Comment by scarface74
5 years ago
Every time I see this argument I have the same question. How many successful web apps are there for Android? Apps that make the most money on the App Store are free to play games with in app purchases of loot boxe, coins, etc. how many of those are feasible on the web?
On the other hand, which apps that make money via in app purchases would be viable and successful as web apps?
I think most would be as successful IF they had an equally frictionless payment system. Big hits like Candy Crush could easily be built as a web app. These are not pushing the boundaries of software, they're just exploiting our psychology.
If PWA support is so good on Android, there should be a lot of successful profitable PWA’s on Android. Chrome supports the Web Payments API that should make payments seamless in the browser.
I have removed all my e-commerce apps and use on web versions of those on my phones (Flipkart agrees - https://www.pwastats.com/2017/08/flipkart/ ). I saw my parents doing the same when they uninstalled a bunch of apps like FB & Pinterest and started using the web versions instead to save space and don't seem to have any negative experience.
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PWA support is still pretty new. It will take some time before we see a lot of really successful PWA deployments.
counterpoint to that argument: if you want to create an app that runs on both Apple and Android products, and you know that Apple doesn't support the progressive web app specification, why would you waste your time? It makes more sense to use a cross-platform development tool and release on the app store when one of the two big software platforms doesn't support the spec.
Any app that you wrote would also have a web equivalent any way for non mobile environments. So why not just do an iOS app and a web app?
And still waiting for someone to give me an example of an app that makes a lot of money on the App Store through in app purchasing, that could probably make just as much money as a PWA if it weren’t for mobile Safari.
But the implication of this argument is that the benefit of PWAs is to the developer rather than the user, right? If PWAs actually benefited users, then creating one instead of an Android app wouldn’t be waste of time even if you had to create a separate iOS native app in either case.