Less development setup required (you can make a PWA with literally just a text editor and a place to upload files), very easy to distribute, free to distribute, cross-platform (although here progress is still being made).

Lower barrier means it's easier to just publish something small you made for yourself, since it can be free without consideration to loosing money from it.

I've argued both sides of this for a long time. The short argument for web apps are that you have real control over them, which means any platform, any time. An iOS app from five years ago is useless without recompilation with the current toolchain, and even then it only works on iOS. A web page from 1994 still renders unmodified today, on any platform, and will for the foreseeable future.

> A web page from 1994 still renders unmodified today, on any platform, and will for the foreseeable future.

Rose tinted glasses.

There was a time not too long ago where IE6 was virtually required because of activex, vbscript, ie specific markup, etc.

Yes, there are always ways to lock yourself in. If you only use features supported by multiple browsers and consider the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect, you stand a decent chance of long term survival. What you sacrifice is efficiency and polish, which are important, so choose wisely.

Google/apple don’t provide tooling for users to control ios/android app, and most apps are compiled without source code available / verification of the binary. With a web browser you are actually executing interpreted code so it’s easy to read the source, block ads etc

Pls. God no.. Why this obsession with apps when a simple PWA does almost all you need. Apps are akin to what the windows app were a one and half decade back. Like web apps blew 99% of thick client app to oblivion the same is going to happen soon to the mobile apps. It isn't without reason, why Apple isn't too keen with this development (they were one of the last to implement web workers and PWA in their browsers). I hope they learn from MS' mistake and embrace PWA rather than try to impede

It was Microsoft's embrace of PWAs that finally made me change how I see them.

Apparently it is still unknown to most HNers that PWAs can also use native APIs, depending on how they are distributed.

Yes, but that will only work on one platform.

Runs in any browser?

Only a browser that supports those APIs

Both major mobile platforms do. That's more that you can say for the native solutions each platform provides.

With Safari coming around, I think all mainstream browsers except IE11 do support them.

And I think MS recently officially stop supporting IE11.

IE 10, not 11.