Comment by CharlesW
7 hours ago
> also, I care about PWAs / glad we could make your day by introducing you to something new
As the creator of pwascore.com, I'm in your elite club of the teensy percentage of people who care about PWAs.
> I think if it were a viable option on an iphone¹, a nonzero number of people² would choose the more privacy-preserving aspects of a PWA over installing a random app
¹They are, and ²they don't. It'd be nice to blame this on HN's favorite boogeyman, but the reality is that (1) PWAs work fine today (pwa.com), (2) the tech industry is anti-PWA, (3) almost no consumers even know what PWAs are, and (4) consumers who do know also prefer "real" apps.
Lets say you were making an app and had to decide between native or PWA. You don't need much more than push notifications so there shouldn't be a big difference between the two. You do your research and find that you can either have:
a) Native app: publish to App Store, make links on your website directly open the App Store page where the user can install your app
b) PWA: your app is usable directly on your website, but push notifications don't work unless your users add the page to their home screen. You can't have a button on your website to install it - you must instruct the user to navigate some Safari menus to find an option which is hidden *six* taps away
Do you think b) is a viable option? I don't, and I'm sure that's one of the reasons the tech industry is anti-PWA. It also doesn't help that Apple drags its feet with supporting new standards (web push only supported in iOS Safari from 2023, but 2016 in other browsers).