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[2]: https://formidable.com/work/starbucks-progressive-web-app/

Starbucks put a lot of effort into their PWA [1] to ensure users of low-end devices were able to get a rich experience. I just found a case study [2] by the team that built it that goes into some interesting details.

[1]: https://app.starbucks.com/

doomrobo 1263 days ago

Personal experience as a web dev: the mobile Safari PWA experience (and even regular browser experience) is terrible. The browser is riddled with bugs and lacks support for features that have been around for a while. I apologzie for not having examples bc it was a few months ago that I was struggling with this, but hopefully someone else can fill some in. I honestly believe Apple's stranglehold on the mobile browsing experience has been one of the most disempowering things to mobile users in the last decade.

Why is the answer to this question always “Safari sucks”?

Are there no good PWAs that run on Android? Are there none that, though perhaps smaller is scope, run well in Safari?

People have been advocating for PWAs for a very long time now but it’s incredibly hard to get examples of good ones. There is always some complaint about Safari instead.

>There is always some complaint about Safari instead.

when one app is used by roughly half of all mobile users, that's not something you can ignore. so complaining about that one app when these conversations come up does not seem out of place. essentially, the conversation is something like:

- PWAs are great!

-- How well do they run on Safari?

- PWAs are great on other platforms.

-- So about half of mobile users? Doesn't seem that great to me

Safari is used by half of US users. Worldwide it’s closer to 20%. And the desktop is totally open.

I’m not saying I expect PWAs to be huge, but it seems like they should be more notable PWAs if people really wanted them so bad.

meh, semantics. the point is that there's a large enough audience that it doesn't add up to making sense for dev time.

madeofpalk 1263 days ago

Google, to some degree, worked with Twitter to make twitter.com a 'flagship example' of what PWAs could be. If that's the best Google could come up with, the platform stands zero chance.

lern_too_spel 1263 days ago

I prefer the Twitter PWA to the native app. What do you think is wrong with it?

jacooper 1263 days ago

Filled with empty loading pages? Not smooth at all compared to the native app? And having zero animations doesn't help at all

lern_too_spel 1262 days ago

Everything loads instantly for me, including the app because I always have a browser process running anyway. What browser are you using?

fsflover 1263 days ago

Twitter is actively trying to force people to use the app by making web experience miserable.

steve1977 1263 days ago

And that’s for an app that is actually trivial.

Apple's stronghold affects PWA feasibility on Android too. If I have to write a PWA for Android and a native app for iOS to cover gaps in Safari, why choose a PWA at all?

Apple may be ~50% of the market in the US but it’s ~20% of the market worldwide. On the desktop anyone on any mainstream OS can use Chrome or FF.

Yet someone the total lack of PWA success is 100% Safari’s fault.

Look at all those users I listed above. How are there no common/well known PWAs if they’re so great? People use websites like the Google Suite and Figma and such. They use web apps built as desktop apps in Electron. They use native apps.

Almost no one uses PWAs. Even if Figma or Gmail or whatever is available to be saved as a PWA it doesn’t seem to be commonly done.

There must be some other problem than Safari. It can’t be the big issue.

toyg 1263 days ago

> ~20% of the market worldwide

But a much higher percentage of the profitable market, in terms of app income.

pjmlp 1263 days ago

There are many markets where it is hardly a presence out of those 20% and not every company is a global corporation.

Gigachad 1263 days ago

Telegram is probably the best example of a PWA. It's not as good as the mobile app, especially for gestures, but it's better than a lot of native apps.

dmitriid 1261 days ago

Telegram really is an outlier among messengers. Each version is developed by like one person, and they are all feature-rich, feature-complete, fast and smooth.

esprehn 1263 days ago

There's a bunch that run very well on Android: Twitter, Instagram, Uber, Lyft, even TikTok all have very good PWAs.

TikTok aggressively funnels you into the native app for various business reasons, but the experience is well polished if they'd let you use it all the time.

Safari (really that iOS won't let you pick a different browser) has definitely been holding back the growth of PWAs though. Without decent install to home screen support (apple doesn't implement install banners for web), no push notifications, many of the native API integrations missing, it's hard to go too far down the web path before the business folks want the native app for growth angles. It's a lot more about making money than the better UX that can be had with native.

dmitriid 1261 days ago

> many of the native API integrations missing

Those "native API integrations" are Chrome-only non-standards that neither Safari nor Firefox are ever going to implement.

TobyTheDog123 1263 days ago

Because Safari sucks.

The reason iOS and Google/Android PWAs suck is because Apple does everything in its power to make them suck:

- Complex and user-unfriendly "add-to-homescreen" functionality

- Limited/trailing functionality for native APIs

- The obnoxious url/browser bar persistent at the bottom of the page, with horrendous and uncustomizable hiding/showing of said bar.

People advocate for PWAs, but I never use them because as an end-user they're awful to use, because developers can't create them to the quality of native applications because of these limitations. Of course the complaints go to Safari in that case.

