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