doesn't implement the necessary APIs. Because if it did, many devs would ditch the Apple Tax. đ
@siguza Safari is this eraâs IE6.
Ken McLeod@kp One answer to this question: because a native iOS app provides more flexibility* than MobileSafari would give to a website.
* "flexibility" can mean the ability to control the user experience, but it can also mean the ability to gather and/or exfiltrate more data.
Rachel Brindle@kp for a less-nefarious reason: because users have been trained to trust apps more than websites on mobile devices.
At a previous company, they had a full-featured iOS app, but the Android app was literally a webview. They did that because customers kept using unofficial Android apps from the play store (which the company didnât like because they wanted to prevent possible fraud. They just didnât want that badly enough to write a native Android app)
@younata yeah. I sometimes try to explain to non-technical people that apps are a strange default but thatâs how weâre trained. When someone has to use Safari to use a website the first question is; where is the app?
It doesnât matter if the app is a web view wrapper. It has to be an app in the App Store or people just wonât use the product.
Apple (and Google) will happily accept and enforce this status quo though.
Phillip UptonCome live in Montana, walk outside past your wifi⌠and see how that works out for you.
Anything not in a flat part of town or the highway is a big olâ âSOSâ for cell coverage.
(Wyoming was the same way when I lived there)
Daniel@philsplace Not letting you do anything meaningful/at all while youâre offline is a big reason to ask this question, and sadly there is no shortage of such apps.
And thatâs not even including the cases where you have slow internet, which browsers tend to handle just fine, whereas over-zealous native devs typically err on the low side by an order of magnitude when setting network timeout policies for their app.
@kp
And thatâs not even including the cases where you have slow internet, which browsers tend to handle just fine, whereas over-zealous native devs typically err on the low side by an order of magnitude when setting network timeout policies for their app.
@kp
@philsplace Web apps work offline but WebKit has always had bad support for those capabilities. When Apple finally implements them there are bad bugs that take a long time to fix: https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show-stoppers
When it comes to WebKit Apple doesnât seem to care about privacy and security.
Alda VigdĂs@kp I have never been asked to make an "the mobile version of website is worse than our app, so use that instead" popover, but that would be one of the reasons for reaching into my drawer to get my undated and unsigned letter of resignation.