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?
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.
An excellent appraisal of the importance of the rule of least power.
If there’s one takeaway from all this, it’s that the web is a flexible medium where any number of technologies can be combined in all sorts of interesting ways.
It’s great to see how (progressive) web apps are being supported on both iOS and macOS …I just wish the discovery were better.
This is very convincing.
Once again, Safari has fucked up its implementation.
Read the book I wrote about service workers. It’s all yours.
A bug report for Safari on Mac’s add-to-dock feature.
It’s fine to require JavaScript for read/write functionality. But have you considered a read-only mode without JavaScript?
Reframing the principle of least power.