[HN Gopher] Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better
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Microsoft and Google collaborate to make PWAs better
Author : judah
Score : 102 points
Date : 2020-07-10 15:54 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| Nice, I like the way Microsoft chose to ignore the bad blood with
| Google regarding its apps for Windows Phone and has embraced
| Android.
|
| PWA collaboration seems to be a step in the right direction,
| especially since Edge is using chromium and Microsoft seems to be
| building great PWA apps[1].
|
| Although I'm not entirely sure about Google's end game with
| PWA[2], I hope these kind of collaboration motivates industries
| to build more PWA apps and put pressure on Apple to properly
| support PWA APIs in Safari; then may be, just may be one day
| we'll have fair grounds for new mobile operating systems to
| compete without this Playstore/Appstore duopoly.
|
| [1]https://www.bing.com/covid/
|
| [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23574697
| brundolf wrote:
| Microsoft has also heavily invested in the web ecosystem via
| VSCode, TypeScript, and NPM. Not to mention that Office is now
| chiefly a web app. My guess is that, among other things, they
| see it as a way to cultivate fields adjacent to Azure and
| attract customers to it.
| osrec wrote:
| I agree. Apple is stifling innovation by not supporting certain
| APIs.
|
| They need to stop doing this, or they will hurt themselves in
| the long run. As it is, most people use Safari on iOS because
| they are forced to - all other browsers on iOS are forced to
| use WKWebView, which basically means they are wrappers around
| Safari's view.
|
| To this day, I can't understand why their users stand for this.
| In this regard, Apple reminds me of a cult leader brainwashing
| their followers into believing the cult's way is the best way.
| Makes me a little sick actually.
| EvanWinget wrote:
| I wish that Apple had better support for PWAs and allowed
| alternative rendering engines. The issue is that they are the
| only major player in mobile that cares about user privacy,
| and this allows them to maintain their monopoly for many
| users.
|
| If the option is Android + first-class support for PWAs vs.
| Apple with limited support for PWAs, I'll go for the latter
| every time.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| The caring for privacy is only lip service. Consider that
| on iOS, you cannot get your location without also sending
| that location to Apple. You cannot install an app without
| telling Apple what you installed. You cannot install your
| own app on your device in a usable manner without giving
| banking details to Apple. You cannot subscribe to a service
| that has an associated app from that app without telling
| Apple that you've subscribed to it. To show how much it
| really cares, Apple moved Chinese users' data to allow the
| CCP unfettered access.
|
| Facebook also says it cares about privacy, and I consider
| both claims to be equally believable.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| 99.9% of users don't even know what a browser engine is. Why
| would they care that they're using WebKit instead of gecko or
| chromium? What they want is their bookmarks and such to sync
| between browsers across devices, and Apple lets that work
| just fine.
|
| As an iPhone user I actually like that all phones use the
| same engine. It prevents the "this website is better viewed
| in <browser>" pop up from affecting mobile users (and in
| particular it forces google to support a browser other than
| chrome). In other words, the engine monoculture means that
| making a site work for any iOS users means it will work for
| every iOS user, which I as a user really appreciate.
| alwillis wrote:
| _In this regard, Apple reminds me of a cult leader
| brainwashing their followers into believing the cult 's way
| is the best way. Makes me a little sick actually._
|
| Are you sure you aren't the one being brainwashed?
|
| Why should anyone trust Google, since they make virtually all
| of their revenue from ad tech, which means tracking users
| across the web, even when they don't want to be. Advertisers
| are Google's customers, not the users of their browsers or
| operating systems.
|
| And since Apple makes virtually all of their revenue from
| selling devices and services, who's more credible on the
| issue of privacy?
|
| If we are to believe Apple cares about its users, then it
| makes perfect sense why they don't allow slower, less power
| efficient, less secure and less private web engines available
| on iOS.
|
| "But shouldn't this be up to the user?" some will say ask.
| Yes, but to a point. There are already so many ways on the
| web to shoot yourself in the foot. Apple is making it clear
| that if you want a platform where there are no safeguards,
| then this isn't the platform for you.
|
| There are certainly a tiny, vocal minority of iOS users who
| complain a lot about wanting the ability to shoot themselves
| in the foot if they so choose. But Apple knows those aren't
| their core users and their revenue show that.
|
| _They need to stop doing this, or they will hurt themselves
| in the long run._
|
| People have been saying this for many years and now they're
| valued at over $1.5 trillion during an _economic collapse and
| global pandemic_. Please tell me when the lack of web APIs
| that would make it easier for their users to be tracked on
| the web is going to have any material effect on them.