They absolutely could have PWAs be of higher quality, but they don't, for obvious reasons.

I get why they suck on iOS.

Why aren’t they on Android? Windows? Linux? MacOS?

Existing PWAs should be better known, especially in HN-like/tech circles.

But that’s not what I see.

TobyTheDog123 1263 days ago

I can't entirely speak for Android, but I assume that Google has similar nonsense (as evidenced by sideloading being a pain to the average user)

For Windows, Linux, and MacOS, there's no real need for them, or not enough need for them to exist. There are no policies or guidelines to follow, there is no 30% tax.

The browsers people use on desktop devices provide everything that developers need and can reasonably expect of the platform. There aren't any usability differences, there are barely any performance differences, and there are barely any feature differences.

In fact, I think many desktop end-users would prefer the app to be web-based because it feels so native.

In addition, it's what another commenter said - if it can't be on iOS, then what's even the point of having one?

pjmlp 1263 days ago

Because many countries hardly have an iOS presence and there are tons of companies that only care about the local market.

saagarjha 1263 days ago

You can hide the URL bar with the right meta tag, no?

TobyTheDog123 1263 days ago

If the user adds the PWA to their homescreen through the user-unfriendly process, I believe so.

But users won't (and don't) go through that.

lelandfe 1263 days ago

Personal experience shipping a big PWA: Safari's PWA experience is not just bad, it's all but undiscoverable:

Open the Share sheet, scroll down, tap "Add to Home Screen," fill in the information, tap Add.

There are simply no users that do this, and it is not an alternative to having a mobile app in the App Store.

CharlesW 1263 days ago

> There are simply no users that do this…

100%. PWAs are not a priority for Apple (and shouldn't be for developers) because users don't search for apps in web search engines, they search for them in the App Store.

locutous 1263 days ago

App store discoverability is very poor. Web discoverability is much easier to manage. It's something you have more control over and can buy easier through marketing via any channel you want. App store pages just don't convert well.

donbrae 1263 days ago

I agree about the installation process (though the user shouldn’t need to fill in any info). The actual user experience when using home screen PWAs can be made to be OK, but there really needs to be a meta tag or whatever to allow an ‘Add to Home Screen’ banner to appear (similar to the way you can link to the App Store if you have a native app).

https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/13/apple-mulls-opening-browser-e...

ExMachina73 1263 days ago

This was an interesting recent development if it ends up being true, specifically Apple opening up iOS browser engine restrictions:

function_seven 1263 days ago

Personal experience as a web user: I agree.

I'm not even talking about bugs per se. Just the experience. I find myself constantly battling misinterpreted gestures. I try to zoom out on a page. Safari thinks I want to switch to the Tab View. I don't. Please just make the page smaller so I can see it all.

Or, I try to grab a UI slider that's positioned near the left edge of the viewport. Safari thinks I want to navigate back to the previous page. Nope. Apparently if form controls are too close to the screen's edge, they're read-only at that point?

So many gestures are overloaded now that it's a stressful thing sometimes to get it to do what I want. Being pixel-perfect with my fat dumb finger is no fun.

faizmokhtar 1263 days ago

Is it because it's actually riddle with bugs or just that most devs built on top of features only available on Chrome?

Isn't the main purpose of a native app access to data collection that a browser would not have access? That way they can make money on that data collection?

Am I just too cynical here?

aqfamnzc 1263 days ago

Many other benefits to the company: (not necessarily for the user)

* Persistent shortcut button on device's launcher

* Notifications to pull user back into app to consume content, spend money, view ads

* Data collection like you say

* Uniquely identify user w/ device identifiers

* No browser UI and quirks

* Persistent storage on user's device

kitsunesoba 1263 days ago

On the dev side of things, a huge advantage of using the native SDK is that you’re not stuck with the downsides of the web’s “bring your own everything” approach. You’ve get an expansive set of capable UI widgets and frameworks for everything imaginable that are battle-tested and opinionated with there being a well supported “happy path” for just about any task.

Additionally many of the APIs are mature and haven’t changed significantly in a while, which means the body of relevant reference material online is huge — it’s not necessarily outdated just because it’s a couple years old, predating [X buzzword feature] getting added to [Y trendy JS framework] and turning popular convention upside down for the fiftieth time.

Well, that’s how it on iOS at least. It’s more murky on Android because Android Framework is kind of a mess, but it still has some advantages over the web.

All of those are possible with PWAs except #5, and I'd argue that having completely different SDKs for each platform is much worse :(

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/710157

hutzlibu 1263 days ago

A pwa can only track you, as long as it is running and depending on the browser, has focus.

A native app can track you all the time.

Also, PWAs on apple have only "persistent" storage for 7 days.

edgyquant 1263 days ago

Notifications are not. Yea the browser technically provides them but no one allows this (nor should they)

Lyft has a PWA, which IMO is a really good use case for browser-based notifications.

