I use Voyager, a client for Lemmy, on a daily basis and it’s my favorite mobile (iPad) app. Voyager is the spiritual successor to the Apollo client for Reddit.
The app uses Ionic’s Capacitor, which to my rudimentary understanding is the webview-based upgrade of Cordova. I’ve had far fewer issues with this app than the likes of Bluesky (react native) and Discord (I think also react native but not sure).
The webview approach seems to be the only way for a one-person team to feasible provide a cross-platform app with an app-store presence. Another promising alternative to Capacitor is Tauri Mobile which does essentially the same thing, but mobile doesn’t seem to be a high priority for them.
I installed this on Android, and unless iOS experience is massively different, this is not a good example:
- there's no touch feedback (ripple) on many of clickable components. Some that do have it look non-native, inconsistent and sometimes gets stuck
- the search bar on top app bar in `search` tab looks very non-native and non-standard (it's elevated on top of elevated app bar already)
- the lists look iOS-y, especially settings
- the settings list item has weird glitch where it loses background after touching (but not clicking)
- collapsing comments is pretty choppy (on a Samsung S25 so a pretty powerful phone)
- can't swipe down a bottom sheet (with post options/actions)
- it's just not android-y — the navigation is weird, the design is all over the place,
It's not unusable and it's a good tradeoff for a small team I guess. But this is nowhere near the experience a native app can provide, and has lots of small papercuts that would make for at least a slightly frustrating experience. It is a decent app don't get me wrong, but it's clearly not native
Like GP I haven't experienced many WebView based apps that are great so I had to give this a spin and I have to say it's actually pretty good! I would not have identified this as a WebView app if I didn't already know about it from this comment.
You are comparing web view apps to web view apps. “React Native” has muddied the waters here with intentional misuse of terminology. With React Native you still write a web view app - it just ahead of time compiles to run without the browser view on device. But it doesn’t use any native UI components, which is what “native app” used to mean.
I may have read your comment backwards but it seems rather wrong: react native DOES use native UI components, thats why it has “native” in its name. It’s also not compiled ahead of time per se, you still execute JS in the app (not in webview, yes) , but its mapped to native components
Thank you, it appears I was misinformed and/or conflating my knowledge of how flutter works. Mae culpa.
It does seem that many RN apps do React (not native) components when they need to do something custom, which may explain my sub-par, non-native experience with the RN apps I have used.
Even something “custom” is still a native component. The JSX you write eventually creates native views. Whether or not those views and components match the style and behavior of stock iOS or Android is a different story, and whether or not there are performance bottlenecks due to React Native’s bridge (now in theory no longer an issue because of a big architecture rewrite called Fabric) is another.
> The moment you create/share data with a site, what's to prevent them from reselling it?
If I can clearly assert origin and personal ownership of my data, I can forbid further reselling of it.
EU legislation shows that we can actually have the right to demand that a company forgets about us. Asserting such rights become easier the more accurately we define what data is ours.
> If I can clearly assert origin and personal ownership of my data, I can forbid further reselling of it.
Can you? A site's TOS will say that by sharing your data, you grant them the right to display, reuse and redistribute it, the same as you do now. And that would take precedence because your host provided the data. They requested and you provided.
The only thing that would change that is actual legislation. But then the legislation is orthogonal to personal data storage. If you want legislation for that, pursue legislation for that. Personal data storage is completely separate, and the two shouldn't be confused with each other.
The right granted by the TOS elapses when you cancel the respective service, or when you revoke your consent (in which case the service provider may possibly cancel the service). (Some TOS are also simply illegal to begin with.) That’s what the GP is referring to.
No they don't. I don't know where you've gotten that information, but none of it is correct.
I mean, a TOS could be written that way. But they're generally not, because companies don't want to self-impose limits like that.
The TOS usually has something like "grant the platform a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to host, display, distribute, modify, and otherwise use that content in connection with the service".
This is demonstrably not fantasy as the example case is a fully productionized network (Bluesky and the rest of AT-net) that’s having real-world impact to the point where it’s under threat from several authoritarian states.
Don't get me wrong, I'm in the tech industry and generally more online then likely 95% of the population, but ime ... Nobody even knows what bluesky is?
(They also don't know what X is, though they DO know what Twitter is)
And even more niche products like mostodon, the fediverse altogether etc are entirely unknown to most of the tech industry too.
