Tags: apps

Optimizing PWAs For Different Display Modes — Smashing Magazine

There’s really good browser support for display-mode media queries and this article does a really good job of running through some of the use cases for your progressive web app.

There was a time when you needed to make a native app in order to take advantage of specific technologies. That time has passed.

Now you can do all of these things on the web:

• push notifications,
• offline storage,
• camera access,
• and more.

Take a look at the home screen on your phone. Looking at the apps you’ve downloaded from an app store, ask yourself how many of them could’ve been web apps.

Social media apps, airline apps, shopping apps …none of them are using technologies that aren’t widely available on the web.

“But”, you might be thinking, “it feels different having a nice icon on my homescreen that launches a standalone app compared to navigating to a bookmark in my web browser.”

I agree! And you can do that with a web app. All it takes the addition of one manifest file that lists which icons and colours to use.

If that file exists for a website, then once the user adds the website to their homescreen it will behave just like native app.

Try it for yourself. Go to instagram.com in your mobile browser and it to your homescreen (on the iPhone, you get to the “add to home screen” option from the sharing icon—scroll down the list of options to find it).

See how it’s now an icon on your home screen just like all your other apps? Tap that icon to see how it launches just like a native app with no browser chrome around it.

This doesn’t just work on mobile. Desktop browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Safari also allow you to install web apps straight from the browser and into your dock.

About half of the icons in my dock are actually web apps and I honestly can’t tell which is which. Mastodon, Instagram, Google Calendar, Google Docs …I’m sure most of those services are available as downloadable desktop apps, but why would I bother doing that when I get exactly the same experience by adding the sites to my dock?

From a business perspective, it makes so much sense to build a web app (or simply turn your existing website into a web app with the addition of a manifest file). No need for separate iOS or Android developer teams. No need to play the waiting game with updates to your app in the app store—on the web, updates are instant.

You can even use an impressive-sounding marketing term for this approach: progressive web apps:

A Progressive Web App (PWA) is a web app that uses progressive enhancement to provide users with a more reliable experience, uses new capabilities to provide a more integrated experience, and can be installed. And, because it’s a web app, it can reach anyone, anywhere, on any device, all with a single codebase. Once installed, a PWA looks like any other app, specifically:

• It has an icon on the home screen, app launcher, launchpad, or start menu.
• It appears when you search for apps on the device.
• It opens in a standalone window, wholly separated from a browser’s user interface.
• It has access to higher levels of integration with the OS, for example, URL handling or title bar customization.
• It works offline.

But there’s still one thing that native apps do better than the web. If you want to be able to monitor and track users to an invasive degree, the web can’t compete with the capabilities of native apps. That’s why you’ll see so many websites on your mobile device that implore to install their app from the app store.

If that’s not a priority for you, then you can differentiate yourself from your competitors by offering your users a progressive web app. Instead of having links to Apple and Google’s app stores, you can link to a page on your own site with installation instructions.

I can guarantee you that users won’t be able to tell the difference between a native app they installed from an app store and a web app they’ve added to their home screen.

It’s time for modern CSS to kill the SPA - Jono Alderson

SPAs were a clever solution to a temporary limitation. But that limitation no longer exists.

Use modern server rendering. Use actual pages. Animate with CSS. Preload with intent. Ship less JavaScript.

The orders of complexity of websites and what they imply for the design of web platform features

An excellent appraisal of the importance of the rule of least power.

Scrappy: make little apps for you and your friends

I really like the thinking behind this project:

We believe computers should work for people, and dream of a future where computing, like cooking or word processing, is available to everyone. Where you can solve your own small, unique problems with small, unique apps. Where you don’t just rely on mass-market apps made by expert programmers. Where you share home-made little apps with family and friends.

Scrappy is our contribution to this dream.

Who’s Afraid of a Hard Page Load?

Why single-page apps are just not worth it:

Here’s the problem: your team almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to out-engineer the browser. The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript.

Meanwhile, the browser marches on, improving the UX of every website that uses basic HTML semantics. For instance: browsers often don’t repaint full pages anymore.

The web on mobile (a response) | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

Rich suggests another reason why the UX of websites on mobile is so shit these days:

The path to installing a native app is well trodden. We search the App Store (or ironically follow a link from a website), hit ‘Get’ and the app is downloaded to our phone’s home screen, ready to use any time with a simple tap.

A PWA can also live on your home screen, nicely indistinguishable from a native app. But the journey to getting a PWA – or indeed any web app – onto your home screen remains convoluted to say the least. This is the lack of equivalence I’m driving at. I wonder if the mobile web experience would suck as badly if web apps could be installed just as easily as native apps?

