The actual tech behind the PWA hype is nice/neat, but hardly puts them on par with mobile apps. It's the old "necessary but not sufficient" distinction, which people find so easy to ignore.
If you really support the vision of PWAs, you should be busily tamping down the hype, because promising a lot more than can be delivered will likely kill PWAs before the vision can be realized.
Notice the article linked to this post is a hype piece by someone offering PWA consulting services. It's not hard to see why he's sold.
This growing aversion to device-specific apps is actually a good thing in itself. Remember when web sites used to state that they were 'best viewed with browser X at resolution Y'? The rise of Firefox and the related demise of Internet Explorer (I wrote 'Internet Exploder' initially, a habit very much ingrained after years of suffering at the hands of Github's new overlord) did away with that nonsense, the web was slowly starting to live up to its promise of universal access no matter the OS or browser vendor. Then apps showed up, and with them the balkanisation returned with vengeance: to access this service you need to use iOS, Android app under construction, no plans for other devices, sorry 'bout that.
There is a space for apps: games and other performance/timing-critical applications which are hard to implement using web technologies. Applications which by nature are device-specific, e.g. Android Xposed, firewall apps, etc. Things like checking the bus times or booking a train ticket should never require an app.
The 90s called and want ActiveX back.
Service Workers, for example, are just a working draft and somehow not having the spec implemented is considered as lagging.
PWAs are fine for some uses. However I think it would be better for everybody if the vendors were extra cautions when creating and approving these standards as these APIs tend to crystallise and browsers end up supporting a lot of deprecated cruft. I was young when MS was doing the same thing with IE6 but I still remember the pain in the ass making anything remotely compatible was. And back then we were not talking about access to stuff like microphone or background activity.
Are they good proposals? How could they be improved? Do they meet the needs of the various interested parties, most especially end-users? Taken together, are they coherent, do they compose and complement each other, do they move toward a robust, comprehensive software framework?
Maybe it's happening, but I don't see these questions being asked a lot, much less addressed. Should we all just trust in Google? And expect Apple, MS, and other browser vendors to do so as well, not to mention implement Google's APIs as quickly as they come out?
No doubt, there is a lot of good work coming out of Google, but overall, I don't think the present system will be sustainable nor result in a good web.
All this seems quite carefully calculated by Apple, not to miss the boat on service workers, but also to hamstring PWA's just enough to make them non-competitive.
I think the most interesting area is apps which are written with web technologies, and then deployed to different platforms. For example, that could be a React Native codebase which renders to Android's native toolkit, iOS native, and HTML, and through that to a PWA and perhaps a Windows UWP app. There's a lot of flexibility there, to start just on HTML, or just on the native toolkits, and expand organically as appropriate.
Under the current circumstances, businesses will certainly want to be on the app stores, but there are a lot of services where just having an app is limiting, for instance I was looking recently at banking services for amalgamating accounts, and every one that I could find available in the UK has a website which is just a marketing page with a link to Google Play and the iOS Appstore. But surely most people also want to be able to look at their bank accounts on their computer, not everyone owns and iPad and a smartphone is a small form factor for that kind of information. A PWA, responsive, installable and offline-capable, is a good way of handling that.
I think, PWA will probably end up being a third target, not a replacement for Android or iOS.
It's funny, because Microsoft seems to be actively encouraging/misleading developers to bundle their PWAs as "Microsoft Store apps".
Seems like Microsoft is looking at PWAs from the opposite angle - an opportunity to "liberate" users from Android/iOS stores lock users in to its store.
Will it work? That depends on all of you developers out there.
[1] https://www.tune.com/blog/no-the-average-american-does-not-d...
Are you saying that some websites may not offer as much trust as an app-store approved app? Maybe when discovering new web-apps, I agree, but for standard websites that you know the url for, maybe not so much? I can't imagine someone not trusting "pandora.com", for example.