On: Moving from Native Apps to Progressive Web Apps

[victorhooi]

Is this a given though?

What is stopping a progressive web-app from performing as well, or nearly as well (to be impercetible).

I would have assumed that most of the time waiting is on network events - so using things like service workers to handle things asynchronously, and also handle caching would reduce things.

I watched a presentation on how Google made the IO 2016 webapp (https://events.google.com/io2016/):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__KvYxcIIm8

and they used quite a few clever tricks to tweak performance.

[bsder → victorhooi]

> What is stopping a progressive web-app from performing as well, or nearly as well (to be impercetible).

Direct access to graphics, direct access to network, and direct access to storage.

The problem is that direct access to network and storage are ALSO security hazards.

[josephg → bsder]

The desktop is (slowly) making inroads on that front through app sandboxing, backported from mobile operating systems like ios and android. I really look forward to being able to run native apps on my desktop without worrying about the network & filesystem access they have.

[pjmlp → victorhooi]

That is the whole point.

Native apps are fast and enjoy every feature the OS has to offer.

Web apps are a pile of hacks that require conferences sharing clever tricks, usually browser specific, to make them usable at all.