| tapoxi wrote:
| > If we are to believe Apple cares about its users, then it
| makes perfect sense why they don't allow slower, less power
| efficient, less secure and less private web engines
| available on iOS.
|
| Caring would mean giving people a choice. The real reason
| is they're pivoting into services and other forms of
| recurring revenue. They don't want people building
| platform-independent apps that don't need Apple approval
| and can bill outside of their 30% cut.
| vially wrote:
| > [...] why they don't allow slower, less power efficient,
| less secure and less private web engines available on iOS
|
| Do you have a source that shows how
| chromium/edge/firefox/etc are inferior to safari in this
| regard?
| paxys wrote:
| New leadership definitely helps. Satya seems to want to move
| past the old way of doing things at Microsoft as aggressively
| as possible.
| mandeeeeeep wrote:
| I remember when the microsoft app store on windows 8 were a bunch
| of websites wrapped into an app. It really lowered the quality of
| apps and the overall appeal of the windows app store.
|
| That being said, how will PWAs get around the apple and google
| requirements that apps downloadable from their stores where they
| mention apps can't just be a website wrapped into an app?
| judah wrote:
| > "It really lowered the quality of apps and the overall appeal
| of the windows app store...how will PWAs get around the apple
| and google requirements that apps downloadable from their
| stores where they mention apps can't just be a website wrapped
| into an app"
|
| Fair question. Google is implementing a new quality bar for
| PWAs in their store. See this post[0] for details.
|
| Microsoft also is doing work in this area. We're not ready to
| share details, but will likely in the coming months.
|
| With PWABuilder, our goal is to help devs build _quality_ PWAs:
| ones with rich offline experiences, measurably great
| performance, and apps that are functionally rich. This implies
| something more than e.g. your resume packaged as a PWA. Towards
| that end, PWABuilder analyzes your PWA and gives you feedback
| on capabilities: encourages use of our rich web components[1],
| helps you build a great offline experience[2], and more.
| Whether your app is functionally useful (i.e. not just a
| brochure) is a quality bar left to app stores themselves.
|
| [0]: https://twitter.com/ChromiumDev/status/1276223634550353920
|
| [1]: https://components.pwabuilder.com
|
| [2]: https://www.pwabuilder.com/serviceworker
| FiddlerClamp wrote:
| I wonder if they're doing this for the Surface Duo launch.
| pjmlp wrote:
| They already had this with Edge and Windows Store.
|
| https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/pwa/
|
| The best part was that this way WinRT APIs are directly exposed
| as browser APIs, no need for hybrid solutions.
|
| This is just the next step using the Chrome based engine
| instead.
| judah wrote:
| Fair question. Certainly Microsoft wants Duo to succeed. But
| PWABuilder been pushing for PWAs in App Stores for years -- we
| also support MacOS, Samsung Galaxy Store, Microsoft Store, and
| others. (We're talking with Apple now to enable PWAs in iOS app
| store as well.)
|
| This collaboration with Google took place because Google
| revamped their "PWAs in the Store" story. It used to be a very
| basic story: a native app wrapping a web view that loads your
| PWA. Those worked, but didn't support some modern APIs (e.g.
| service worker, IIRC), didn't share cookies and login
| information with the browser, and other problems.
|
| Google revamped the story here to a more first-class approach
| for PWAs in their Store. It's called "Trusted Web Activities."
|
| And earlier this year, Google created Bubblewrap, a command
| line tool to generate a proper Trusted Web Activity for
| publishing in their Store. So we wanted to take advantage of
| that new and better approach. That's really our reason for
| collaboration here.
| butz wrote:
| Firefox needs to catch up on PWA support for desktop, Safari too.
| judah wrote:
| Yes. For Firefox desktop, here's the open case[0].
|
| I and many others would love to see Firefox supporting
| installable PWAs. :-)
|
| [0]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1407202
| input_sh wrote:
| It's catching up slowly. I can save a website and open it in
| its own window (at least on Firefox Beta).
|
| What's missing is the ability to integrate it with my OS app
| launcher, though I can get around that by adding my own
| launcher. Something like: firefox
| --ssb="https://news.ycombinator.com"
| tie_ wrote:
| Awesome! I hope this will put some pressure on Apple to add
| support for critical PWA features (e.g. push notifications) to
| iOS.
| yeahgoodok wrote:
| You seem to be heavily involved in the PWABuilder website. Can
| you explain why the PWA needs to register a pushManager? I'd like
| to publish my app without setting up push notifications.
| judah wrote:
| You don't need to register a push manager; only if you want to
| send push notifications.
|
| If you're referring to the PWABuilder analysis page, yeah, we
| hear your feedback. We're going to be revamping that page in
| the coming months. We'll deal with push notification score when
| we do that.
| HJain13 wrote:
| As the author seems to be here, the links in the "Add features to
| my PWA" section on pwabuilder website, don't seem to work for me.
| judah wrote:
| Thanks for the heads up. We just changed the URLs to that
| yesterday. Fixing! In the meantime, you can access those
| components here[0].
|
| [0]: https://components.pwabuilder.com/
| techntoke wrote:
| Microsoft is now using Medium as their official blogging service?
| judah wrote:
| Author here. Some teams use it, including ours (PWABuilder).
