alt Hacker NewsA ton of features work only or better on app:
- anything privacy sensitive
- anything processing intense (using optimized binaries)
- widgets
- camera and audio based features *can* work, but are more finicky (or outright broken on ios)
- local storage (exists in web app, short lifetimes on web site)
- performance/latency sensitive work
- (I'm less familiar, but probably local sensors, like gps and acceleration)Replies
anything privacy sensitive
You've got that backwards. Web is more private than an app.
Every regulated healthcare company has a web site. None require an "app."
I sign in to video calls using my browser every day. Saying video/audio requires an app beggars belief.
Privacy is the opposite of what you get with an app. Privacy? Really?
Local storage is available to browsers. Office 365 literally functions in a browser with full access to local storage.
Anything processor intensive can be compiled to WASM. This isn't 2005 anymore.
So... widgets?
I can see an argument for games, where you want to pre-install a large amount of resources, and maybe have a better i/o story. Even that is a function of convenience over necessity.
> anything privacy sensitive
I'd actually prefer that stuff stay in a browser and far away from my local storage on a device I take everywhere. Seems far riskier having it locally.
> anything processing intense
I can play Half-Life 2 in a browser window these days. I can do photo editing and CAD in the browser. I can have entire IDEs in the browser, compilers, non-linear video editors, and more. We're also kind of scoping this to phone apps, they're usually not very processing intense as you quickly hit heat and battery limits.
> camera and audio based features can work, but are more finicky (or outright broken on ios)
Sounds more like an overly restricted OS than anything else.
> local storage (exists in web app, short lifetimes on web site)
Once again, sounds like an overly restricted OS than a browser issue.
> (I'm less familiar, but probably local sensors, like gps and acceleration)
https://sensor-js.xyz/demo.html < works fine
https://openstreetmap.org < works fine
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It's a shrinking area: You can get GPS, accelerometer, etc inputs from a web app nowadays. From my own experience the main areas that are tricky are related to automatically finding and connecting to devices: you can do bluetooth at least, but there's things an app can do with wifi and local connection protocols you can't easily do with a web app.