What is the difference between a regular app and a web app? Does iOS have WebApps or is just an Android thing?
I’ve been using wefwef WebApps to browse the fediverse and am curious to understand how it works. I do not have knowledge deep knowledge about coding or programming.
A regular app is an executable you install on a machine. Typically people associate “app” with specifically mobile apps, but technically a program you install on Windows can be called an app, but most people differentiate those by calling them a “program”
A web app is just a name people use for a website that looks and behaves in an “applike” way.
Like you wouldn’t call a blog a web app because blogging is just content you consume.
But if you make a website that “does” something, like a tool (for example most of google’s tools you can use like Google Docs, Google Sheets, etc), folks like to call that stuff a “web app”, because it sort of serves the same purpose of what an app installed on your machine would do but it runs inside your browser on the internet, instead of as an installed executable.
You also then get further specific to what is called the “Single Page Web App”, or SWP. These are web apps that also are notable for the fact they pretty much are just 1 single page with all their functionality in 1 place, no need to navigate to another url triggering a page reload, the entire web app exists at 1 single endpoint and all of its “pages” are within its own logic.
For example if you have a web app where it has “tabs” or “modals” that you can sift through within the webapp, instead of needing to load an entire new url+web page to view em, thats a SWP.
Adding onto limecool’s response, both iOS and Android are able to use them. I’m using wefwef right now on my iPhone. It looks like any other app on my phone and acts a lot like it, too. (As a former Apollo user, I can only commend the wefwef team for a truly spectacular replication of Apollo’s sleek user interface. The similarities are truly striking.)
So they’re kind of like a glorified web bookmarks, but they have some capability for managing their own storage (note when you’re prompted to “update” wefwef) rather than being simple links. As an iPhone user, another notable difference comes when you’re getting a new phone. These days, all your apps redownload whenever you restore from a backup, which of course takes time. But your webapps? They’re ready to go right away.
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