Performance of Web Apps Saved to Home Screen Hampered in iOS 4.3

[mdriftmeyer]

didn't SJ say that web apps are fully supported?

Seeing as how HTML 5 support for Safari 5.0.4 is way behind WebKit Nightly, eventually when Safari 6 arrives people will presumably stop complaining. Hell, iOS 4.3 Safari is even behind Safari 5.0.4 in functionality and performance.

The latest Chrome unstable and WebKit Nightly only have partial support for Web Applications. They have zero support for custom scheme handlers and custom content handlers.

When they do, then the performance will change.

 

[jebbe]

Most Web Apps are garbage anyways

But I doubt Apple would do this intentionally since in the beginning before the App Store, they wanted everyone to use Web Apps instead of them putting out a store of their own.

That failed, so they moved on.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

My guess is that apps that are installed as web-apps on the springboard using this :

<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />

are being opened up using UIWebViews instead of loading the entire Safari app. Developers already know that UIWebViews do NOT benefit from the upgrades of Safari in iOS4.3.

When Apple decides to upgrade the UIWebView component (which is not a trivial task), all the webapps will gain in speed.

Apps on the desktop that are merely shortcuts should still benefit from full-speed Safari.

Excellent point.

 

[baryon]

I have never used web apps ever. I though that saving them to the home screen is like a bookmark, bringing you to a specific URL in Safari. How is there a difference between opening a bookmark and going there manually? Isn't it supposed to make no difference at all?

 

[crisss1205]

How were they able to get the SunSpider test as a web app if it is not a web app?

 

[Bubba Satori]

Good. Everyone should be using the app store now.

Down with the internet.
Everything should be iApple.
Everyone should conform.
Choice is blasphemy.
Freedom is slavery.
Good talk.
Ave Steverino.
Amen.

 

[Daveoc64]

How were they able to get the SunSpider test as a web app if it is not a web app?

Anyone can make a web app. It takes one line of code.

 

[camelsnot]

This quote brought to you by the letters N, C, and the number 17.

says you. Lots of corporations are building web apps to interface with their enterprise. It's more than ignorance thinking people in a certain industry are wanting this fixed. $teve Job$ said web apps were cool.. HTML5 was the savior.

 

[Me1000]

There is a lot of misinformation here. So let's lay out some facts

1.web apps saved to the home page are slower than apps running in safari
2. Web apps embedded in native apps are slower (that's the UIWebView stuff)
3. Web apps are just as competent as native apps. Saying that google is the only one who writes good web apps is not only disingenuous, but also very disrespectful. Applications like http://280slides.com http://picsengine.com/home http://gomockingbird.com etc are all great applications done by indie developers. They are targeted at the desktop (so don't pretend like these web apps should run on your crippled iOS device)
4. Apple cripples iOS browers. For god's sake we don't even have an upload button. Some of the new more interesting HTML5 features (web workers for example) are not supported. These are not just bugs, they are purposefully left out of safari.
5. The forward face of apple is not what is really happening. It's crazy to believe apple wanted web apps to be the platform for iOS. Speculating about their intentions is not a good idea. If you want to know something, talk to a friend that works at apple.

 

[Laird Knox]

Is an example of this the Bank of America App? If I access my accounts through he iOS app on my iPhone 4 or just through the browser performance is terrible.

Does anyone else have the same experience?

on my iPad1 it does run better but it still choppy and very slow.

The BoA app and web site should win an award for how poorly it is designed.

The screens on the app are a bit different from the web site but I'm betting it is the same HTML codebase behind an app wrapper. When I downloaded the app I was disgusted with how poorly it runs.

/sticks to 4.2.6

So Safari can run at the slower speed as well? OK then...

 

[camelsnot]

How are you to judge whether the fix is simple or not? Do you have access to the codebase and therefore know exactly what the issue is and how long it'd take? No, you don't. There could easily be some underlying issue that needs to be fixed before Web Apps are updated with the latest WebKit. You simply don't know what the situation is.

How are you to judge it's not Apple up to their old tricks? There may not be an uderlying issue. $teve Job$ may, once again, be showing his a$$ (while talking out of it at the same time).

You simply don't know what the situation is either.

 

[Tastic Bycrom]

It seems to me that the iOS development team @ Apple are either incompetent or jerks. Incompetent because if this was unintentional, then they obviously didn't spend enough quality time to test everything. Why not just use the same Javascript engine in the whole iOS?

On the other hand, if it's intentional, seems very profit-mongering. I understand Apple wanting to make money, but I feel there's more to life than just making profits. Plus, if they made the performance as good as possible, wouldn't make some people want to pay for more stuff?

