Why Your App Could Have Been a Webpage: A Hacker's Fix
Your 'App' Could Have Been a Webpage (so I fixed it for you)
I was annoyed when forced to install the Travelbound app just to view a simple itinerary. After reverse-engineering its network traffic, I discovered it was just serving HTML and JSON. I built a lightweight, ad-free webpage that offers better accessibility and features, proving that many native apps are unnecessary bloat.
"Software companies are happy to make their lives harder and more expensive in order to deliver HTML content to fewer people and with fewer features than if they just published directly to the Web."
HN discussion
- Hobbyist developers face prohibitive barriers on Apple's platform, such as the $99 developer fee required even for basic iCloud integration, forcing many to use Python with webview as a workaround.
- Native apps offer distinct advantages over web pages in memory efficiency, battery life, security through store review processes, and deeper integration with system features like Apple Shortcuts.
- Web apps and PWAs suffer from unreliable local storage where browsers or OSes can wipe data, and they lack the perceived security of vetted native applications that cannot change arbitrarily with a reload.
- The prevalence of native apps is driven less by technical necessity and more by marketing appeal, better distribution channels, and the desire to avoid the thankless, expensive burden of self-hosting.
- While many 'crapplets' could be web pages, the original iPhone vision of web-only apps failed because early web technologies lacked the performance and hardware access that users demanded, leading to the current native ecosystem.