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Off-topic, but... why?
|
| Is it lower friction to start up your team's blog on Medium
| versus the unified blog platform larger Microsoft teams tend
| to use?
| judah wrote:
| PWABuilder is an open source project and builds cross
| platform web apps. We feel Medium is a better fit than the
| more corporate structured blogs. So far we've been pretty
| happy with Medium.
|
| That said, we have been mulling building our own blogging
| platform using our own tools and web components for the
| sake of dogfooding.
| Nightshaxx wrote:
| You might want to customize it a bit more to make it
| clear this is an offical blog. For a few seconds when
| reading this on mobile I was super confused if this was
| official or just someone outside MS writing about it.
| davrous wrote:
| Thanks for this feedback. We're thinking about hosting a
| blogging platform directly under pwabuilder.com. We've
| got a small team that was mainly focused on writing new
| features & code but we definitely need to better address
| our blogging approach.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Something like this I would expect to be be part of Edge
| Developer Blog, given https://developer.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/pwa/
| techntoke wrote:
| Might I suggest looking into Hugo.
| techntoke wrote:
| That is like a team at Microsoft using Gmail as their email
| provider.
| ta17711771 wrote:
| How?
| vntok wrote:
| What is the name of that blogging software Microsoft is
| providing in competition with Medium?
| techntoke wrote:
| Microsoft uses a .NET static site generator for company
| blogs similar to Hugo.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I am very excited about the idea of both of these monsters
| actually getting behind PWA. One can only wonder about their
| motivations (i.e. anti-trust heating up), but I will take
| whatever I can get at this point.
|
| To me, full support for PWA across all vendors' app stores would
| represent a revolution in the ability for hobbyists and small
| development shops to publish incredible applications.
|
| Has HN not been published as a PWA to the various app stores yet?
| This seems like an obvious use case and could serve as a great
| example for other applications.
| no_gravity wrote:
| The main problem I see in PWAs these days is that they cannot
| permanently store data on the device. As soon as the user deletes
| their "browser data", all the data of the PWAs on the device is
| lost too.
|
| If PWAs would get their own permanent storage like other apps, it
| would be a huge step forward.
| burtonator wrote:
| PWAs are designed with the web/cloud in mind. The permanent
| data should be hosted in the cloud.
|
| One of the issues is that storage in a PWA is done via
| localStorage or IndexedDB... both of which aren't really
| available outside of the browser.
|
| Also, part of the benefit of a PWA is being able to be in
| mobile devices and 'storage' there is different than on the
| desktop.
| bob1029 wrote:
| For the PWAs I'd like to deploy, all I really need is 256 bits
| of entropy to persist on each client. I am entirely done with
| the ideology where I offload arbitrary storage and compute
| concerns to client devices. Keeping it all on the server is so
| much better in almost every way.
| judah wrote:
| Certainly it's true PWAs are subject to the user's desires
| about browser data. I think that's a good thing for users.
|
| PWAs usually store client-side data as a kind of cache:
| cookies, local storage, service worker cache. Caches are not
| meant to be permanent.
|
| There may be room for improvement here, however. One might
| imagine that clearing browser data shouldn't clear data for
| installed PWAs. That's an argument worth further evaluation.
| no_gravity wrote:
| Can you elaborate why it could be a good thing for users?
|
| Not being able to reliably store data on the device means
| that PWAs have to send the users data over the internet and
| store it on an external server. I would think users rather do
| not like that.
|
| I am only talking about installed PWAs here. Of course not
| every website should be able to avoid having its cookies
| deleted.
| judah wrote:
| "Good for users" was in the context of PWAs, not installed
| PWAs. Clearly the user's expectation is that clearing
| browsing data will clear data for web apps they navigate to
| in the browser.
|
| Installed PWAs is another question. I suspect users will be
| surprised if they clear their browsing data only to
| discover they have to login again to Twitter, for example.
|
| I may raise this question to the Edge Chromium team. I'm
| certain it's been raised before, but with Microsoft making
| PWAs first-class on Windows[0], this becomes a more
| prominent issue.
|
| [0]: https://www.windowscentral.com/heres-how-microsoft-
| making-ed...
