Google is a schizophrenic company.

Just watch a few Google I/O tracks, and there is always the future of mobile apps is Android on the Android tracks, while the Chrome/Web tracks are pushing for the future of mobile apps is Web, with an occasional jab at native devs, as if on the room next door they weren't talking about native development.

Then to make it even better, now we have Flutter as the third track.

While PWAs are slowly being adopted by everyone else, Google is the company pushing them.

They even have a Web Site just for PWAs, https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/, so yeah politics.

...or there are just many different ways to solve for the massive variety of problems, and developers with a huge variety of backgrounds, and Google is trying to help them all? p.s. I am a Googler

Which is understandable.

What isn't so understandable is having a speech as if on the next door employees of the same company weren't exactly speaking the opposite.

I don't understand how in stage A one can speak how glorious the future of native apps is going to be, while on Stage B we are hearing how web apps are going to win the war against native apps and PWA are the path to it.

Perhaps their product mismanagement style alone is enough of an indictment for Google to be broken up into smaller companies.

We have seen how WebOS and FirefoxOS turned out. Wishing Google good luck with PWAs on slow devices. Having seen Inbox web app animations and memory usage I'm not holding my breath

Open secret: FirefoxOS "failed" because it could not get a few super popular services in the targeted markets to write apps for it. It's very hard to break the chicken and egg issue without that support when bootstrapping a new mobile OS.

This is what I truly hope PWAs can solve. If they are 'good enough', they will bridge the gap for new platforms until they're popular enough for companies to develop for directly.

The problem is that a web app can never be good enough, because a web app can never be secure. I simply can't trust my private data to a PWA, because the developer can ship me malicious JavaScript at any time. With open source I can compile and audit code myself (or rely on others to do so for me); with an app store I can rely on a vendor to audit code; with a web app I have no assurance.

Did you actually use WebOS? I've had a great experience with the Palm Pre phones, way ahead of its time.

I was a big WebOS advocate, and loved it very much. Owned 3 Pre series phones.

But you do have to admit that UI latency on it was quite high compared to iOS. I mean, so was Android back then, but they improved it significantly.

Exactly. Android had a native stack and it also had terrible performance. I don’t think it was any worse than WebOS’s.

There’s good reason to blelieve that given enough time and even a fraction of resources that the Android team had WebOS would be able to significantly up their performance game (I say a fraction of resources because there is a lot of well funded open source development being done to improve web tech on mobile, through Chromium, WebKit and Firefox that would be leveraged).