How are you going to have a PWA that works offline with server side rendering? The latest “Apple wants to force everyone to develop apps instead of using the web so they can get their 30% cut of mostly free apps” controversy was about offline storage expiring after 7 days.

Not to mention that the same people who are buying cheap Android phones probably have limited data plans and/or low bandwidth.

By having a server worker that caches the whole site, done.

Apple's decision doesn't apply to PWAs as clarified on a later update.

Plus updating the browser cache every couple of days isn't a big deal, native apps get store updates almost every day.

So, no dynamic changes of the UI? We are talking about “web apps”.

Many "web apps" are plain CRUD entry forms with fancy CSS animations.

I’ve done CRUD apps on mobile mostly for field services (technicians, deliveries, etc.) where it had to work offline. Even then you needed to navigate between screens, menus, navigate to different screens based on options chosen, client side validation, manage state on the client, etc.

You still needed UI changes.

Still possible with service workers without having the poor browser chew a SPA framework.

How do service workers help if you can’t depend on having a network connection?

Are you really saying that it would he more performant that you have to make a round trip just to perform validation? How slow would the hardware have to be for a network round trip to be faster?

By reading from the cache the necessary static HTML and CSS.

Validations always need to be done on both sides, unless one does not value security.

All of this is possible with vanilaJS, using builtin browser features, no need to kill the poor CPU with an additional bloated framework.

I used to be big in native apps, until having seen too many examples of what used to be done in VB/Acess back in the day.

So unless it is a game using OpenGL ES 3.0, Vulkan, Metal, something that requires AR/VR, real time audio, GPGPU for machine learning, or direct access to hardware sensors, it might be quite doable as PWA.

Validation does need to be done on both sides. But validations on the client side means no round trips and you can do validations even when you’re not online. Also even if the content is “static”, if you don’t have access to the network, how do you do simple things like display totals from service charges, a receipt of all the items delivered - propane as deliveries and tank repairs, alarm installation or at home nurse care where they had a checklist?

Even with CRUD apps you need to display dynamic content based on user interaction.

I used to be big in native apps, until having seen too many examples of what used to be done in VB/Acess back in the day.

So you haven’t seen the poor performance of ASP.Net Web Forms with the huge hidden field to maintain state and redrawing the screen for every interaction and a network round trip?

Not to the point that it actually matters, in a world were plenty of people are deploying node, django and rails applications.

if you haven’t noticed, the world is moving away from server side rendering - even Microsoft is pushing toward client side rendering.

I notice what our customers pay for and write on their RFPs, everything else are just caravans passing by our shovel store.