I wish PWAs were more prolific. It feels like there should be sufficient incentive from both app publishers and users away from traditional app stores.

From the user's perspective, why download an app from the ad-riddled App or Play store, at least 10s of MB in size, rather than visit a website, and only if you like what you see, "install" the PWA (save it to the home screen)?

From the app development side, there are several disadvantages of publishing native apps:

- Requirement to share a large chunk of app-generated revenue with app stores

- Cost of development for an app that only works on 1 platform

- Regulatory requirements for listing in app stores, as well as keeping up to date with policy changes

- Lack of control / risk of having your app pulled at any time for non-compliance, whether intentional or not

So why aren't PWAs more popular?

- A lack of awareness? Many devs I've worked with had never heard of PWAs, whilst users are trained to use app stores from the moment they setup the phone

- A lack of a de facto "PWA app store", without which PWAs are scattered across the internet?

- Improved UX in native apps over PWAs, but surely this problem is solvable?

- Other?

I think this is a short sighted and unfair view of native apps.

It is significantly difficult to provide fluent and fast “native” like experience with WebApps because of browser related overheads.

Another advantage of native apps, at least on iOS, is that they magically “receive” updates in the form of updates to the OS, I.e. when Apple updates the underlying iOS APIs, the apps can directly take advantage of the updates without any developer updates.

Apps also automatically adopt the new OS UI updates if they use native APIs. For example, many apps were dark-mode ready with little to no developer updates when Apple rolled out dark mode.

These are just the few advantages of native apps.

Developers are going to go where the users are, and the users are going to go to the App Store. It's a self-reinforcing cycle.

That and PWAs do not match the quality of the experience of a native app on iPhones. It doesn't even matter why, whether it's technical or political: they just don't and users don't have to care about the why.

They also don't care about apps taking up tens of MBs. Your average social media app and you average banking app is hundreds of MBs for no good reason. It's also irrelevant to users. They don't care.

> from the ad-riddled App or Play store

This part is also funny. It is true that in 2025 they are both ad-riddled, but compared to what? The even more ad-riddled web? Who even spends their time browsing the App Store anymore? You might go there if you're looking for a specific type of app, but most of the time people hear about new apps through word of mouth. It's not the halcyon days of 2009/2010 where new apps were constantly coming out and hitting the charts enticing people to try them.

The year of PWAs will come the same year as Desktop Linux. You can use them now, today, but really it's only nerds that want to. All the theoretical advantages of PWAs are not better enough over the flow of Get > verify with Face ID > wait for it to download for approximately three seconds > Open. It's on your phone, sandboxed, and always available as long as there's not a live service element attached that you're forced to use.

> - Improved UX in native apps over PWAs, but surely this problem is solvable?

How? You can hardly solve that even on platforms without all the restrictions iOS Safari has. Of course unless your “app” is using Electron/etc. It’s near impossible to get even basic things like animations to look consistent and same as in native apps.

Perhaps. I’d hazard a guess that:

1. TikTok is far less profitable without the kind of data collection that installed apps allow.

2. The average user doesn’t like interacting with websites as much apps for this purpose and might prefer to use alternative social media networks instead.

What kind of data would a native app collect that the web wouldn’t? Seems like all the important advertiser-relevant demographic data is in the user account itself, not the platform. Whether you’re interested in snowmobiles or baby diapers would show up in both web and native apps via your user account?

Also what technical limitations remain in web apps that limit use? WebGPU seems like it can handle most video pixel processing functions that native apps need and websites can be installed easily.

- start on device boot

- list of contacts / address book

- GPS location (browser can access location too if given permission ofc)

- list of devices accessible on local network (if tiktok really is a malware vector this would be a great way to scan users' homes for vulnerable IoT devices)

- list of other apps installed on device

Advertisers aren't just interested in bucketing you based off headline demographics like what videos you watch, they bucket you with people who have similar behaviors and extrapolate that you will like what they like, so they'll take as many dimensions as they can get to find similarities in behavior.

The user fingerprinting is also used to identify you on devices you're not logging in on.

> - list of other apps installed on device

Is there are an API for that on iOS?

I thought so but apparently it was patched long ago [0]. Still there on android, tho you’re meant to fall under a set of valid use cases or risk rejection. [1]

[0] https://github.com/danielamitay/iHasApp

[1] https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

> - start on device boot

Don't think it's possible on iOS, and I'm doubtful TikTok does this even if it were possible on Android.

> - GPS location (browser can access location too if given permission ofc)

Actually this AND all of the other fingerprinting methods you listed also require user permission managed by the mobile OS (iOS/Android).

In effect there is nothing a 'native' app can get without user knowledge/consent that a web app could not. If there is, it should be considered a bug for mobile OS providers to fix.

What about a background data refresh task running and the server geolocating the IP making the request? The accuracy would vary but you could still get reasonably close to assuming someone's nearest city.

Background data refresh is reasonably safe to assume everyone has turned on...

It’s not collecting data for advertising reasons; it’s a CCP operated malware vector.

Where's the evidence?

Porque no los dos

It's much harder to make videos using a web interface than native app.

I've heard maybe one or two people asking for a bluesky app. Everyone else just gets on with using the web app and doesn't complain at all.