I used it for years, but it didn't seem to work right on a new phone, with some UI elements not visible or off-screen, so I went back to the app.
Curiously I just realized it's the same view I get from the app on my phone a lot of the time due to some kind of error when loading the normal app view.
It's funny because the very first thing that Steve Jobs pushed when the first iPhone came out was PWA's, essentially, and not an App Store, which didn't exist yet... and the same API's are still available in Webkit I believe
That's a circular dependency though. You want that stuff because you want to use Drive with native apps and not web apps. But Drive is a first class backend (actually even more featureful, frankly) to web apps too. Basically the native Drive client is for native/legacy interop, not a barrier to a PWA future.
Holding the web back is entirely intentional and makes strategic sense from Apple's point of view. They're well aware that a majority of apps would work perfectly fine as web apps -- but that also removes Apple from the equation. Only allowing Safari on iOS and intentionally gimping it solves the problem.
I mean, I can't even blame them. Can't lose out on that sweet 30% cut, y'know?
I'm only disappointed that legislation took this long to catch up to their shenanigans, and only in the EU.
They don't care about the web and what is good for end users i.e. more APIs = less privacy.
They simply want to build apps without Apple's fee and controls.
I care deeply about privacy. That means I trust the browser sandbox a lot more than native apps. There's obviously a reason sites like Twitter and Reddit try to force their native apps on you as soon as you visit their web page on a phone -- it'll allow them to spy more on you.
You shouldn't.
The most privacy invading behaviour by far is the cross-site tracking that happens on the web. Where large data companies as well as Facebook/Google are building behavioural profiles with thousands of features and data is being packaged and sold to entities you have no knowledge of.
And all of which is being facilitated by browser fingerprinting courtesy of Google recklessly adopting APIs with little care about privacy.
A native app won't prevent Google or Facebook (or Apple) from tracking you. In my experience, native apps typically always require login, and then fingerprinting is unnecessary.
Avoiding their services, and using an open source and privacy respecting browser with uBlock Origin installed will protect you however.
The latter can be done on all OSes I've used -- except iOS.
I don’t agree with it at all to be perfectly clear. I’m only postulating that realistically the only way Apple takes PWAs to first class status is if they get a cut. Its rather unfortunate
I'm not so sure they will, now that the cat is (finally!) out of the bag.
However, if the EU is silent because it considers Apple's reaction acceptable, the new laws are meaningless, unnecessary, a total waste of time, and an embarrassment to the EU.
So my hope is that they realize this and the silence is due to the EU preparing to put Apple in its place.
F2P mobile games need to be able to send you notification spam, because they're based around habituation and addiction. You couldn't do that in MobileSafari until very recently[0].
[0] Supposedly. I pinned Google Fi to my homescreen on my iPad, it asked for notification permissions, I see a notification count badge on it's app icon, but it still doesn't actually notify me when I get a text message or call.
You do not want to load big chunk of JS because it was never cached, or as Uber used to do, download all the possible new promos every time you opened the app...
You want to squeeze through the minimal data you need to arrange your core business function.
All it takes is for network connectivity to be a little bit spotty (admittedly, Uber made it work a little bit better these days).
In the past, I've been more than once frustrated to rage from the fact that Uber couldn't just grab my A-GPS position, ping for address and send a short packet to order a car, but it had to download potentially megabytes of promo html before it let me actually do anything useful.
Avoiding it with PWA is afaik even harder (currently looking exactly into making PWA because I don't want to deal with iOS).
Some of these (increased caching and remote notifications) you can get on iOS if you install a web app as a Home Screen icon, but as just a website Uber might not get their minimum bar of functionality for widespread use. So far, I haven't seen any large companies have installed web apps as their go-to-market strategy.
I understand Drive working better as a native app; it needs to be able to provide a virtual filesystem to the OS and do background syncing and such. But why Uber? Uber has (or maybe had) a mobile site that works fine for requesting rides and basically everything the app can do. I don't see what value Uber being a native app adds for the user. The same goes for most mobile games; they tend to have simple graphics that the browser is perfectly capable of rendering with great performance, and they tend to reinvent all common UI components so losing access to native system buttons and such wouldn't make a difference. PWAs should also provide plenty of storage for local save files and other game data. The exception of course being games that really push the system to its limits. I don't expect, say, Death Stranding or the RE4 remake to work well without direct access to native graphics acceleration, and they're too large to load as a single webpage. I will reiterate though that this is not the case for most mobile apps, even extremely profitable F2P ones that would benefit greatly from an extra 30% revenue. Why then do they not target the web? My gut feel is that it's because mobile users are trained to look in the app store for apps and games, not the web, while desktop users expect apps to be available in the browser with the exception of some professional tools and high-end games. That is to say, it's largely a cultural problem. Of course, Apple's lackluster support or PWAs doesn't help.