Electron gives you far, far more access to native libraries and hardware than PWAs will ever dream about. People are still arguing about how to expose USB devices, bluetooth, etc. in the browser for example. With an electron app you can just npm install a few native wrapper libs and go to town. It's great for moving clunky old native GUI apps (IDEs, etc.) to a more modern cross-platform codebase.

Unlikely, because Electron is very useful in exposing system and hardware APIs.

For most apps - wouldn't PWA's be sufficient as implemented today. Presumably, they'll expose more and more hardware APIs over time?

Even basic things like reading and writing files from the filesystem are obnoxiously difficult in a pure browser or PWA environment. Storing state in general is full of enormous pitfalls and eccentricities, like 50mb limits for some browsers or just completely random total deletion of all app state at the browser's whim.

Seems like they are making a lot of progress on that front: https://web.dev/file-system-access/

Fine, but these are proposals. We want something we can work with today, something that we have the power to hack on that will expose new systems we come up with to HTML/JS, and that is the niche that Electron-like systems fill really well.

Supported in Chrome and Edge today.

PWA is useless if you need to bypass CORS(i.e you can't develop a general rss reader for example). In practice PWAs are just a shortcut to a website.

  On electron you get closer to native apps in terms of network and OS access so I believe the PWA are and Electron are quite different platforms.

Do PWA's support notifications?

If not, then no.

Web notifications do exist, they're horrible though