I don't think we can really know the potential of PWA, since most developers aren't going to put effort into PWAs if they won't work for a big chunk of the market. Apple is effectively strangling the technology on all platforms by refusing to support it on theirs.
> What's actually missing that's stopping this from working?
Proper support on all platforms. No point working on PWAs that have janky tooling (reason: see previous sentence) when they're only going to work decently on Android devices anyway.
So why would you build a native Android app if PWAs work better? There’s way more web developers than Android developers, and you would avoid the Play Store fees. Sound cheaper to me. What part of iOS is invalidating the value proposition for Android here?
You also didn’t answer what is missing. What is missing? What’s this insurmountable problem that’s solved everywhere else? Why is janky tooling attributable to Apple?
Try reading my post again, maybe? The tooling is pretty janky because no one does this yet. No point to torture yourself with janky tooling when you only get to target android anyway...