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.