Tech is downstream of culture. Seems that smart people keep getting duped by this idea.
For example Twitter and Facebook didn’t result in a bunch of Democracies springing up after the Arab Spring, it resulted in the complete opposite. Tech simply amplifies the culture that was already there.
Bluesky is not decentralized. Building a centralized system on top of a protocol that can also theoretically support decentralized systems does not make it decentralized. https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/
Honestly, that’s not been my experience. Granted the UK is less authoritarian than most. But the general attitude is people who care don’t even use Bluesky and those that don’t continue to use Meta services because why wouldn’t they if they don’t care.
I know the topic of mental health and social media is different from the topic of independence vs the monolithic web. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t significant overlap in terms of those who are willing to boycott Meta for privacy reasons are also the kinds of people who likely dislike social media for other societal reasons too.
> the point where it’s under threat from several authoritarian states.
This is a victim fantasy, and if being under intense attack from the state meant you were rebelling against the authoritarian system, then you would be capping for Parler, Gab, X and Tiktok. Bluesky, however, is only under attack from its own users, who are authoritarian trolls. At least the management seem to be getting sick of them, because it is actively inhibiting their growth* that they've been used as a base for the angriest, most entitled, least interesting people on the planet. It must be hell trying to manage a site filled with people demanding to speak to the manager.
It is also just a centralized twitter clone backed by VC looking for a return; not a revolution.
[*] Of course, it was their strategy to cater to that group because of all the free advertising they'd get from the media. But it had and has nothing to do with Dorsey's hopeful redemption arc, which was only about decentralization (i.e. not having speech under the control of people like him) and resilience. Bluesky was supposed to be bittorrent.
Wasn’t BlueSky kinda ruined by the whole leftist Twitter exodus while simultaneously being fawned over and settled by Reddity political types? Maybe I’m missing something but I’ve tried to use it a few times and it just feels like another internet echo chamber silo (even if that’s due to user self-isolation and not the underlying tech).
It doesn’t really rely absolutely on domain names; at the very root there’s just a DID. DNS happens to be the best we’ve got right now as a human-readable username and address in-one goes.
We’re evaluating Keyhive for use in our distributed chat application and my colleague wrote an in-depth explainer on Keyhive’s underlying Key Encapsulation Mechanism BeeKEM, which is a decentralized offshoot of TreeKEM used in MLS: http://meri.garden/a-deep-dive-explainer-on-beekem-protocol/
That one line on its own should be enough put the illegitimacy of this proposal on clear display. Privacy for me (the surveillance state) but not for thee (the populace).
No idea why this is getting downvoted; this is a very important correction since the “tragedy of the commons” meme is based on a flawed premise that needs to be amended.
Only for the people already affluent enough to afford the ever-more expensive subscriptions. Those most in need of a floor-raising don’t have the disposable income to take a bet on AI.
It's very easy to sign up for an API account and pay per-call, or even nothing. Free offerings out there are great (Gemini, OpenRouter...) and a few are even suitable for agentic development.
Either you are the item being sold or you are paying for the service.
Nothing is free, and I for one prefer a subscription model, if only as a change from the ad model.
I am sure we will see the worst of all worlds, but for now, for this moment in history, subscription is better than ads.
Let’s also never have ads in GenAi tools. The kind of invasive intent level influence these things can achieve, will make our current situation look like a paradise
I'd never buy anything as overt as an advertisement in an AI tool. I just want to buy influence. Just coincidentally use my product as the example. Just suggest my preferred technology when asked a few % more often than my competitors. I'd never want someone to observe me pulling the strings
At this point I care far more about an open (and credibly ethically-sourced) data model than open code, open weights or whatever. I wanna use models that can tell me whether or not a resource I’m pointing to is in its training data or not.
https://github.com/aeharding/voyager
The app uses Ionic’s Capacitor, which to my rudimentary understanding is the webview-based upgrade of Cordova. I’ve had far fewer issues with this app than the likes of Bluesky (react native) and Discord (I think also react native but not sure).
The webview approach seems to be the only way for a one-person team to feasible provide a cross-platform app with an app-store presence. Another promising alternative to Capacitor is Tauri Mobile which does essentially the same thing, but mobile doesn’t seem to be a high priority for them.