[joshstrange]

I feel like something that gets brushed off on HN all the time is:

Do people actually want PWAs?

In my experience the answer is a resounding “NO”.

Android supports PWAs but they aren’t taking the world by storm. My Android friends don’t use any that I’m aware of and if you ask them about it they just get a blank look on the faces.

Heck, businesses don’t care about PWAs or websites even. I work in this space, I’ve written well over 10 cross platform apps (web/iOS/Android) and not only do they not care about PWAs but they don’t care much about the web. It’s the same codebase and normally we get the web version up and running first so we tell them they can start playing with it on their phone in the browser. They literally do not even open it until we provide the app version to them. I know because only once there is an app do we hear _any_ feedback. No matter how many times we tell them it’s the same, that they can start doing user acceptance testing or QA early, or to just check the UI/colors to make sure it’s what they want. They don’t care until it’s an app.

[remram]

Do I want apps that install instantly from the page, can't reach into my photos or contacts, and that even I can develop for all platforms without learning OS-specific APIs? Yes. I use some already, though a lot of apps today are mobile-friendly versions of websites, so I just use the website (e.g. Twitter, YouTube, FreshRSS, ...)

[Affric]

> that even I can develop

This gives away that you are not a regular consumer.

[93po]

I want PWAs in instances where the alternative is no app or no feature at all. For instance I use Firefox in iOS but it’s massively crippled (no extension support) thanks to Apple being shitheads. If the only option to have extension support is with PWA then I 100% want PWA

[pornel]

People have been trained to look for apps in the app stores. PWAs aren't there, and have a different installation method, for technical reasons that shouldn't matter in most cases.

If you ask differently: do you want apps that install almost instantly, and take almost no space on your phone? A lot of people would be interested.

Renting a scooter or charging an EV tends to require native apps for no good reason. These apps can be 100MB+ large, and it's infuriating to install them when paying for roaming, or being somewhere in the middle-of-nowhere where it takes ages to download. The QR-code-linked page that merely redirects to an app store could have been the app itself!

[syndeo]

Well Apple's proposed solution is App Clips, which is what Spin (and perhaps others?) use: https://developer.apple.com/app-clips/

Of course, an efficiently-coded webpage (e.g. no JS-heavy libs) could also work, with arguably less hassle all-around. But native apps do tend to "feel" nicer.

[pornel]

App Clips are so much this: https://xkcd.com/1367/

I’ve seen App Clip in the wild only once, and it was a barely functional stop-gap-app that asked me to download the full app to finish the registration :/

I assume that the proposition of making a second app, Apple-only, which has even more restrictions and technical challenges than regular apps, is just not economical to catch on.

JS is often bloated, but there’s a lot of tooling for diagnosing and fixing the problem. There are libraries that care about size. Minified JS is pretty dense anyway.

Swift and its frameworks can easily be as bloated, but it’s harder to inspect bloat in compiled code. Languages with generics aren’t easier to keep in check than JS. You can easily accidentally multiply your code when it’s monomorphized, or prevent dead code removal when it’s not. It’s easy to find iOS apps that are 10x larger than a bloated website.

[chillfox]

Nope, every PWA I have used ended up loosing data. They are universally shit across all devices/os I have tried.