this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Well now I have a new “app” to test. I could login with my reddthat account just fine, and it acts like a native app on iphone if I first open it in safari and then add it to the home screen. I can “close” it and it remembers my account just fine on reopen. TIL more things about lemmy.
Yep ... voyager is a PWA!
Personally, I much prefer all of the alternative WebUI frontends to the native apps.
While the native apps can be awesome, and all of their developers are doing great things for the fediverse, right now the fediverse is, IMO, best thought of as a web first ecosystem, just because of how DIY, volunteer/FOSS and non-profit it is. Alternative webUIs seem to me a better and faster way to get flexibility and user options across the fediverse.
They also avoid what I fear is a dark pattern with mobile apps, which is that the platform that gets a good mobile app all of a sudden has a significant advantage and "market inertia". But expecting the creator of a new platform to create two mobile apps is way too much. And so you have to wait for mobile developers, which is almost certainly a popularity contest with a pretty strong feedback loop. This seems to me contrary to the spirit, goals and even health of the fediverse at the moment, which is very much still in an experimental prototyping phase.
Plus, these PWAs work pretty well and seem to clearly be developed faster, and of course, are inherently cross-platform ... because you know, that's what the internet is about.
well said 👏