Reminds me of this very, very classic/epic post [0] by John Carmack on this very topic. Definitely worth a (re-)read.
Steve first talked about application development for iPhone at the same keynote I was demonstrating the new ID Tech 5 rendering engine on Mac, so I was in the front row. When he started going on about “Web Apps”, I was (reasonably quietly) going “Booo!!!”.
After the public cleared out and the rest of us were gathered in front of the stage, I started urgently going on about how web apps are terrible, and wouldn’t show the true potential of the device. We could do so much more with real native access!
Steve responded with a line he had used before: “Bad apps could bring down cell phone towers.” I hated that line. He could have just said “We aren’t ready”, and that would have been fine.
> Nowadays they might as well not exists for iOS/macOS
They work fine for both iOS and macOS. Safari scores higher than Firefox on Android.
Don’t be fooled by scores like this that include non-standard behaviour. Including Blink-only behaviour that both Mozilla and Apple have rejected is obviously going to artificially inflate Chrome’s score.
I guess I should have made clear that I don’t have much experience with macOS, but I stand by them being useless on iOS.
Last time I tried developing a PWA-first app on iOS it was horrible. Users couldn’t figure out how to install it, notifications, workers, haptics, etc had all sorts of arbitrary restrictions.
> Nowadays they might as well not exists for iOS/macOS
PWAs work very well on macOS. I use the PWA version of discord instead of their electron app because it feels a lot more "native" and responsive than the alternative.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/8l9qw2/comment/dzdwc...