I think most would be as successful IF they had an equally frictionless payment system. Big hits like Candy Crush could easily be built as a web app. These are not pushing the boundaries of software, they're just exploiting our psychology.

If PWA support is so good on Android, there should be a lot of successful profitable PWA’s on Android. Chrome supports the Web Payments API that should make payments seamless in the browser.

I have removed all my e-commerce apps and use on web versions of those on my phones (Flipkart agrees - https://www.pwastats.com/2017/08/flipkart/ ). I saw my parents doing the same when they uninstalled a bunch of apps like FB & Pinterest and started using the web versions instead to save space and don't seem to have any negative experience.

Which still doesn’t support the argument that Apple wants to cripple PWAs because it makes money on the App Store. Those apps would have been free on the App Store and since they are selling physical goods, Apple wouldn’t have made any money on in app purchases.

I mean it gives credit to the theory that webapps (PWAs in particular) are gaining tractions and big companies are paying attention to it because people are actually using it, which means Apple is afraid it might loose it's stranglehold on the app economy.

The types of apps that are theoretically “moving to the web” aren’t making Apple any money anyway. There is no evidence that there is a trend for the types of apps that actually benefit from in app purchases are moving to the web.

All of the APIs that Apple isn’t supporting wouldn’t help a single major revenue producing app move to the browser.

PWA support is still pretty new. It will take some time before we see a lot of really successful PWA deployments.

counterpoint to that argument: if you want to create an app that runs on both Apple and Android products, and you know that Apple doesn't support the progressive web app specification, why would you waste your time? It makes more sense to use a cross-platform development tool and release on the app store when one of the two big software platforms doesn't support the spec.

Any app that you wrote would also have a web equivalent any way for non mobile environments. So why not just do an iOS app and a web app?

And still waiting for someone to give me an example of an app that makes a lot of money on the App Store through in app purchasing, that could probably make just as much money as a PWA if it weren’t for mobile Safari.

But the implication of this argument is that the benefit of PWAs is to the developer rather than the user, right? If PWAs actually benefited users, then creating one instead of an Android app wouldn’t be waste of time even if you had to create a separate iOS native app in either case.