it works incredibly well as a PWA and feels 100% like a native app. This also allows me to open it on my portrait-orientation monitor on my PC and it feels very good. Handling is much better than the native lemmy UI and i only visit lemmy ui for admin stuff
Writing a native app, and not just a web wrapper, is a different skillset to writing a PWA. It’s not a quick conversion, it’s a whole new app from scratch and everything would be rewritten.
This is a superb PWA, and web apps will get better in each iOS release.
There are plenty of native apps to choose from if you want one.
Actually, as I understand it, wefwef is built using the Ionic framework, which has a really handy tool called Capacitor that lets you port over a web app to native really easily. It’s pretty neat!
That lets you access native device features from a webapp/website.
It doesn’t make a webapp a “native” app. It would still be exactly the same web based technologies - still a very fancy website. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. As wefwef is amazing
Unfortunately, PWA have a limit of only 50 MB storage on your device. Not sure what this means for wefwef’s ability to store and show content, or to grow features over time.
Just makes it easier for people who are accustomed to searching for useful things mainly on appstores. Many have no idea you can have full functionality in the form of PWAs.
As someone who hasn’t really used many PWAs in the past, I am realizing that like 90% of the apps on my phone could probably just be a PWA. Hell, most of them just seem to be wrapping a browser in an iOS app anyway.
I could have a nice icon of my choice and without browser logo under it. really. that's the only reason. I'm simply a purist and I love to have my UI clean and the way I want it, all my icons have the same form factor and general vibe. I even might give up on wefwef if something decent will come out. And the whole mess because of dumb icon
I don’t think that makes you a purist, I think that just means you have ocd or something 😅
Everyone is entitled to their opinion but I personally think there are way more important reasons for the developers and users as to PWA or native.
I love the frequency of updates wefwef is providing us to improve the user experience by bypassing the approval process of submitting every update to the app stores. And instantly makes the app accessible to users across platforms and not limited to just iOS or android.