[criddell]

You don't have to change users, you have to get Google and Apple to change. There's no technical reason they couldn't include web apps in their app stores. In the article the author speculates that both Google and Apple are working on this. I could see Google embracing web apps, but I'd be surprised if Apple does.

[celeritascelery]

I would be seriously surprised if any smartphone company added PWA's to their app stores. Web apps inherently can't take advantage of many platform/model specific features. Even thing like UI elements, fonts, gestures etc. OS manufacturers want their feature sets used because it adds value to their ecosystem. As a consumer of smartphone apps, I tend to agree with them.

[WorldMaker]

Microsoft announced at BUILD this year that PWAs would be ingested by the Bing crawler directly into the Windows Store, with tools for sites to opt out or further control their listings (including monetizing them).

The Windows Store has supported server-hosted web apps [1] for some time now, and provides a large subsection of the platform-specific libraries to hosted web apps. Hosted Web Apps are based on earlier drafts of PWA standards, but the expectation from BUILD and other Microsoft talks is that they will bring platform-specific libraries along for the ride as the converge to more recent PWA standards.

[1] https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/bridges/hosted...

[gramstrong]

Apple and Microsoft are actually dragging their feet to embrace PWA's until they can be regulated by their app stores and monetized. It's actually really annoying if you're interested in developing PWAs, because one of the nicest features is that it's a pseudo-native app that is cross compatible and doesn't have to be registered in any app stores.

[kevmo314]

You can already add PWA's to your home screen: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/engage-and-re...

It's not that far of a leap to think they'll be added to the app store.

[joking]

not only in the stores, widgets and general integration with the os (like actionable notifications etc.) are one of the things that make native apps a necesity. To appear in the widget screen in ios or make a homescreen widget in android you must have a native app.

[Ajedi32]

Actionable notifications have been a feature of PWAs in Chrome for over a year now: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/01/notificati...

[ehsanu1]

That's progress, but that's not exactly a home screen widget. Eg, I can see "20C" and an icon showing it's rainy right on my phone's home screen. I don't think you can do that with the web yet, hopefully people are working on it.