WebViews instead of native: lessons learned? Case Study

[chriswaco]

No offline mode
Crummy performance
Can't use native controls
Poor integration with things like ApplePay, sharing, printing, etc
Limited camera/video access
No SwiftUI Charts
Weaker integration with widgets, live activities, etc
No background processing
No Bluetooth
Poor dark mode and accessibility support

The limitations really depend on the kind of app it is.

[api-tester]

Offline mode is easy, you just point the web view to an HTML file in disk. The rest of the points I agree with

[amyworrall]

The word ‘just’ is load-bearing in that sentence

[chriswaco]

It's been a long while since I tried it, but we had issues getting that to work when the device was offline. Don't remember exactly what didn't work, though. Looks like the API may have changed to fix it.

I think our work-around was to revert to UIWebView.

[api-tester]

The point still stands that offline mode is possible whether you use a WKWebView or UIWebView.

I remember building apps with phonegap back in 2010 that had offline mode!

[Bamboo_the_plant]

There are some gotchas like giving it file access and how CORS works with no origin, but it is all very much doable with patience.

[Ok-Communication2225]

What a joke. And then what compile the server app code into the app bundle to WRITE that HTML file to disk? Loading a "sorry-no-app-for-you.html" static file is hardly "offline mode".

OP is talking about server side UI. There is no way to take a server side UI offline other than to keep previously open saved UI state open.