Pwa vs Kivy App
FleetingI love PWA. In particular, I love the idea that people already have the whole UI toolset at hand (the browser) and I don’t need to rely on some extra ui framework like gtk, Qt, tk…
Yet, after some time playing with them, I realized that:
- it is not practical when used in the afterlife for my phones, as I cannot install the same version of chrome in them and therefore I have a very heterogeneous feature set,
- it still feels like a web page, even when installed in the phone. And sliding down will refresh the page,
- some features that I often want to use are pretty young and difficult to use, like Bluetooth Low Energy or the file access API.
- the shortcuts made in the home screen are pretty hard to add manually. I have to manually navigate to all the pages and click on add to screen. This is not practical when simulating loosing my phone from time to time.
On the other end, there is kivy and my attempt to have a a python runtime on android that went pretty well. With it, the only feature differences is what the android API provides, which is much most stable than the PWA one.
Also, with the a legacy from another lifetime, I can still run the same code in a android 4 device, which is pretty neat.
Also, I can install the runtime only once and use python modules to create several application, making the installation from scratch much easier.
It is also easy to control the application from outside, making it possible to run all sort of automation, like synchronising the podcasts, starting the pomodoro timer etc from the comfort of my computer.
The only downside I can see is that it will be harder to have two application running side by side, like a podcast player along with an interval timer, while with separate applications, is it easy to do with the split screen.