Here’s a post outlining all the great things you can do in mobile web browsers today: Your App Should Have Been A Website (And Probably Your Game Too):

Today’s browsers are powerhouses. Notifications? Check. Offline mode? Check. Secure payments? Yep, they’ve got that too. And with technologies like WebAssembly and WebGPU, web games are catching up to native-level performance. In some cases, they’re already there.

This is all true. But this post from John Gruber is equally true: One Bit of Anecdata That the Web Is Languishing Vis-à-Vis Native Mobile Apps:

I won’t hold up this one experience as a sign that the web is dying, but it sure seems to be languishing, especially for mobile devices.

As John points out, the problems aren’t technical:

There’s absolutely no reason the mobile web experience shouldn’t be fast, reliable, well-designed, and keep you logged in. If one of the two should suck, it should be the app that sucks and the website that works well. You shouldn’t be expected to carry around a bundle of software from your utility company in your pocket. But it’s the other way around.

He’s right. It makes no sense, but this is the reality.

Ten or fifteen years ago, the gap between the web and native apps on mobile was entirely technical. There were certain things that you just couldn’t do in web browsers. That’s no longer the case now. The web caught up quite a while back.

But the experience of using websites on a mobile device is awful. Never mind the terrible performance penalties incurred by unnecessary frameworks and libraries like React and its ilk, there’s the constant game of whack-a-mole with banners and overlays. What’s just about bearable in a large desktop viewport becomes intolerable on a small screen.

This is not a technical problem. This doesn’t get solved by web standards. This is a cultural problem.

First of all, there’s the business culture. If your business model depends on tracking people or pushing newsletter sign-ups, then it’s inevitable that your website will be shite on mobile.

Mind you, if your business model depends on tracking people, you’re more likely to try push people to download your native app. Like Cory Doctorow says:

50% of web users are running ad-blockers. 0% of app users are running ad-blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that’s a felony (Jay Freeman calls this ‘felony contempt of business-model’).

Matt May brings up the same point in his guide, How to grey-rock Meta:

Remove Meta apps from your devices and use only the mobile web versions. Mobile apps have greater access to your personal data, provided the app requests those privileges, and Facebook and Instagram in particular (more so than WhatsApp, another Meta property) request the vast majority of those privileges. This includes precise GPS data on where you are, whether or not you are using the app.

Ironically, it’s the strength of the web—and web browsers—that has led to such shitty mobile web experiences. The pretty decent security model on the web means that sites have to pester you.

Part of the reason why you don’t see the same egregious over-use of pop-ups and overlays in native apps is that they aren’t needed. If you’ve installed the app, you’re already being tracked.

But when I describe the dreadful UX of most websites on mobile as a cultural problem, I don’t just mean business culture.

Us, the people who make websites, designers and developers, we’re responsible for this too.

For all our talk of mobile-first design for the last fifteen years, we never really meant it, did we? Sure, we use media queries and other responsive techniques, but all we’ve really done is make sure that a terrible experience fits on the screen.

As developers, I’m sure we can tell ourselves all sorts of fairy tales about why it’s perfectly justified to make users on mobile networks download React, Tailwind, and megabytes more of third-party code.

As designers, I’m sure we can tell ourselves all sorts of fairy tales about why intrusive pop-ups and overlays are the responsibility of some other department (as though users make any sort of distinction).

Worst of all, we’ve spent the last fifteen years teaching users that if they want a good experience on their mobile device, they should look in an app store, not on the web.

Ask anyone about their experience of using websites on their mobile device. They’ll tell you plenty of stories of how badly it sucks.

It doesn’t matter that the web is the perfect medium for just-in-time delivery of information. It doesn’t matter that web browsers can now do just about everything that native apps can do.

In many ways, I wish this were a technical problem. At least then we could lobby for some technical advancement that would fix this situation.

But this is not a technical problem. This is a people problem. Specifically, the people who make websites.

We fucked up. Badly. And I don’t see any signs that things are going to change anytime soon.

But hey, websites on desktop are just great!

Moving on from React, a Year Later

Many interactions are not possible without JavaScript, but that doesn’t mean we should look to write more than we have to. The server doing something useful is a requirement for building an interesting business. The client doing something is often a nice-to-have.

There’s also this:

It’s really fast

One of the arguments for a SPA is that it provides a more reactive customer experience. I think that’s mostly debunked at this point, due to the performance creep and complexity that comes in with a more complicated client-server relationship.

What I’ve learned about writing AI apps so far | Seldo.com

LLMs are good at transforming text into less text

Laurie is really onto something with this:

This is the biggest and most fundamental thing about LLMs, and a great rule of thumb for what’s going to be an effective LLM application. Is what you’re doing taking a large amount of text and asking the LLM to convert it into a smaller amount of text? Then it’s probably going to be great at it. If you’re asking it to convert into a roughly equal amount of text it will be so-so. If you’re asking it to create more text than you gave it, forget about it.