Take off your tin-foil hat and learn that software development is no easy task.

 

[jrichman63]

So what exactly is the Home Screen?

Is the second page still considered the home page? Because my first page has 2 apps for a clean presentation and I moved my home page stuff to the second page.

Are docked apps effected by this too?

 

[hachre]

Good. Everyone should be using the app store now.

Get brainwashed some more.

 

[GoodWatch]

Down with the internet.
Everything should be iApple.
Everyone should conform.
Choice is blasphemy.
Freedom is slavery.
Good talk.
Ave Steverino.
Amen.

I salute you!

 

[vladzaharia]

How are you to judge it's not Apple up to their old tricks? There may not be an uderlying issue. $teve Job$ may, once again, be showing his a$$ (while talking out of it at the same time).

You simply don't know what the situation is either.

Sure, I don't know the issue either. Never claimed I did, never claimed I knew how quick it was to fix or what their intentions were. But the person I was replying to did.

 

[ksgant]

so, this is a stupid question...how do I get the "web-app" for sunspider which I'm assuming is different than just the web page?

I go to sunspider web page on Safari on my iPhone 4. I run the test there. Gives me about the same speed as you see on the image in the article. 4058 or something like that. Then to make the page a "web app" do I hit the control at the bottom that says "Add to home screen"...is that a web app? Because if it is, all it does it open up Safari again and it's right there, and it gives me the same speed.

What am I missing here?

 

[crisss1205]

Anyone can make a web app. It takes one line of code.

I know that but the SunSpider page doesn't have that line of code. How were they able to make it a web app if it doesn't have that line of code?

 

[typeoserv]

i've seen that untappd is defiantly slower loading on 4.3

 

[vladzaharia]

I know that but the SunSpider page doesn't have that line of code. How were they able to make it a web app if it doesn't have that line of code?

Because they just need a page which links to the SunSpider benchmark. Literally, all you need to do is write an HTML page with that meta tag, and a link to the SunSpider page. It takes all of 5 seconds.

 

[zorinlynx]

I'm annoyed that app web views are slowed down. Guess I'll have to start configuring apps to always open links in safari.

 

[wizard]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

My guess is that apps that are installed as web-apps on the springboard using this :

<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />

are being opened up using UIWebViews instead of loading the entire Safari app. Developers already know that UIWebViews do NOT benefit from the upgrades of Safari in iOS4.3.

When Apple decides to upgrade the UIWebView component (which is not a trivial task), all the webapps will gain in speed.

Apps on the desktop that are merely shortcuts should still benefit from full-speed Safari.

People need to read this! It is not a trivial exercise to move to supporting the new WebKit through out the system. Frankly it is a surprise to me that they updated Safari like this in 4.x release as it is.

Seriously folks this is a dot x release be happy that they stuffed an updated Safari into the platform in the first place.

Finally the developer tools are $5; you can get an awfully lot of info directly from the horses mouth by reading Apples release notes.

 

[fahadqureshi]

I just learned this a separate category of apps. What you have is just a bookmark on your home screen since they aren't actual apps. Apparently there's separate apps that can actually be saved and run like normal apps instead of just acting like a bookmark on the home screen.

Check out the examples here: http://web.appstorm.net/roundups/30-incredibly-useful-fun-html5-mobile-apps/ Then save them to your home screen (I tried Canvas as an example). Now run them. Now open up the multi-task bar. They should be running like any other native iOS app. Interesting, right?

Kind of an oversight if Apple forgot to take advantage of the WebKit updates for these web apps. Patch it up on the double!

wow thanks for that link. i had no idea that this breed of app's even existed.

 

[Daveoc64]

People need to read this! It is not a trivial exercise to move to supporting the new WebKit through out the system. Frankly it is a surprise to me that they updated Safari like this in 4.x release as it is.

It should be VERY easy to implement a new version of WebKit.

 

[wizard]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

People need to read this! It is not a trivial exercise to move to supporting the new WebKit through out the system. Frankly it is a surprise to me that they updated Safari like this in 4.x release as it is.

It should be VERY easy to implement a new version of WebKit.

You mis understand. Web kit is easy as we have seen with Safari. Implementing it into established APIs is not at all. Not even close. You basically have to completely over haul web views for one thing.

As to the comment about whinning it fits this situation perfectly as the noise in this thread for the most part is baseless. In otherwords it is driven by emotion and ignorance. Call it sexist if you want but it clearly conveys the point being made here.