[andrewrn]

Woah this is very exciting if true! I love Linux and my framework laptop, but have wanted to make simple iOS apps.

That being said, PWA’s are damn capable at this point for basic little apps. I wish more laypeople were aware of the ability to “install” PWA’s. Most non-tech people only think apps come from the iOS App Store.

[_fat_santa]

> PWA’s are damn capable at this point for basic little apps. I wish more laypeople were aware of the ability to “install” PWA’s. Most non-tech people only think apps come from the iOS App Store.

I recently had a conversation with my business partner about our SaaS, he was pushing for us to write a full mobile app for our service and I pushed back and said lets do a PWA instead.

From a technical perspective, maintaining a PWA is so much easier in my opinion than maintaining a mobile app, even if you end up writing a new codebase specifically for your PWA. Simply not having to go through Apple saves so much time.

As for education the distribution channel is very different. We advertise our PWA in our website and prompt people to install it in our app if we see that they are running the right browser/device.

I would say at this point if you have a "business app" that just does regular CRUD stuff and doesn't reach for any mobile API's, a PWA is perfect.

[frollogaston]

There's always some catch to make sure you can't 100% jump to a PWA and skip the native app. At least PWAs can do push notifications finally.

[gman83]

FYI, I've been making iOS apps on Linux for a while now, I just use CodeMagic to do the build step - https://codemagic.io/

[afavour]

Yeah I do really wish PWAs got more attention. But it’s very, very difficult to do that last mile of UI polish that makes the average iOS app gleam by comparison. Fingers crossed we’ll see more browser primitive APIs in that area.

[whycome]

The user flow for installing PWAs is so dumb. It’s deliberate I guess. It doesn’t align with the idea of “installing” or even a marketplace. I think the language is something like “add to home” and it’s not clear that it’s anything other than a shortcut to a website.

[Obscurity4340]

Are PWA's subject to Safari's data collection policies or is it different?

[pjmlp]

Why bothering collecting on the client, when we can collect everything on the server?

[c0wb0yc0d3r]

What if there is no server? An offline first PWA could easily be served via a static web host.