I run a website where I get asked quite often to make it into a mobile app, and I reply by showing how to add it to the device's homescreen and not need an app. Never ever ever in the few dozen times I've had this conversation has anyone ever actually done it. In fact most responses to that suggestion have been overwhelmingly negative. They want an app, even though it'd just be a wrapper around the site with no added features, they want an app.

Bingo. That's exactly what end-consumers want. If you have a good enough PWA, you can wrap it in a single webview and push it to the appstore/play market. The presence is the important part, the actual implementation does not matter.

Why not just add the ability to list a PWA in the app store? At that point the installation is intentional and the overhead on Apple/Google is minimal... and Apple still gets their $99/year to allow making it easy to put your app's icon on a user's home screen.

On one hand I can see rational reasons for them not allowing it; Apple doesn't control when you push updates to your PWA, so they don't want to give their seal of approval by listing it in the app store.

But on the other hand, it's pretty depressing to give up the dream of instant app updates, by wrapping your shiny PWA in Cordova and promising to never execute external JavaScript.

Pushing updates without going through the app store has been allowed by Apple as long as the assets being updated are not binary code; specifically CSS, HTML, and JavaScript are okay (I wonder whether WebAssembly will be considered "binary" or not... will be interesting to see). I convinced a former employer to abandon their Xamarin-built app and switch to Ionic (Cordova with nice, fancy UI additions) specifically because they could push updates to the app without going through the app store. Officially (unless things changed?) the Google Play store says this isn't allowed but there is no review process with Google Play so publishing a new app and then pushing an update for the previous version won't likely get you in trouble. If someone HAS been busted by the Google Play cops for this it would be news to me.

Ionic CEO here - have seen no issues with anyone using our deploy (web-content remote update) feature on either platform to date

I recently picked up app development and I went for React Native + Expo. I was shocked that I could push OTA updates without going through the store. Basically if my app was approved once, I can make huge sweeping fundamental changes to the app without running it past Apple again. Basically the only things you can't change are the permissions. Anything else is fair game. And with Expo it was basically trivial to get an app up and working (don't take this as biased praise in favor of RN or Expo, I still have serious dissatisfaction with both technologies, but this particular part was shockingly seamless).

So I guess moral of the story, wrap your PWA in an Expo app and update as often as you want without having to resubmit.

Oh, cool. I think I was confused about Apple's rules on this. I guess you are allowed to push minor updates to your app, as long as it's JavaScript being executed by their JavaScript engine/WebKit.

But apparently there is (or at one point was) a restriction that says you're not supposed to add new features via remote executable code pushes [0] (although I'm not sure if they'd notice).

[0] https://rollout.io/blog/updating-apps-without-app-store/

Microsoft does this on UWP.

well i had a different experience. we dong have a native app, but some of our b2b customers wanted an "app" to use on mobile. The app is responsive so we show them how to add it to homescreen and that's it.

It might be business customers are more willing to jump through hoops. My website is targeted at the general public in a small midwestern town, where technology is a four letter word.

Indeed. Business customers aren't representative of the greater public because they tend to take their issues directly to IT support, they get it sorted, and don't think about it again. Your every day average user doesn't have an IT support department to which to go. They do, however, have the App Store/Play Store.

I run a PWA and can track this based on the "standalone" property. But what's more telling is customer requests. It's a confusing request that it seems like many potential customers haven't seen before. Lots of people ask me to "just put it in the app store" despite having an FAQ with instructions on how to add to the home screen. Many more say they will become customers "when you have an app"

Because of this, I'm working on making my UI more app like and using Cordova to publish it to app stores.

edit: My app is still pretty small but the percentage of logged in users who have ever loaded from the PWA is < 5%

Users always have to be educated, whether it's PWA or how to pronounce the @ symbol a mere 20 years ago.

My guess is that it's rare. Hell, I didn't even know I could do it until I was developing a PWA. I've never seen a website that offers it.

It would be very nice if phones put that feature front-and-center. My guess is that they sideline it so the web can't compete with their native apps.

It really reeks of the same kind of anticompetitive behavior that got MS in trouble twenty years ago.

Apple is way worse in this regard, but Google is still incentivized to keep at least PWAs from being first class citizens on Android because they don't get their app store sales cuts or microtransaction money from them. And at least on Android you can install other browsers.

People consider the hegemony of Chrome to be the premier threat to the open web but I keep feeling iOS Safari is the real drag. Apple is so heavily incentivized to sabotage web tech that could encroach on their app store revenue.

I wonder if there is anything like a PWA store?

Win10 store allows PWAs, and even automatically lists the ones it finds online (via Bing crawler).

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/pwa

I find it all oddly ironic. Remember back in late 90s - early 00s, Microsoft was generally hostile towards open web and the (then only just appearing) web apps, because that undermined its desktop app monopoly? Here we are 20 years later, and now it's Apple and Google protecting their turf on mobile, while Microsoft is promoting PWAs to entice the mobile devs into supporting Win10.

They do it on ChromeOS though, so I guess it is politics as usual.

You can use browsers other than Safari on iOS.

All browsers on iOS are essentially wrappers for Safari. They all have to use the built-in iOS WebView; per Apple's rules you're not allowed to execute JS or anything like that on your own.

Which means no extensions for iOS Firefox nor Chrome.

I can’t install any adblockers on my iPhone, the best is Safari which has some built in anti-tracking but that’s it.

Chrome on Android will show a banner to add it to your home screen.

True, the situation on Android is much better than iOS. Also after you do this, you get an icon in your app drawer and not just the homescreen.

It also shows up as an app in the system menu, with natively controlled permissions, notifications, battery restrictions, etc.

iOS doesn’t have an app drawer, so I’m not quite sure where you’re going with your comparison…

Yep, sorry that was confusing. I was comparing to previous versions of Android. It's relatively new that it's added to the app drawer.

I have a HN bookmark/icon on my home screen.

Yes. Most of my users are using the page as an app and the usage has only increased the last year's.