| I don't think PWAs are quite ready on iOS yet. "You may be thinking that PWAs are a non-starter until iOS starts to support the manifest standard and service workers, but I have news for you: You can achieve PWA-like behavior with Apple’s proprietary meta tags. There is a service worker polyfill for Cordova that will allow you to build a hybrid app for iOS, so you can get the PWA benefits without sacrificing an app presence on iOS." Cordova is a JavaScript/HTML based app framework: https://cordova.apache.org So using Cordova means you have to submit an app and hence is not pwa right? Can non native web apps on mobile get access to push notifications, the camera (low level like snap chat), the photo library, audio recording or touch the address book? As of today I don't think you can do these things without an app on iOS. If you look at the top paid/free apps on iOS most of them are either multimedia heavy (Instagram, snapchat, Pinterest, etc) or games. Neither of these types of apps would work well with the current state of PWA. That being said having a separate android/iOS team and shipping apps to two app stores is expensive and a total pain. I think that some major changes in the way apps get developed are on the horizon. I think by looking at react/react native you can see where things are going. I.e business logic and API layer shared cross platform, cross functional teams that can work on 60-70% of your products surface with domain experts dealing with platform specific issues. That plus the ability to push over the air updates is going to change things quite a bit. I feel this approach is valid even for large parts of nultidmedia heavy apps (sign up flows, pop up dialogs, etc) and could even be used in a hybrid approach with a pwa style App. |