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Comment by mephitix | Hacker News Reader

Getting PWAs right is difficult at the moment. If you don't get service workers right and don't build out the surrounding features (cache invalidation!) then it creates a worse experience.

Then take into account the fact that PWA support is broken on iOS... I really doubt that Apple will fully support PWAs (e.g. web push) beyond App Manifest.

The issue that isn't discussed as much is discoverability. iOS users are trained to go to the App Store to install an app. App Store on iOS feels safe, secure, and intuitive. How often do you think a user will choose to pin a website on iOS, regardless of what the suggestion UI looks like?

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  App Store on iOS feels safe

Does it feel safe or is it actually safe? A big part of Apple's competitive advantage is the quality it provides (real or perceived). If an app provides a subpar experience, they can yank it from the app store, whereas they have no recourse if a PWA starts e.g. cryptomining in the background.

Both. From an end-users perspective - someone who doesn't know the inner workings of the app store - then it feels safe. In a world where common people are becoming trained not to click to download random links on the internet and look at the 'lock in the address bar', going to the App Store app and seeing the familiar UI feels safer. For us tech folks, then yes, we know it is safer.

Strangely, their new ad platform appears to be pretty gameable in some respects...

https://medium.com/@johnnylin/how-to-make-80-000-per-month-o...

That said, they just denied an app I released (here on Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pavlok.mee... , it syncs my content from different media sources around the web) was denied. They said it was too close to a web experience.

We've released several iOS and Android apps, and inside of our apps are mini-apps (different habits and behaviors our users want to change). The app we were attempting to make used React, which was giving us a headache.

The denial was annoying, but fortunately, iOS just enabled PWAs. It seems to my developers that the site is essentially Web technologies (HTML/CSS/JS) + a Manifest. By doing that, you can enable push notifications and offline access. Is that essentially it? Because that might solve the problem of making apps rapidly on multiple platforms for us.

PWAs are broken on iOS. Push notifications are not supported, and in general the experience is pretty bad.

See this article for more details: https://medium.com/@firt/progressive-web-apps-on-ios-are-her...

The worst is that if you are in a PWA, say in a page like /my/sub/page and navigate out of the PWA, like go to a different website or go to another app, and then come back to the PWA, it will reload and go to the / home page, destroying all state and routing.

Depends on the audience. My small SaaS business never had a native app. 'Installation' of the PWA was never an issue (for SMB owners).

Cache invalidation is hard though.

Do you tell your clients to install the PWA and how to do it? Or do customers find and install the PWA without interacting with you? Or both?

I'll pipe in with my experience. I worked for a company that built applications for a mostly non-technical customer group. We built a very small PWA for them to perform some daily record entry, which often occurred out in the field or in rural areas where connection is spotty. We thought it was a great use-case.

They couldn't have cared less about the offline use or having the option to install it. They just liked the app.

I think service workers and PWAs in general definitely serve a purpose in enhancing web applications in ways that the user might not explicitly realize, though.

Thanks! But my question - probably not phrased well - was whether you told them about the app or whether they organically found the app and were ok with how to install it.

I feel that if you know your customers well and vice versa (usually a high-touch sales model), you can tell them where the app is, how to install it, and like you said, they don't care.

If you have a PWA sitting in the wild and have a low-touch sales model, I wonder how many people will actually go to that site and hit 'install to homescreen' vs looking for an app. It is a very strange approach on an iPhone.

A concrete example - I don't know our company. I'm a farmer and I want a daily record entry app on my iPhone. Do I go to the app store, look for an app and go through the usual dance OR do I look on the web, find the PWA, see a prompt to 'install to homescreen!' and I'm ok with hitting OK on it.

If I don't hit that 'install to homescren!' button on iPhone, I won't get things like web push notifications (which you still don't get on iPhone) which are pretty important to some apps.

If I come to you, or if you send out a message personally to me and tell me to 'install to homescreen' then I'm totally fine with it.

I will say that our marketing and sales teams probably did a poor job of communicating the capabilities of the app to our customers. I'm not even sure if most of them knew how it worked.

I don't think our customers found the PWA features "organically", either. If they saw the install prompt, they most likely didn't understand it, ignored it, or both. I tried showing it to some at a conference, but like I said, they were uninterested in those features in comparison to the app itself.

I see. I am guessing for your app (record entry) it didn't matter that they were uninterested in those features.

I'm working on an app that is highly reliant on push notifications (like chat). So if I made it a PWA, it would be DOA if my customers didn't hit 'install to homescreen'.

Not entirely- you can still receive notifications even if you're not installed to the home screen.

The progressive path isn't great, but installing an app from an App Store is a huge jump for users to make, so neither is ideal really...

On iOS you can't get notifications if you've closed out of Safari... it's not really usable.

A simple scenario is - you're inviting someone to a chat room. You send them an invite and now you have to wait. Usually what people do is other things - like go to a different website, go to a different app, etc. In only the case where you're sitting on the same website will you get a notification. It doesn't work.

It gets worse - let's say you installed the app to your homescreen. You run through that same scenario above - you navigate through your web app into /chatroom and click on an invite button there. Then you navigate away to another website/app. When you come back to the homescreen app, the entire site has reloaded and it will take you automatically to the main screen of your web app: /

Note - these broken behaviors are only on iOS.

Oh, yeah. I don't consider iOS a full PWA platform for exactly these reasons. Sad really.

There are a lot of use cases where getting someone to install an app is a big lift.

With PWAs, discoverability can be search ads, included in existing communications, linked from another app, etc.

You are right about high-touch sales in my case. I indeed provide guidelines to 'install the website as an app'. This works every time.

Not because the guidelines are that good, but because in reality it seems to be quite easy for the average SMB owner. Both in Safari and Chrome.

Except offline, I don't use any 'hardware' api's though.

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