A couple of weeks ago I was with a friend who was looking at a website for unusual holiday properties and he bemoaned the lack of an app. I asked him why bookmarks didn't work for him, and he explained it all just got lost - he wanted this to be in the "hotels and holidays" section of his phone's home screen. So I showed him how to add a website to his home screen (well, sort of, I've been iOS since ~2009 and he uses Android, so we had to do a little of collaboration to make it work). Mind blown. Effusive thanks. He now has a way to bookmark sites that works for him.
I'm a big fan of the PWA phenomenon, and got very annoyed with my CEO when I was CTO'ing a new platform about 10 years ago, because he wanted to move to native apps just so that a loading screen looked a little nicer. Ended up using a native shell, did the loading screen the way he wanted and then fell back to a WebUI view for core functions.
However, there are some areas where I think native wins out, primarily the developer experience - I'll take SwiftUI + Swift over almost any other UI based developer workflow out there.
WebASM should mean we see a nice little bit of innovation in the web app dev experience in the near future, and I keep meaning to find time to try Elm out, but at the moment the next app I'm thinking about (which has some tricky low latency UI needs), I'm eyeing up native a lot.
I'm a big fan of the PWA phenomenon, and got very annoyed with my CEO when I was CTO'ing a new platform about 10 years ago, because he wanted to move to native apps just so that a loading screen looked a little nicer. Ended up using a native shell, did the loading screen the way he wanted and then fell back to a WebUI view for core functions.
However, there are some areas where I think native wins out, primarily the developer experience - I'll take SwiftUI + Swift over almost any other UI based developer workflow out there.
WebASM should mean we see a nice little bit of innovation in the web app dev experience in the near future, and I keep meaning to find time to try Elm out, but at the moment the next app I'm thinking about (which has some tricky low latency UI needs), I'm eyeing up native a lot.