[kitsunesoba]

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.