| no_gravity wrote:
| Keeping the user logged in is not the issue. A PWA can
| inject a unique ID into the installation in various ways.
|
| The problem is the data. Imagine a text editor where all
| your text documents are gone after you cleared the data
| of a different app, the browser.
|
| I wrote a fitness app as a PWA some time ago and its
| pretty annoying to download all the instruction videos
| again every time you clear your "browser data". Plus all
| infos about which exercises you did and when is gone for
| good of course.
| judah wrote:
| > "Imagine a text editor where all your text documents
| are gone after you cleared the browser data"
|
| One way to address that issue is the native file system
| access APIs[0] coming soon, available today in Chrome
| Canary and Edge Canary. There, you'd be able to save your
| documents to the user's file system, just like a native
| app would. Those files will be exempt from any browser
| data clearing.
|
| > all infos about which exercises you did and when is
| gone for good of course.
|
| Might be good to store that data on the server. I realize
| not all PWAs have a proper backend server, but that
| sounds like a good candidate.
|
| [0]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?i
| d=853326
| no_gravity wrote:
| > Native File System API
|
| Great, so there is light at the end of the tunnel!
|
| > store that data on the server
|
| Well, we talked about that already:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23793541
| iggldiggl wrote:
| I wonder how Mozilla will handle this, given that so far
| they deemed file system access as too dangerous even for
| extensions, nevermind random web pages...
| judah wrote:
| Also, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, you may also
| be interested in the Persistent Storage APIs:
| https://web.dev/persistent-storage/
| streptomycin wrote:
| It's only marginally subject to the user's desires. I wrote a
| fairly popular PWA and the most common questions users have
| are...
|
| "Why did all my data get deleted? How can I get it back?"
|
| and
|
| "Why is it saying the browser won't let me store more data?"
|
| The user's desires are pretty clear in both cases, but it's
| very unclear how the user can get what they want.
| ta17711771 wrote:
| So make them app_db side user config data, not local browser
| database config data.
| kinlan wrote:
| You can request persistent storage that isn't cleared.
| judah wrote:
| Good point! I had forgotten about this.
|
| kinlan is referring to this web API[0], which allows a PWA to
| store data persistently.
|
| [0]: https://web.dev/persistent-storage/
| [deleted]
| davrous wrote:
| They can thanks to the Native File System API coming with
| Project Fugu: https://web.dev/native-file-system/. Available
| via origin trial for now but it should be soon released more
| broadly.
| yeahgoodok wrote:
| What's the sense in publishing your PWA in the Play Store? Chrome
| already prompts the user if they'd like to install a PWA shortcut
| when you visit the site. I ask because it costs $25 and while I
| have a lot of time on my hands I'm a cheap ass.
| pjmlp wrote:
| You can get access to native APIs that way, without the typical
| hybrid approach.
| burtonator wrote:
| User behavior... We have a mobile PWA and literally all our
| users are like "I went to the Android app store and you don't
| have a mobile app so you suck" ... but the app already works in
| the browser.
|
| Discoverability is an issue too. If your users search for your
| app keyword there then you're more easily found
| butz wrote:
| Discoverability. Users browsing Play Store might see your app
| in related apps list or in search results. And you will get a
| way to gather user feedback without hosting and moderating
| forum or discussion board. Also, we are still at the point when
| you tell user to download an app, one usually goes to Play/App
| Store, not searches the web.
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| Also Businesses which has no use for an app, can claim 'We
| have an app' as many like to do and now they can convert
| their website to a publishable app more easily.
| judah wrote:
| > "What's the sense in publishing your PWA in the Store?
|
| We've trained a generation of users to look for apps in app
| stores. I blogged about this here[0], but having your PWA in
| app stores means more users for your app.
|
| [0]:
| https://debuggerdotbreak.judahgabriel.com/2018/04/13/i-built...
| yeahgoodok wrote:
| I actually had just read this blog post prior to posting my
| comment. There's a lot of good insight on HOW to publish but
| I didn't see any compelling evidence on WHY to publish
| (specific traffic numbers, etc).
| judah wrote:
| Check out the "Why" header and several paragraphs. I talk
| about reasons why I published my own PWA in app stores:
| some technical, but the big one being that's where the
| users are.
| partiallypro wrote:
| I have a feeling that Microsoft is going to launch an "Edgebook"
| competitor to Chromebook in the the future using Windows 10X.
| This obviously is good for the ecosystem all around, for tablets,
| phones, desktop, etc.
| loudmax wrote:
| Obviously good to have competition for Chrombebooks.
|
| Now imagine how good it would be if there were competition on
| the desktop market.
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