I’ve never seen anyone explain to me why, as an iOS user, this is a good thing of preferable to a native app.
I’ve seen lots of pro-developer arguments. And anti-Apple’s tight control arguments.
But no one has ever explained to me why as a user I should want a PWA that isn’t some form of the arguments above.
Developers and their time matters more for the above since they're a smaller, minority population whose services are disproportionately necessary as opposed to users (who are more replaceable).
From purely a self-centered user's point of view, it doesn't matter, and might even be a negative since they don't get Apple's high-touch review. But it's not like Apple cares all that much about the opinions or user experience of the user either. One positive I can think of is more diversity and availability, there are just many more PWAs available. Another is time saved - if a user can start using your PWA in a couple seconds instead of painfully installing the app over a minute, then over a billion users you've saved very significant time.
I would even argue this sort of time saving might cause "natural" selection.
Then you want native apps, not websites.
It's significantly more efficient for the end user: fewer resources consumed on a few billion devices vs. a few dozen devs building separate apps.
Ah yes, the elusive unicorn of a "well built basic app"
> web app also grants significantly more consumer freedom of choice.
Literally nothing in this conversation up to this point mentioned consumer freedom and choice.
What about consumer freedom and choice not to approach the heat death of universe through the use of websites-as-apps (on of the most inefficient ways to make apps)?
I have an app like that... I make it by myself, and I have no desire to make 5 different GUIs. And yet thousands of people on iOS use it as a PWA. That seems pretty pro-user.
The downside is, my app performs worse in Safari than any other browser, so these iOS folks with high end iPhones are getting about the same experience as Android users with $100 phones. I bet I would have even more iOS users if Apple let them use a better web browser :)
Many of us hate iOS, Apple's taxation, and Apple's asinine rules with a burning passion. But we have no choice but to develop for the OS that 50% of Americans choose. It sucks.
It's as if AOL won and we had to build what Time Warner wanted and had to pay 30% of our revenues.
It's as if we're living in a Steve Baller hellscape, but everyone worships it because it was from the other Steve.
The modern tech ecosystem sucks.
Picture a maybe-for-legal-reasons-theoretical app that needs to be supported on android and iOS plus would massively benefit from the ability to preview the mobile app in a supporting Web portal.
PWA gives us :
- A unified codebase across 2 apps and a Web portal (same project produces the ios, Android and web builds, reuse of css styles, UI components etc)
- Significant reduction in effort developing and maintaining 3ish separate codebases for the same functionality (not quite 3x reduction, there are platform specific issues you have to resolve but still really great).
- Way easier time resourcing the project, one skillet for the 3 frontends and the team can swarm to the required work (This was amazing in the current high demand market)
- Access to the huge array of existing libraries and UI components
For larger more established companies then sure go native. But for companies that have to efficiently use capital, any money spent basically building the same thing twice is money not invested in further understanding the user's needs and improving their experience.
The typical non game application is mostly just a front end to services where there is no money being directly charged through the website/app anyway.
It came out in the Epic Trial that 70-80% of App Store revenue comes from games. Those would never be PWAs anyway.
With one of my current contract, we have 2 people coding and ended up having to create a separate iOS app because there is no Notification support. We abandoned our proof-of-concept PWA because we had like 10% Android users and putting in the maintenance effort was not worth it. Without Android support, after a few months all Android users decided to ‘upgrade’ their phones to iOS devices.
Is the the future we want? Do we want to be forced into walled gardens and implicitly guiding users into it? If your team is small should you be forced into one specific platform or should your mostly-CRUD app be viably built for a cross-platform solution like PWAs which covers the major platforms and the niche ones like Linux phones.
Do I want a future with crummy PWAs instead of applications when appropriate? I want that about as much as I want Electron apps.
> Every website without fail that ever wanted me to allow push notifications did it just so they could spam me.
I think this is mostly due to iOS/Safari not supporting notifications. The more serious actors who want to provide actual value to the users have been strong armed by Apple to create a native mobile app. Conversely, if the only browser allowed on iOS actually supported push notifications, you would see more legitimate prompts for using the tech.
Now, with installation of PWAs, it'll become the same as the "apps" of old, just without a store in between.
PWA manifests etc
I disagree. Apple needs to improve their support for PWAs, so that PWABuilder becomes obsolete.