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Hacker News (YC)?
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Popularity Score: 4
This app was mentioned in 7 comments, with an average of 1.71 upvotes
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HTML apps can be an order of magnitude more economical to make especially if you're supporting multiple platforms. It shouldn't be surprising that some people and companies don't have the resources to have the slickest possible UX on every platform.
It's just as possible to make bad native apps as well. I think this is a really well done HTML app that most people wouldn't notice wasn't native: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.premii.hn
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.premii.hn
I find it to be the most usable one.
Since you already have a pretty good mobile website, just use cordova to wrap it up. There is a cordova push notification plugin, google it.
Ionic: you will have to re-implement site in iconic. Its mostly angular.
react: you will have to re-implement your site in react.
Based on my hacker news app, I know user don't care about native look. Some user do (only after they find out its not native), but you can't have 100% of the marketplace.
Cordova works pretty good for 90% of apps out there. In fact if majority of app uses cordova, mobile platform would have been in better place.
These are my apps build using cordova:
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.premii.hn
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.premii.reddit
- https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-yc/id713733435
and on the web
OP/blog was talking about backbone, angularJS and other 3rd party frameworks, and about not using them.
I care too much care about performance. I prefer my app to be super fast or as fast as it can be. Also prefer to tweak design to my liking.
I have used angular at my previous company and know about backbone and ember. I felt they all very slow, and won't work or do what you want to do. Specially for mobile spa, these frameworks are huge and slow. Bootstrap is super huge.
I use jQuery, and micro templates. Number of places I use jQuery is also very small. Found jQuery to be slow compare to vanilla JS. Example: $(element).show() and $(element).hide() are like 30 times slower compare to $(element)[0].style.display = 'none/block';
You can say, I have written my own framework. It doesn't do much. Its more like how I write my app.
I write all my API related code one place. More like Angular Factory/service. Even if I have used angular JS, I would have written same line of code. It also does local/session storage caching. Well I will have to write then in angular too. it has async and sync interface. Angular factory is only async. So I will have to write my own code for that.
View are pretty much generated using API response, and micro template. Angular would have provide for loop and if conditions but slow rendering. Micro template way faster compare to Angular view rendering but I have to write my own for loop and if condition. There is no use of two way data binding in my apps or 99% of the apps.
AngularJS rerenders when you go back to a view. I hate that. Try my app in mobile, and see what happens when you go back to a list view from a comment view.
My app sends 21 KB of gzip css. 14 KB is for icons, and 6 KB for everything. Bootstrap alone is 13K (Gzipped). I would have probably used 5% of the code, probably had to overwrite most of the default style. and on top of that my CSS.
FYI: My apps works on iOS, Android, Firefox, Windows Phone 8.1, all desktop browsers including IE10+, and available as a native in the iOS app store and Android play store.
This Hacker News app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.premii.hn is the best for me.
Agree that Angular is slow and ionic is slower.
But performance of the web apps are not bad. Android 4.0 was as not that good, but its been improving ever since. Its very close to native on both platform.
It also allows developer like me to have an app on iOS and Android. My app on iOS and Android has 4.5 star ratings.
iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-yc/id713733435 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.premii.hn
Or you can try it out on the web; http://hn.premii.com/
If I had gone native, my app would have been only on one platform.