Depending how much of the hype around AI you’ve taken on board, the idea that they “take text and turn it into less text” might seem gigantic back-pedal away from previous claims of what AI can do. But taking text and turning it into less text is still an enormous field of endeavour, and a huge market. It’s still very exciting, all the more exciting because it’s got clear boundaries and isn’t hype-driven over-reaching, or dependent on LLMs overnight becoming way better than they currently are.

Daring Fireball: One Bit of Anecdata That the Web Is Languishing Vis-à-Vis Native Mobile Apps

I have to agree with John here:

There’s absolutely no reason the mobile web experience shouldn’t be fast, reliable, well-designed, and keep you logged in. If one of the two should suck, it should be the app that sucks and the website that works well. You shouldn’t be expected to carry around a bundle of software from your utility company in your pocket. But it’s the other way around.

There’s absolutely no technical reason why it should be this way around. This is a cultural problem with “modern front-end web development”.

Your App Should Have Been A Website (And Probably Your Game Too) - Rogue Engine

Remember when every company rushed to make an app? Airlines, restaurants, even your local coffee shop. Back then, it made some sense. Browsers weren’t as powerful, and apps had unique features like notifications and offline access. But fast-forward to today, and browsers can do all that. Yet businesses still push native apps as if it’s 2010, and we’re left downloading apps for things that should just work on the web.

This is all factually correct, but alas as Cory Doctorow points out, you can’t install an ad-blocker in a native app. To you and me, that’s a bug. To short-sighted businesses, it’s a feature.

(When I say “ad-blocker”, I mean “tracking-blocker”.)

I wrote a book about service workers. It’s called Going Offline. It was first published by A Book Apart in 2018. Now it’s available to read for free online.

If you want you can read the book as a PDF, an ePub, or .mobi, but I recommend reading it in your browser.

Needless to say the web book works offline. Once you go to goingoffline.adactio.com you can add it to the homescreen of your mobile device or add it to the dock on your Mac. After that, you won’t need a network connection.

The book is free to read. Properly free. Not the kind of “free” where you have to supply an email address first. Why would I make you go to the trouble of generating a burner email account?

The site has no analytics. No tracking. No third-party scripts of any kind whatsover. By complete coincidence, the site is fast. Funny that.

For the styling of this web book, I tweaked the stylesheet I used for HTML5 For Web Designers. I updated it a little bit to use logical properties, some fluid typography and view transitions.

In the process of converting the book to HTML, I got reaquainted with what I had written almost seven years ago. It was kind of fun to approach it afresh. I think it stands up pretty darn well.

Ethan wrote about his feelings when he put two of his books online, illustrated by that amazing photo that always gives me the feels:

I’ll miss those days, but I’m just glad these books are still here. They’re just different than they used to be. I suppose I am too.

Anyway, if you’re interested in making your website work offline, have a read of Going Offline. Enjoy!

Back in June I documented a bug on macOS in how Spaces (or whatever they call they’re desktop management thingy now) works with websites added to the dock.

I’m happy to report that after upgrading to Sequoia, the latest version of macOS, the bug has been fixed! Excellent!

Not only that, but there’s another really great little improvement…

Let’s say you’ve installed a website like The Session by adding it to the dock. Now let’s say you get an email in Apple Mail that includes a link to something on The Session. It used to be that clicking on that link would open it in your default web browser. But now clicking on that link opens it in the installed web app!

It’s a lovely little enhancement that makes the installed website truly feel like a native app.

Websites in the dock also support the badging API, which is really nice!

Like I said at the time:

I wonder if there’s much point using wrappers like Electron any more? I feel like they were mostly aiming to get that parity with native apps in having a standalone application launched from the dock.

Now all you need is a website.

The biggest issue remains discovery. Unless you already know that it’s possible to add a website to the dock, you’re unlikely to find out about it. That’s why I’ve got a page with installation instructions on The Session.

Still, the discovery possibilities on Apples’s desktop devices are waaaaay better than on Apple’s mobile devices.

Apple are doing such great work on their desktop operating system to make websites first-class citizens. Meanwhile, they’re doing less than nothing on their mobile operating system. For a while there, they literally planned to break all websites added to the homescreen. Fortunately they were forced to back down.

But it’s still so sad to see how Apple are doing everything in their power to prevent people from finding out that you can add websites to your homescreen—despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that push notifications on iOS only work if the website has been added to the home screen!

So while I’m really happy to see the great work being done on installing websites for desktop computers, I’m remain disgusted by what’s happening on mobile:

At this point I’ve pretty much given up on Apple ever doing anything about this pathetic situation.

How Microsoft Edge Is Replacing React With Web Components - The New Stack

“And so what we did is we started looking at, internally, all of the places where we’re using web technology — so all of our internal web UIs — and realized that they were just really unacceptably slow.”

Why were they slow? The answer: React.

