I built a mobile PWA app, with functionality equivalent to a native app in look and feel. I put a lot of work in pre-rendering the next views in the background to get it where it’s at.

However, users don’t understand that it’s a platform simply because it’s a website. The marketing around web technology is just that it’s a completely impersonal experience.

Then the first statement out of users is “This is great! When’s the app coming out?”

Thirdly, when users want to go to the PWA, they look around their home screens forgetting that it wasn’t an app.

Fourthly, users don’t know how to add it to their Home Screen, so they invariably type it in their browser everytime they’d like to access it, adding lots of friction.

This has been such an eye opening experience beyond anything I expected, I knew about marketing as UX but I had no idea this is the marketing users are familiar with. So for that simple reason I’m working on the app.

But then of course there is the case of OnlyFans which isn’t an app but has found success. I think this works because its ingress exists on apps, so its discovery can co-opt the origin app e.g Twitter