Ask HN: Are installable webapps feasible/worthwhile?

5 points

16 years ago

I've an idea for a consumer-oriented HTML5 app that I'm working on. Without giving away too much information, it's an age-old piece of consumer software that's typically done as a shrink-wrap, install-from-CD kind of thing. But these days, most of the core functionality can be done right in the browser, so I'm developing a webapp to do just that.

How important is it that such an app be "installable" for consumers? The potential concerns as I see them are:

1. puts an icon in the Start Menu/Dock

2. app works offline

Assuming these things even matter, is it feasible to build apps that can do this? Although HTML5 supports offline operation (http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/offline.html) I'm not sure it's widely implemented yet.

Chrome has an app store (http://code.google.com/chrome/apps) but you apparently need a developer build of Chrome for it to work.

Perhaps installability isn't needed at all for a MVP... a simple bookmark might suffice. Thoughts?

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