- The app store tax
- The extra work of maintaining at least 2 separate apps (iOS, Android, optionally(?) desktop web app)
- Dealing with app store rules
Some of these are not just costs. I have experience with native apps that have to make things worse for users (compared to the web app) or risk getting booted off the app store.
App tax: 15-30%, which can drive the price for consumers up by up to 44%
https://open-web-advocacy.org/walled-gardens-report/#negativ...
I asked in the start of the thread: how does it impact you, or your customers?
For example, our platform requires a subscription, but we can't link to the page where you subscribe anywhere. That means that if our FAQ page links to the subscribe page, and we have a link to the FAQ anywhere, we have to block that from happening. This isn't just extra work (to prevent users from ending up on that subscription page), it actually prevents us from offering users a way to subscribe or even change their subscription from within the app. This directly hurts our business model (subscriptions) and UX (users have to change their subscription by manually visiting our site in a browser).
All of this work means we either have to charge the user extra money (increased costs for consumers) or do less with the money we have (decreased value for the consumers).
I know this doesn't fully answer your question, but I hope it sheds a bit of light on what these extra costs are and how consumers end up paying for it.
Apple is not just holding back PWA on iOS, they're holding back the entire web everywhere.
Compare that with desktop, where web apps (maybe not PWAs, strictly speaking) are dominating: Gmail, Office/Docs, GitHub, Figma, you basically do everything in web apps.
And if you count Electron [1]: VSCode, Slack, Spotify, etc, etc.
[1] Importantly, Electron lets you bring your own (browser) engine. You can build a native app on iOS that is just a wrapper around a web app, but it has to run on iOS' WebKit, and is thus limited by what Apple deems worthy
Second: There are many reasons why businesses would opt for a native app. Notifications, for one (not available on the web on iOS until just a couple of years ago). Also, native apps allow for more tracking (whereas browsers are paranoid by default).
Third: A few years back, companies like FB, Google and Twitter all launched "Lite" versions of their apps, specifically targeted at Africa and other developing markets. They were all web apps (or wrappers around web apps). I will admit that this was years ago, and I have not checked if these Lite versions are still around and/or widely used.
So, instead of hiring a team to build an amazing PWA for Android, and an app for iOS, business hires three teams? One building a web app, a native app for iOS, and a native app for Android?
> Compare that with desktop, where web apps (maybe not PWAs, strictly speaking)
Indeed, these are not PWAs, not even strictly speaking. Also, they all depend on full desktop browser to work (often due to sheer fact that they are complex apps that don't work well on mobile screens), and none of them including Google have an amazing native-like PWA experience on Android.
I mean, you're bemoaning iOS crippling PWAs on iOS. It should be so easy to show amazing non-crippled PWAs on Android. After all, we've been told for the better part of the decade that PWAs are amazing native-like now. Android's market share is 68-70% worldwide. You'd think someone would finally be able to show the full power of a PWA? Anyone?
> And if you count Electron [1]: VSCode, Slack, Spotify, etc, etc.
One of them has millions of man-hours and millions of dollars of investment to make it somewhat performant. The others struggle to show a few pages of text and images in less than 1GB or RAM. Not the flex you think it is.
Yes. The web's winning feature is "it works everywhere". If your app doesn't work for the wealthiest 50% of users, why go that route? Making a desktop web app work on mobile, just for Android, is a lot of work. It needs to work on both iOS and Android to make it worthwhile.
> they all depend on full desktop browser to work (often due to sheer fact that they are complex apps that don't work well on mobile screens)
Gmail, Office, Docs - they all exist on mobile (as native apps). So it's not the complexity itself that makes it a problem on mobile screens. What does the native Gmail app do that the desktop web app doesn't?
> Android's market share is 68-70% worldwide.
Not in the wealthiest parts of the world, where the money is.
> If your app doesn't work for the wealthiest 50% of users, why go that route?
Why doesn't business hire two teams? One for the amazing native-like PWA, and one for iOS?
> Making a desktop web app work on mobile, just for Android, is a lot of work.
More work than hiring a separate Android team? More work than hiring a team to create a PWA which we've heard continuously for the past 10 years is amazingly easy and native-like?
> Gmail, Office, Docs - they all exist on mobile (as native apps). S
Yes, yes they do. As native apps
> Not in the wealthiest parts of the world, where the money is.
In 10 years you'd think we'd see actual examples of these amazing fast native-like PWAs on Android. All we hear is excuses.
Funnily enough I know of a few. E.g. Foodora's web app is surprisingly good, and it's possible that their "native" app is just running inside a webview, since it's indistibguishable from their website. But even MORE funnily enough, it takes a PWA sceptic to spot good PWA apps when none of the PWA proponents can point to a good PWA to save their life.
> Why doesn't business hire two teams? One for the amazing native-like PWA, and one for iOS?
You quote me, but missed the exact part where I already answered that question (I presume by accident ;)), so I'll just repeat myself:
> Yes. The web's winning feature is "it works everywhere". If your app doesn't work for the wealthiest 50% of users, why go that route? Making a desktop web app work on mobile, just for Android, is a lot of work. It needs to work on both iOS and Android to make it worthwhile.
For background, this piece by Alex Russell is worth reading:
Platform Adjacency Theory