The mobile market has a clear preference for apps over webapps.
I love webapps and they have a lot of positives but few devs stop and reflect on what the market is conveying.
I noted a few weeks ago:
PWAs are an effective way of distributing applications permissionlessly, especially on iOS, but there's a few drawbacks:
- Hard to install: the fact that you have multiple steps that need explanation (go to the hamburger menu, tap on install, but on iOS use Share...). As insignificant as this sounds, it's a major UX hurdle for users and why I think PWAs are not more widespread. Apple and Google know this very well.
- Harder to discover: though not needing an app store is an upside, it hurts discoverability, especially on app stores with a social layer like Zapstore
- Reliance on domain names: Not a huge problem but definitely not as sovereign as private keys
- Hard to verify releases: since you pull data and UI from a website, it's unclear when you have upgraded, impractical to sign and next to impossible to audit a particular release. Websites typically perform lots of deployments every day
Zapstore
npub10r…jt2p8
2024-12-16 20:41:00
Author Public Key
npub10r8xl2njyepcw2zwv3a6dyufj4e4ajx86hz6v4ehu4gnpupxxp7stjt2p8Published at
2024-12-16 20:41:00Event JSON
{
"id": "8334fcdaca1a8b2585d1db866116af7fea1aa1ca87fcf16a836ca2d52bbba676",
"pubkey": "78ce6faa72264387284e647ba6938995735ec8c7d5c5a65737e55130f026307d",
"created_at": 1734381660,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"content-warning",
""
]
],
"content": "The mobile market has a clear preference for apps over webapps.\n\nI love webapps and they have a lot of positives but few devs stop and reflect on what the market is conveying.\n\nI noted a few weeks ago:\n\nPWAs are an effective way of distributing applications permissionlessly, especially on iOS, but there's a few drawbacks:\n\n - Hard to install: the fact that you have multiple steps that need explanation (go to the hamburger menu, tap on install, but on iOS use Share...). As insignificant as this sounds, it's a major UX hurdle for users and why I think PWAs are not more widespread. Apple and Google know this very well.\n\n - Harder to discover: though not needing an app store is an upside, it hurts discoverability, especially on app stores with a social layer like Zapstore\n\n - Reliance on domain names: Not a huge problem but definitely not as sovereign as private keys\n\n - Hard to verify releases: since you pull data and UI from a website, it's unclear when you have upgraded, impractical to sign and next to impossible to audit a particular release. Websites typically perform lots of deployments every day",
"sig": "8bd0f0fa7037c09ec203237cb45b82e03c01504d8eb7e9b838a9f38b9f14e745daeea11beb16ee966b34e38020f7e52b6bbbcee4623d1ddfbcf7e2dc621dfa78"
}