Ask HN: Do customers use your company's PWA? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do customers use your company's PWA?

7 pointsbrundolf6 comments

We've got both a native app and a website. I believe the web app has the full functionality of the native app. So I'm thinking about making a manifest so it can be "installed" as a PWA.

Making the manifest shouldn't take much time so it should be harmless, if nothing else, but I wonder if it's worth advertising via a banner or investing in deeper PWA features like offline availability.

So from a business perspective: if you have a PWA, do people bother installing it? Particularly when you also have a native mobile app. Is it worth spending effort on?

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I guess I don’t understand the feature development part of the question. If you have enough users on the mobile or tablet web app and the specific PWA feature (like offline) makes the app more useful, then you would invest in it to the degree warranted and wouldn’t worry about installs, just usage. If your company is dead set on putting all effort into the native app, regardless of additional benefit relative to improving other platforms, and you’re looking at changing that priority, that’s different, of course.

We’ve found trying to drive home screen installs to be generally useless. But announcing new mobile web app features through the usual channels (“what’s new” monthly emails etc) does seem to affect usage.

It's more a question of "is there a user segment whose first choice among the three would be a PWA, given the option". And then I guess also, "does the general public even know about/understand the concept of PWAs to begin with?"

Mainly looking for anecdata here

>is there a user segment whose first choice among the three would be a PWA, given the option

One meaningful user segment is corporate workers with relatively restrictive IT departments, where you're not able to install native apps. I'm in that category, and use several PWAs.

Interesting, I never would have thought of that angle

Sweetgreen is using a PWA on Android, installed via the Play Store.

It's interesting that you can do that, though I don't think we'd want to retire our existing native apps

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