The web is my favorite OS
I like progressive web apps. They feel like this alternate reality between how smartphones evolved, and how they could’ve evolved. Looking at you, Firefox Phone (RIP).
Native apps chew through system resources, constantly updating in the background and relying on whatever device you’re using to do the heavy lifting. On top of that, almost every app feels completely different depending on the OS.
Debian uses a different GUI toolkit than MacOS or Windows. iPhone does things completely different than Android. Don’t get me wrong — that’s what makes each OS unique; they all have different personalities.
They all do the same things, just in wildly different ways.
Sometimes it’s good to have a unified look. Apple does this really well. Music, Podcasts, Apple TV, Messages, Safari, Apple News and even the Phone app — you can glance at any one of those and immediately recognize Apple’s signature style.
Same with Android, kinda.
You can usually spot a stock Android app thanks to Google’s Material Design. But then Samsung does One UI, LG had their thing for a while, HTC had Sense when they were still relevant, and so on.
It can be beautiful, and it works really really well for system apps. Animations are usually smoother and gestures feel more fluid.
With web apps, whoever you’re hosting them with does all the heavy lifting. You pay for their computational power instead of letting your phone constantly poll for updates in the background, usually collecting data about you every step of the way.
PWAs don’t have that problem. They update on their own servers and they’re ready to tell you everything they’ve learned while you were gone, as fast as your browser can load the page.
I recently switched from a constantly rotating mess of RSS apps in favor of CommaFeed Miniflux and it’s the most fully featured and powerful RSS reader I’ve ever used. It looks pretty basic at first, but you can style it however you want with your own CSS and JavaScript.
I stopped my endless pursuit of the perfect Read it Later app — one that I would actually use, rather than saving hundreds of random links and notice in six months I hadn’t opened the app once. Instead, I set up a self-hosted Linkding instance alongside my Miniflux pod. Now I have a private website full of links I can check out whenever I’m bored.
Instead of tapping the share button, waiting for my phone to launch another app on top of an RSS app, showing me a dialogue and then, finally, sending it to the bookmarking app, I just click the Save button in Miniflux. It adds a predefined tag and quietly beams it over to Linkding where I can pick back up later.
Such simple, little things. But it makes my endless pursuit of finding cool stories around the web so much more enjoyable.
And I’d rather have apps that look the same across all devices than devices where all the apps look the same.
I don’t have to wait for the devs to finally introduce dark mode, or a Dracula theme. I can just code it myself. If things start getting bogged down during heavier tasks, I can just bump up the RAM and processing power, pay a few cents more per month, and I’m golden.
The web feels like an OS of its own — one with infinite possibilities once you start building a little stack of PWAs on your home screen.
They’re not tied to any single device. They’re not locked behind an app store. They’re just… there.
I’m not a developer, so maybe I don’t know exactly what I’m talking about. But as an end user? I fucking love the web as an app everything platform.
I’ll forever wonder what Firefox OS could’ve been if only it hadn’t crashed and burned so quickly. The idea was there, just maybe not the timing.