Comment by abustamam
4 hours ago
It is silly but you have to meet customers where they are.
I think the problem is also that PWAs don't have any discoverability, and no standardization. I did some consulting work for a company that had a PWA. They had a 200-line long react component that was intended to determine what modal to show the user depending on what web browser and OS they were using to instruct them how to install PWA depending on the combination of OS and browser.
This is a lot of friction for the dev, and it's not clear to an average user what a PWA is. But they are familiar with, and for better or worse, trust, the App store. If I didn't know what a PWA and a site said "open menu and click on 'install!'" I'd be very wary of following those instructions!
I think Android and iOS should provide some sort of hook between the app store and PWAs before they really start to catch on.
Yeah, I had a lengthy customer service email template explaining how to install the PWA for when people asked about a mobile app. Almost nobody installed it.
There's an install element in the works. Perhaps that will make it more obvious how to install it https://github.com/WICG/install-element?tab=readme-ov-file
I actually don't know what you mean by PWA. Is that a mobile web site? And by installing it, do you mean installing a link to it on a phone's launcher?
That, but with a little more ceremony. It gets treated as a separate app by mobile OS app switchers and doesn't show the browser's chrome or other open tabs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_app