“We realized that our performance, especially on low-end machines, was really terrible — and that was because we had adopted this React framework, and we had used React in probably one of the worst ways possible.”

Reckoning: Part 1 — The Landscape - Infrequently Noted

I want to be a part of a frontend culture that accepts and promotes our responsibilities to others, rather than wallowing in self-centred “DX” puffery. In the hierarchy of priorities, users must come first.

Alex doesn’t pull his punches in this four-part truth-telling:

1. The Landscape
2. Object Lesson
3. Caprock
4. The Way Out

The React anti-pattern of hugely bloated single-page apps has to stop. And we can stop it.

Success or failure is in your hands, literally. Others in the equation may have authority, but you have power.

Begin to use that power to make noise. Refuse to go along with plans to build YAJSD (Yet Another JavaScript Disaster). Engineering leaders look to their senior engineers for trusted guidance about what technologies to adopt. When someone inevitably proposes the React rewrite, do not be silent. Do not let the bullshit arguments and nonsense justifications pass unchallenged. Make it clear to engineering leadership that this stuff is expensive and is absolutely not “standard”.

MSEdgeExplainers/WebInstall/explainer_same_domain.md at main · MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers

This proposal is exactly what I was asking for!

C’mon browsers, let’s make this happen!

My bug report on Apple’s websites-in-the-dock feature on desktop has me thinking about how starkly different it is on mobile.

On iOS if you want to add a website to your home screen, good luck. The option is buried within the “share” menu.

First off, it makes no sense that adding something to your homescreen counts as sharing. Secondly, how is anybody supposed to know that unless they’re explicitly told.

It’s a similar situation on Android. In theory you can prompt the user to install a progressive web app using the botched BeforeInstallPromptEvent. In practice it’s a mess. What it actually does is defer the installation prompt so you can offer it a more suitable time. But it only works if the browser was going to offer an installation prompt anyway.

When does Chrome on Android decide to offer the installation prompt? It’s a mix of required criteria—a web app manifest, some icons—and an algorithmic spell determined by the user’s engagement.

Other browser makers don’t agree with this arbitrary set of criteria. They quite rightly say that a user should be able to add any website to their home screen if they want to.

What we really need is an installation API: a way to programmatically invoke the add-to-homescreen flow.

Now, I know what you’re going to say. The security and UX implications would be dire. But this should obviously be like geolocation or notifications, only available in secure contexts and gated by user interaction.

Think of it like adding something to the clipboard: it’s something the user can do manually, but the API offers a way to do it programmatically without opening it up to abuse.

(I’d really love it if this API also had a declarative equivalent, much like I want button type="share" for the Web Share API. How about button type="install"?)

People expect this to already exist.

The beforeinstallprompt flow is an absolute mess. Users deserve better.

Apple announced some stuff about artificial insemination at their WorldWide Developer Conference, none of which interests me one whit. But we did get a twitch of the webkit curtains to let us know what’s coming in Safari. That does interest me.

I’m really pleased to see that on desktop, websites that have been added to the dock will be able to intercept links for that domain:

Now, when a user clicks a link, if it matches the scope of a web app that the user has added to their Dock, that link will open in the web app instead of their default web browser.

Excellent! This means that if I click on a link to thesession.org from, say, my Mastodon site-in-the-dock, it will open in The Session site-in-the-dock. Make sure you’ve got the scope property set in your web app manifest.

I have a few different sites added to my dock: The Session, Mastodon, Google Calendar. Sure beats the bloat of Electron apps.

I have encountered a small bug. I’ll describe it here because I have no idea where to file it.

It’s to do with Spaces, Apple’s desktop management thingy. Maybe they don’t call it Spaces anymore. Maybe it’s called Mission Control now. Or Stage Manager. I can’t keep track.

Anyway, here are the steps to reproduce:

1. In Safari on Mac, go to a website like adactio.com
2. From either the File menu or the share icon, select Add to dock.
3. Click on the website’s icon in the dock to open it.
4. Using Apple’s desktop management (Spaces?) available through the F3 key, drag that window to a desktop other than desktop 1.
5. Right click on the site’s icon in the dock and select Options, then Assign To, then This Desktop.
6. Quit the app/website.
7. Return to desktop 1.

Expected behaviour: when I click on the icon in the dock to open the site, it will open in the desktop that it has been assigned to.

Observed behaviour: focus moves to the desktop that the site has been assigned to, but it actually opens in desktop 1.

If someone from Apple is reading, I hope that’s useful.

On the one hand, I hope this isn’t one of those bugs that only I’m experiencing because then I’ll feel foolish. On the other hand, I hope this is one of those bugs that only I’m experiencing because then others don’t have to put up with the buggy behaviour.

Dao Day 2024 – a regression in the making | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

The arc of the web is long and bends towards flexibility.