Easy access to push notifications (which can be sketchy, but doesn't have to be) and believe it or not: Letting users put a shortcut on their homescreen. Sure, you can place a shortcut to a PWA in the Chrome browser but most users won't be configuring that, even if you guide them through it.

These seem like reason that help the business, not the user. Are there any legitimate reason that help improve the user's experience for having an app? I can see this for some games and things that native access is usable. but a shortcut to the homescreen and push notifications are mostly an annoyance for users.

What? Those are pieces of functionality that some users actively want. The experience of having to hunt for Yelp in Safari sucks vs. having it as an icon. Being able to get push notifications is effectively the only thing messaging apps even do! If these features weren't important then why do they even exist?! The irony is that Apple knows if they provided push notifications to mobile websites then suddenly their catalog of apps would have a lot less value as people would be much more willing to just make websites.

Like seriously; compare your comment to this person: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27348626 . You just so happen to be weird: that's all.

In Brave/FF mobile you open then menu and click "add to home screen", do other browsers not have that? Push notifications are pretty common on the web now, aren't they? (I don't use them).

Both Chrome and Safari have the "add to home screen", but Safari doesn't have push notifications, not even for "installed" webapp.

I remember the time when news were flooding the internet evangelizing iphones as the platform of the web, a platform that would allow websites do anything a native application could.

What a letdown...

> I remember the time when news were flooding the internet evangelizing iphones as the platform of the web, a platform that would allow websites do anything a native application could.

> What a letdown...

The original iPhone demo showed the actual desktop version of the NYT website loading in Safari. Websites were the ones that later optimized for mobile.

And I don’t remember iPhones being promoted as giving websites anything approaching native app capabilities except when Apple tried to sell that line to developers before they had a public SDK. Nobody bought it, even then.

Most of the non-sketchy reasons are related to iOS Safari being crippled.

For example, I worked on a rich text editor, and we wanted to put a bar with text formatting tools above the touch keyboard. This is not possible in the browser: your webapp cannot measure the keyboard or the remaining available viewport (and the keyboard's size depends on the input method and the iPhone model).

Another example I experienced is when we wanted to have full-screen dialogs with buttons at the bottom. If you do that, then the users have to tap your buttons twice, because the first tap only expands Safari's browser UI, and your buttons near the bottom of the screen only work while that UI is expanded.