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Has anyone actually made a mobile webapp that isn't a completely miserable user experience? People keep talking about how PWAs are the future or whatever but then every time I try using one the performance is really poor.

Twitter for example claims their PWA "Loads quickly on 2G and 3G networks" compared to their native app but my actual experience using it was very much the opposite. Everything takes seemingly 2-3x longer to load.

Uber would be in deep trouble if their app got pulled. It's not that easy to get people to use your web site once they are used to the app.

Could you make an app that just installs your web app in the launcher so the user only uses your webapp directly? iirc that can't be pulled as easily by Google.

I've done that - it's a pretty poor experience in practice.

Why is that? What has been your experience?

I found it harder to make a clean, smooth user interface. Lots of workarounds to make things fit into the right place, to make the right thing in focus for user input. I'm not a professional front-end developer so maybe I just wasn't any good at it, but achieving a basic level of quality was much harder.