EGreg 1263 days ago

Unique identification is no longer possible thanks to the 7 day cap on script writeable storage.

Notifications are coming in 2023.

But the big one — access to the address book picker - is still behind an Experimental flag !!

cokeandpepsi 1263 days ago

also avoids adblock

threeseed 1263 days ago

Mobile web apps have existed for decades.

It simply comes down to the fact that the user experience is not as good as native.

And you can't run a successful business without making your users happy.

jacobsenscott 1263 days ago

This isn't true for 99% of business out there. Almost every mobile app is worse than its website in a mobile browser because most business can't afford a web dev team, an android dev team, and an ios dev team. The exceptions are the few apps built by the mega-corps that have the resources to build a good mobile app. Nobody want's to install some broken app with a fraction of the functionality of the web site, but that's what 99% of the apps in the app store are.

friedman23 1263 days ago

It's only not as good because web is purposefully crippled.

anderber 1263 days ago

I think that it really depends on what the PWA is trying to do and its purpose. I think the Twitter, Instagram, and Starbucks apps are both good examples of what can be done. Potentially a lot more could be done with PWAs, if there was more push to make them better.

https://appsco.pe/

mostlysimilar 1263 days ago

Scrolled around and decided to try the TikTok app. It’s perfectly functional but immediately pops up asking to install the native app for the “full experience”.

The first popup was dismissible, so I kept swiping. Within two videos the same popup was back and it was not dismissible.

Companies intentionally cripple the web experience.

dmitriid 1261 days ago

People keep bringing up Twitter as an example of a good PWA... But it is objectively horrendously bad.

If that's the best example of a PWA, give me a badly implemented native app any day of the week and five times on Sundays.

pjmlp 1263 days ago

Twitter is kind of ok for what I need from it.

Also mobile Web is good enough for most forms over data kind of applications.

Other than games, where Web 3D APIs are stuck in 2010, many "apps" could be easily done as mobile Web, specially all those that are basically mobile Electron.

kitsunesoba 1263 days ago

The biggest thing hurting PWAs in my opinion is that SPAs and web apps in general is done as a cost-saving measure.

This means that while they can be good, they very often aren’t because they aren’t getting the budgets and caliber of engineering talent they’d need to be good, and so it’s much more common that they fall somewhere on the less-great side of mediocre.

Users then associate this degraded quality with web apps and disinclines them from using them, even on platforms where PWA installation is promoted (like with Edge/Chrome on Windows and Chrome on Android).

Safari’s limitations play a part too but even if Safari vanished tomorrow PWAs would continue to get lukewarm reception so long as companies aren’t putting the same kind of resources they’d put into a flagship native app into their PWAs. At the end of the day, if you cheap out you get a crap experience.

geysersam 1263 days ago

What's wrong with the YouTube pwa? To me it looks and feels very similar to the app.

Edit: just tried the Spotify pwa and it's not bad. Maybe not as good as native, but that's partly because of the big "Get App" button in the bottom right corner.

stby 1263 days ago

Agreed, both are pretty good. Especially the YouTube PWA runs just as good as the native app on my Android phone, up to the point where I often forget which one I'm currently using.

freedomben 1263 days ago

Google's Santa Tracker is a pretty great PWA

for something where the tracked object is stationary for 364 days out of the year, seems like not a difficult task /s

freedomben 1263 days ago

I know you're joking (and it was funny), but thinking about it I think it's actually harder in some ways because you go from almost no traffic most of the year to needing to scale really, really fast. And the PWA has a ton of games and other things in it, so not as simple as the old school trackers that don't even need a backend cause all of the "tracking" happens in the browser

I'm 100% unawares of the Santa Tracker app that you speak, so yes, I was attempting to be funny. However, for that 1 day of the year, is it that hard to have the "tracking" done locally since it's literally just made up data? Just know the localized time and where sunset is, and have the "Santa" moving around in the nighttime areas of the globe. Guessing on efficiency suggests to me rapid movements along the North/South with magical speed roughly equidistant from the terminator at a distance equivalent to midnight.?? Again, since it's 100% make believe, it's not like your browser has to show the exact same location as someone else's.

Any other games the app might be included are out side of the scope of the imaginary app in my mind.

lrem 1263 days ago

I thought that a number of first party Google "native" apps is just a packaged PWA, isn't it?

Disclaimer: I work for Google, but never paid much attention to that corner of the company.

dmitriid 1260 days ago

> I thought that a number of first party Google "native" apps is just a packaged PWA, isn't it?

I wonder what those are. Because the apps where they want actual fast responsive apps with smooth animations etc. (and tracking :) ) are all native as far as I can tell.

saxomoose 1258 days ago

Google Finance would be an example.

saxomoose 1258 days ago

I had a decent experience with the Qoezion app recently:

https://app.qoezion.com

Basic messaging functionality, ...

narrator 1263 days ago

Brave Browser on Android is better for youtube because of the ad blocker.