Do you think introduction of web apps, will slow down development of native apps?

[TrancyGoose]

Just a thought, in essence, I know that web apps have been around for a while on Chromium based browsers.
I personally daily drive Safari and don't really touch Chromium all that much.
But those of us who use Safari, we can basically turn anything in to an app, outlook web app can become an application and one i am particularly exited to use: Youtube Music, of course it won't give offline content, but still. Do you think this will have any impact on developers and speed on how they port their apps to apple silicon?

 

[TrenttonY]

Just a thought, in essence, I know that web apps have been around for a while on Chromium based browsers.
I personally daily drive Safari and don't really touch Chromium all that much.
But those of us who use Safari, we can basically turn anything in to an app, outlook web app can become an application and one i am particularly exited to use: Youtube Music, of course it won't give offline content, but still. Do you think this will have any impact on developers and speed on how they port their apps to apple silicon?

Apple has made it extremely easy (relative) for developers to port their apps from a iPadOS app to a macOS app… they just refuse too.

I’ve given up on the Mac having a healthy app market.

 

[dmccloud]

Just a thought, in essence, I know that web apps have been around for a while on Chromium based browsers.
I personally daily drive Safari and don't really touch Chromium all that much.
But those of us who use Safari, we can basically turn anything in to an app, outlook web app can become an application and one i am particularly exited to use: Youtube Music, of course it won't give offline content, but still. Do you think this will have any impact on developers and speed on how they port their apps to apple silicon?

I don't think it will have much effect on developers at all. In broad terms, the teams working on the apps (whether for Youtube, Facebook, Google Music, etc..) are separate from the website teams. Also, since offline storage wouldn't be an option for those web apps, it would cut out portions of the existing audience who want the ability to download content for offline consumption. The other consideration is that Chrome web apps haven't made a dent into app development on other platforms (Android, Chrome OS, Windows), so there is an established precedent that can be looked at here.

Apple has made it extremely easy (relative) for developers to port their apps from a iPadOS app to a macOS app… they just refuse too.

I’ve given up on the Mac having a healthy app market.

While it may be easy to port apps from a coding perspective, there are numerous apps for which making them available on the Mac would be unrealistic, or even break the user experience. Examples of this are apps designed for a touch interface over anything else, as well as apps that rely on features specific to iPhones and/or iPads, such as GPS functionality. This also goes back into how most customers use their mobile devices compared to their laptop or desktop machines.

 

[VivienM]

Just a thought, in essence, I know that web apps have been around for a while on Chromium based browsers.
I personally daily drive Safari and don't really touch Chromium all that much.
But those of us who use Safari, we can basically turn anything in to an app, outlook web app can become an application and one i am particularly exited to use: Youtube Music, of course it won't give offline content, but still. Do you think this will have any impact on developers and speed on how they port their apps to apple silicon?

I think it's unlikely that it will have much impact.

One big reason - a lot of "native" apps are actually, if you poke at them enough, Electron-based web apps.

There are many, many developers whose approach to the world for the past decade has been "a web interface for desktops, a nativeish app for mobile." Electron lets those guys pretend to have a native desktop app.

If people didn't see the value of a real native app two weeks ago, I don't think mildly improved support/integration for web apps will change their thinking. And if they saw the value of a native app two weeks ago, that value hasn't changed.

 

[frou]

A huge number of people use Chrome as their browser, and it already supports this kind of separated out PWA that gets installed into /Applications/.

So the question is how many of those people have taken advantage of this feature. I'm not sure, but you don't hear about it very often, so I'd guess not many.

That said, I'm personally glad that Safari is adding this and will definitely try it.

I think that "proper" Mac app development (i.e. really polished AppKit apps) is kinda in a death spiral, because it's only old fogey developers who know the ins and outs of it, and they make up less and less of the developer crowd as time goes on.

 

[TrancyGoose]

A huge number of people use Chrome as their browser, and it already supports this kind of separated out PWA that gets installed into /Applications/.

So the question is how many of those people have taken advantage of this feature. I'm not sure, but you don't hear about it very often, so I'd guess not many.

That said, I'm personally glad that Safari is adding this and will definitely try it.

I think that "proper" Mac app development (i.e. really polished AppKit apps) is kinda in a death spiral, because it's only old fogey developers who know the ins and outs of it, and they make up less and less of the developer crowd as time goes on.

For one, I am very happy with this, i will definitely try YT Music app, and will see how much of an impact it will have on my M1 Pro resources, specifically, RAM and whether it will be different, what I like in implementation made by apple, lanching this web app, doesn't actually start safari, Safari remains sort of "closed", unlike it happened on chromium, when it first started. I can definitely see people using Safari more now as main, as this was the one feature missing. Of course, I am a nerd.

