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That disappointing moment when you realize that what you thought was a mobile app is just a web view

Comments
  • 5
    DevRant is that type of app too (non quite sure) . In fact, many mobile apps for the phone are just html adaptatations of the website.
  • 7
    @linuxer4fun yeah most of them (sadly) are. @dfox we need you to solve this inquiry. Is devrant a webview or not?
  • 26
    Nope, devRant is not a webview. The only places we use webviews is for the swag items listing.
  • 7
    @dfox oh, then sorry for "blaming" you! I was quite unsure... :)
  • 5
    @dfox Thank you master, is good to know.
  • 10
    Why "sadly"? Why the hate of the web platform? If you can't notice the difference, then it means the mobile web has evolved and there are no janks...
  • 0
    @phoomparin security issues... Code injection.... Jap... Totally fine!!!
  • 2
    @phoomparin Two separate reasons, 1 some do it that way because of laziness 2 there is no offline use and it makes hard (sometimes) you do caching
  • 9
    @jpichardo offline websites? no problem, add a manifest to the HTML tag

    [...]
    <html manifest="test.appcache">
    [...]

    test.appcache file content:

    CACHE MANIFEST
    /index.html
    /styles.css
    /scripts.js
  • 3
    @BrianValente hmm, just learned something new, still I dislike using web view to show everything, not the web technologies, I myself am a web developer
  • 2
    @jpichardo me too. I started developing apps with Apache Cordova. Making it look like native takes time but can be done, but the performance is very low compared to a native app.
  • 6
    Are you guys high? Read up on Progressive Web Apps. Read up on Ionic, Electron, etc... Offline support? No problem. Native functionality? No problem. Javascript is coming for you, you old, crusty wannabe elitists.
  • 2
    @korengali haha no, yeah currently you can use whatever you want to do whatever you want, but there is never going to be something that compares to native. As an example xamarin, it is c# and xaml, but it compiles to native.
  • 4
    @jpichardo Offline use? You even know Service Workers, AppCache Manifest and Progressive Web Apps. And no, I developed mobile apps in both native java (I freaking love kotlin tho, it's the best JVM-based language ever since scala) and React Native. I don't think it's because of laziness, but because of business requirements. I personally don't like WebViews too, as they leads to bad UX. I prefer to write both mobile and webapps (We use Vue or React to create PWA, and it's pretty fast. Usually we go with AMP - Accelerated Mobile Pages for content heavy sites.) for our clients, but mobile developers should also know the extent of the web platform in 2017 too.
  • 0
    @phoomparin totally agree.
  • 3
    Amazon came to take interns from our college and they told us the reason why it's not native. I asked them in their QA session with students why their android app isn't native and the guy replied : Android is a fad right now but will die in a few years so why bother. I used to respect Amazon as a company, I still do but after hearing this it lost a bit of respect from me. Android currently dominates the mobile sector, if you can't embrace a new technology, amazon android tech team needs to be changed. Cmon Amazon give me a better app.
  • 2
    @Batdroid That's actually really funny, especially since as far as I can tell Fire tablets run on a heavily modified Android.
  • 1
    @psudo That is why Amazon lost some respect from me. This was double faced. Besides I don't own a fire tablet, but do they update it frequently? And how many modifications are there?
  • 0
    @Batdroid I don't either. I never really got on the tablet train. Tried twice. Sold them the first time around after never using them and then got a 7" one about a year ago that I occasionally use as an e-reader, but only when I'm at home and don't feel like reading on my phone.
  • 0
    Looks like every app using web view are waiting to implement Progressive web app.
  • 0
    Best way to Scam clients with their Personal brand new b2b mobile app
  • 1
    The amazon app still runs a web view . That's a shame 🙂
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