[troupo]

> If a web app doesn't work on iOS, a business builds a native app instead. iOS is too important. So that fantastic native-like PWA never gets built in the first place.

So, instead of hiring a team to build an amazing PWA for Android, and an app for iOS, business hires three teams? One building a web app, a native app for iOS, and a native app for Android?

> Compare that with desktop, where web apps (maybe not PWAs, strictly speaking)

Indeed, these are not PWAs, not even strictly speaking. Also, they all depend on full desktop browser to work (often due to sheer fact that they are complex apps that don't work well on mobile screens), and none of them including Google have an amazing native-like PWA experience on Android.

I mean, you're bemoaning iOS crippling PWAs on iOS. It should be so easy to show amazing non-crippled PWAs on Android. After all, we've been told for the better part of the decade that PWAs are amazing native-like now. Android's market share is 68-70% worldwide. You'd think someone would finally be able to show the full power of a PWA? Anyone?

> And if you count Electron [1]: VSCode, Slack, Spotify, etc, etc.

One of them has millions of man-hours and millions of dollars of investment to make it somewhat performant. The others struggle to show a few pages of text and images in less than 1GB or RAM. Not the flex you think it is.

[rejhgadellaa]

> business hires three teams?

Yes. The web's winning feature is "it works everywhere". If your app doesn't work for the wealthiest 50% of users, why go that route? Making a desktop web app work on mobile, just for Android, is a lot of work. It needs to work on both iOS and Android to make it worthwhile.

> they all depend on full desktop browser to work (often due to sheer fact that they are complex apps that don't work well on mobile screens)

Gmail, Office, Docs - they all exist on mobile (as native apps). So it's not the complexity itself that makes it a problem on mobile screens. What does the native Gmail app do that the desktop web app doesn't?

> Android's market share is 68-70% worldwide.

Not in the wealthiest parts of the world, where the money is.

[troupo]

> Yes.

> If your app doesn't work for the wealthiest 50% of users, why go that route?

Why doesn't business hire two teams? One for the amazing native-like PWA, and one for iOS?

> Making a desktop web app work on mobile, just for Android, is a lot of work.

More work than hiring a separate Android team? More work than hiring a team to create a PWA which we've heard continuously for the past 10 years is amazingly easy and native-like?

> Gmail, Office, Docs - they all exist on mobile (as native apps). S

Yes, yes they do. As native apps

> Not in the wealthiest parts of the world, where the money is.

In 10 years you'd think we'd see actual examples of these amazing fast native-like PWAs on Android. All we hear is excuses.

Funnily enough I know of a few. E.g. Foodora's web app is surprisingly good, and it's possible that their "native" app is just running inside a webview, since it's indistibguishable from their website. But even MORE funnily enough, it takes a PWA sceptic to spot good PWA apps when none of the PWA proponents can point to a good PWA to save their life.

[rejhgadellaa]

>> If your app doesn't work for the wealthiest 50% of users, why go that route?

> Why doesn't business hire two teams? One for the amazing native-like PWA, and one for iOS?

You quote me, but missed the exact part where I already answered that question (I presume by accident ;)), so I'll just repeat myself:

> Yes. The web's winning feature is "it works everywhere". If your app doesn't work for the wealthiest 50% of users, why go that route? Making a desktop web app work on mobile, just for Android, is a lot of work. It needs to work on both iOS and Android to make it worthwhile.

For background, this piece by Alex Russell is worth reading:

Platform Adjacency Theory

https://infrequently.org/2020/06/platform-adjacency-theory/