[ntaso]

I want PWAs to succeed, because I would love to publish close-to-native apps without an app store. I think PWAs are a great thing for the open web. However, hyping PWAs with unrealistic expectations doesn't do any good. The Ionic team talks in the same vein. I like Ionic, I don't like hype. Here are a few reasons why PWAs aren't there yet and probably won't replace most apps in the near future:

- No native APIs. Yeah sure, you can order a coffee at Starbucks, but the underyling hardware isn't exposed to JS. You won't be able to make a camera app with PWAs.

- Input controls suck. Same as with every mobile browser and every Cordova-based app: You cannot control how the keyboard behaves and I suspect that it's not even in Apple's interest to make Mobile Safari super-great. Sure, they're working on PWAs, but that doesn't mean anything. Just see how bad Mobile Safari's <select> looks like. Or bugs in multi-selects that have been there forever.

- They still run in a browser. It shows an address bar and whatever else your browser is always showing. Try Twitter's PWA right now: https://lite.twitter.com It's way too easy to accidentally swipe back. And then, Twitter being a shitty Single-Page-App, the browser loses its scroll position.

- PWAs suffer from the same problems like all SPAs [1]

And finally:

- A PWA is just a proxy to download and cache responses from a server. It enables offline support (kinda) for single-page apps. It's not a magical something. The problem is that most users go to the App or Play Store first (like djrogers pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15219682). They COULD be using PWAs – or at least good mobile webistes – right now, but they aren't.

I think PWAs will find their places and I'm betting on them, too, to a certain extend. But over-hyping PWAs without addressing these issues is just naive.

[1]: Great read on this topic: https://adamsilver.io/articles/the-disadvantages-of-single-p...

[sjun]

> - They still run in a browser. It shows an address bar and whatever else your browser is always showing. Try Twitter's PWA right now: https://lite.twitter.com It's way too easy to accidentally swipe back. And then, Twitter being a shitty Single-Page-App, the browser loses its scroll position.

Android doesn't show the address bar. I don't have iOS but it seems like Safari support for PWA isn't as far along as Chrome.

[osrec]

One mobile safari bug that really irritates me is not being able to move the cursor on a text input element. Basically, if the text in there is longer than the element, you won't be able to move the cursor left or right. You can only work with the visible part of the input element. Try it - it's really quite terrible!

[ntaso]

I know. Same with textareas, especially if they're wrapped in some kind of scrollable container. It is a mess. I don't know why it's not being fixed.

The only reason I can think of is that Apple intentionally keeps the mobile experience slightly crappy so that people perceive native apps having higher quality.

Of all companies, Apple should be the one with the best usability in a browser, no? But hardly so.

[segf4ult]

You can move the cursor by long pressing on the words to bring up the magnifying glass.