 

[KALLT]

I agree with VivienM.

With any luck, Safari web apps will compete against Electron/Chromium-based apps without bringing the baggage that the latter have. They can bridge the gap between website and native app by providing some of the benefits that native apps have, e.g. a Dock icon, Mission Control and Stage manager, Spotlight and notifications, while sharing credentials and system resources.

For example, I would consider replacing Slack and Spotify with this.

 

[jbwelsch]

I am a huge fan of the feature already. The number of websites that will not produce applications drove me to WebCatalog and WaveBox type apps. I also tried a few custom web wrappers like Fluid. Loved all of them, but this makes life a lot easier. It also links you in with your Keychain passwords, which is a major plus over those others. I've been using alternatives for services that will never have native apps (teacher tools like LMS platforms and Infinite Campus, and things like Proton services).

I think the real problem is the lack of development at all, this is just a nice bandaid from Apple to make life better.

 

[11235813]

A device specific app is a thing of the past. There will only be web apps in the near future. A lot of apps I use even today are a wrapped version of a website. This is much easier for a developer to maintain. Instead of having separate developers for a website, an iPhone app, an Android app, a Windows app, a macOS app, you just make one website and that's it.

 

[Richard Tillard]

In fact, there is truth in the topic of discussion. Especially with all sorts of apps like WhatsApp or Instagram, which are already reluctant to release native apps for macOS.

 

[VivienM]

A device specific app is a thing of the past. There will only be web apps in the near future. A lot of apps I use even today are a wrapped version of a website. This is much easier for a developer to maintain. Instead of having separate developers for a website, an iPhone app, an Android app, a Windows app, a macOS app, you just make one website and that's it.

And... I guess my question is - why is a developer's laziness/cheapness a reason why I have to throw hardware at a task?

Web technologies are horribly, horribly inefficient. Something written in Electron might require 300 megs of RAM and 200 megs of hard disk space when someone writing an old-fashioned native app to accomplish the same thing probably could do it in 10 megs of RAM and hard disk space.

And maybe I'm being charitable - look at Authy, which I would never have adopted had I understood that their 'native' apps were Electron garbage before it was too late. On my M1 Max MBP, where it has the distinct honour of being I think the only non-ARM-native thing left in regular use (because, hey, it's too much work for these guys to replace an embedded Intel Chromium with a universal one, even though somebody else has done all the work), it is currently guzzling 675 megs of RAM and 205 megs of hard disk space. 675 megs of RAM for an app that generates 2FA codes and syncs them to some cloudy thing! Look at what people did twenty years ago with 512 megs of RAM, either in the classic OS or early versions of OS X - in 2003, the lower-end Macs came with 256 megs, while reasonably high-end Power Mac G4/G5 configurations had 512. And those machines did a lot more than generate 2FA codes with that RAM!

And it's easy to say "but RAM is plentiful so who cares?" but it's not, really. Your typical Apple Silicon machine has standard 8 gigs - that's not a huge amount for modern web technologies, Electron, and browsers. Not when a 2FA code generator eats 675 megs alone. And this is why my mom has a MBP with 16 gigs of RAM...

Honestly, it's very revealing to dig up a PPC machine. One of the interesting quirks of history about PPC is that it died before everything started to be filled with embedded Chromiums - indeed, Chrome was first released Intel-only. PPC machines run great running period-appropriate native software. Then, attempt to run a web browser, say TenFourFox, and it is completely unusable on a dual-G4. Then you realize that 20 years of innovation has gone almost entirely at feeding the web technologies beast (plus all the advertising, trackers, etc of the modern web).

 

[TrancyGoose]

I am a huge fan of the feature already. The number of websites that will not produce applications drove me to WebCatalog and WaveBox type apps. I also tried a few custom web wrappers like Fluid. Loved all of them, but this makes life a lot easier. It also links you in with your Keychain passwords, which is a major plus over those others. I've been using alternatives for services that will never have native apps (teacher tools like LMS platforms and Infinite Campus, and things like Proton services).

I think the real problem is the lack of development at all, this is just a nice bandaid from Apple to make life better.

For one, I am waiting for this release, specifically to use Tunein Radio app, they to this day, have no Apple Silicon version .... now, won't be an issue. Especially, since I try to stay away from Chromium as much as possible.

 

[thebart]

I notice there's no Netflix app in the Mac store. I mean Netflix is on everything! My damn car has Netflix. That tells you what a low priority Macs are.

 

[VivienM]

I notice there's no Netflix app in the Mac store. I mean Netflix is on everything! My damn car has Netflix. That tells you what a low priority Macs are.

Not sure Netflix does apps for platforms with full-fledged web browsers... then again, there is a Netflix app in the Microsoft Store. But Microsoft probably paid for that one out of desperation...