What you are ignoring (and in a pretty condescending way if I may say so) is that the best allocation of limited resources in the interest of users is not always to create scores of native client apps and device integrations. It's not all laziness.

No, it isn't always laziness.

Sometimes it's politics (I had a colleague leave a job because the new director of development mandated they rewrite their flagship enterprise apps in React Native because he got a song and dance from a React Native trainer/consultant and wouldn't listen to the people who knew what they were talking about).

Sometimes it's different priorities (a meetup buddy of mine some years ago had to write apps in PhoneGap because "We're in the oil bidness, not the app badness").

It isn't always "the best allocation of limited resources", either. Apart from having to do extra work to make the UX close to native (which isn't trivial), using a "cross platform" solution means you've just included a giant third party dependency that you don't control or maintain. Call it FUD if you want to, but in the forty-odd years I've done programming/development that's never been a good bet. If resources are really limited, the best bet is to have a decent design and very clear (reasonable) expectations and pay someone good to execute them.

I still mourn the loss of Windows Phone (aka one of three mobile OS choices) because of the "app gap". Small developers wouldn't invest the time or money into porting their app to the small marketshare. Even worse though, large companies would let their apps flounder, if they had one at all; the Bank of America app was simply disabled rather than being updated.

If the PWA concept had caught on, users on all platforms would have an equally good UX, increasing user choice.

Do most phone users really want to install apps for Reddit, Imgur, etc.?

I think this is a really great point. PWAs are not a threat to native apps - they are a great in-between that adapts to different use cases.

Installation, push notifications, etc... are all optional and can be mixed and matched based on what users actually want.

An example would be individual forums are a great use case for PWAs.

If you visit a site a lot, you want to install an icon for it. If you're willing to install an icon for it, you prefer the quality and speed of a native experience. That's just common sense.

Funny enough I couldn't find a decent native app for HN, so I just placed a link to the site in my folder with social apps. That site is the worst thing in that folder.

I know a couple people who dislike Reddit's degraded web experience to drive users to their app. I haven't installed the app myself. Maybe it's a minority opinion. But supposedly Reddit has 1.6 billion unique visitors per month, and about 120 million app installs.

Judging by their non-degraded desktop site experience, thank god we have the app. Honestly, Reddit is one of those sites that make me think the world has collectively forgotten how to make a sane site. It takes seconds to load, and almost everything you go means looking at animated placeholders for a time, until something happens.

I have a workstation that deals with 3D rendering and huge Photoshop files, or compiling sizable projects with no problem, and my CPU is still pegged to 100% when I browse Reddit.

I shudder at the thought of those same people being in charge of my mobile experience. I don't feel like having to replace my phone battery every 3 months, thanks.

I would rather have the choice, myself.