Comment by breakfastduck
5 years ago
They're given a very free pass because it's incredibly easy to block a native app from sending data back or even connecting to the internet at all.
You have a lot more control over something that's running locally than something running serverside that simply using the client to harvest data.
It's even easier to block a web app - just don't visit its web address.
A native app sits on your device, executing all kinds of code, sometimes without your knowledge. With PWAs, the code is more or less open source - all the JS is there for you to inspect - even after obfuscation, you can see the network requests being made in the dev tools of any browser.
I appreciate that and maybe didn't make my point as best as I could.
My point was essentially that you can run a native app without internet access most of the time (and can easily block the app making calls out by switching the internet off or blocking the calls its making) but a web app you have absolutely no control over, you just have to not use it.
That's not true with PWAs. You can have PWAs that operate offline. The problem is that not enough web developers know how to build good offline-only PWAs. But trust me, they're coming!