[1]: https://app.starbucks.com/
[2]: https://formidable.com/work/starbucks-progressive-web-app/
Are there no good PWAs that run on Android? Are there none that, though perhaps smaller is scope, run well in Safari?
People have been advocating for PWAs for a very long time now but it’s incredibly hard to get examples of good ones. There is always some complaint about Safari instead.
when one app is used by roughly half of all mobile users, that's not something you can ignore. so complaining about that one app when these conversations come up does not seem out of place. essentially, the conversation is something like:
- PWAs are great!
-- How well do they run on Safari?
- PWAs are great on other platforms.
-- So about half of mobile users? Doesn't seem that great to me
I’m not saying I expect PWAs to be huge, but it seems like they should be more notable PWAs if people really wanted them so bad.
Yet someone the total lack of PWA success is 100% Safari’s fault.
Look at all those users I listed above. How are there no common/well known PWAs if they’re so great? People use websites like the Google Suite and Figma and such. They use web apps built as desktop apps in Electron. They use native apps.
Almost no one uses PWAs. Even if Figma or Gmail or whatever is available to be saved as a PWA it doesn’t seem to be commonly done.
There must be some other problem than Safari. It can’t be the big issue.
But a much higher percentage of the profitable market, in terms of app income.
TikTok aggressively funnels you into the native app for various business reasons, but the experience is well polished if they'd let you use it all the time.
Safari (really that iOS won't let you pick a different browser) has definitely been holding back the growth of PWAs though. Without decent install to home screen support (apple doesn't implement install banners for web), no push notifications, many of the native API integrations missing, it's hard to go too far down the web path before the business folks want the native app for growth angles. It's a lot more about making money than the better UX that can be had with native.
Those "native API integrations" are Chrome-only non-standards that neither Safari nor Firefox are ever going to implement.
The reason iOS and Google/Android PWAs suck is because Apple does everything in its power to make them suck:
- Complex and user-unfriendly "add-to-homescreen" functionality
- Limited/trailing functionality for native APIs
- The obnoxious url/browser bar persistent at the bottom of the page, with horrendous and uncustomizable hiding/showing of said bar.
People advocate for PWAs, but I never use them because as an end-user they're awful to use, because developers can't create them to the quality of native applications because of these limitations. Of course the complaints go to Safari in that case.
They absolutely could have PWAs be of higher quality, but they don't, for obvious reasons.
Why aren’t they on Android? Windows? Linux? MacOS?
Existing PWAs should be better known, especially in HN-like/tech circles.
But that’s not what I see.
For Windows, Linux, and MacOS, there's no real need for them, or not enough need for them to exist. There are no policies or guidelines to follow, there is no 30% tax.
The browsers people use on desktop devices provide everything that developers need and can reasonably expect of the platform. There aren't any usability differences, there are barely any performance differences, and there are barely any feature differences.
In fact, I think many desktop end-users would prefer the app to be web-based because it feels so native.
In addition, it's what another commenter said - if it can't be on iOS, then what's even the point of having one?
But users won't (and don't) go through that.
Open the Share sheet, scroll down, tap "Add to Home Screen," fill in the information, tap Add.
There are simply no users that do this, and it is not an alternative to having a mobile app in the App Store.
100%. PWAs are not a priority for Apple (and shouldn't be for developers) because users don't search for apps in web search engines, they search for them in the App Store.
https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/13/apple-mulls-opening-browser-e...
I'm not even talking about bugs per se. Just the experience. I find myself constantly battling misinterpreted gestures. I try to zoom out on a page. Safari thinks I want to switch to the Tab View. I don't. Please just make the page smaller so I can see it all.
Or, I try to grab a UI slider that's positioned near the left edge of the viewport. Safari thinks I want to navigate back to the previous page. Nope. Apparently if form controls are too close to the screen's edge, they're read-only at that point?
So many gestures are overloaded now that it's a stressful thing sometimes to get it to do what I want. Being pixel-perfect with my fat dumb finger is no fun.
Am I just too cynical here?
* Persistent shortcut button on device's launcher
* Notifications to pull user back into app to consume content, spend money, view ads
* Data collection like you say
* Uniquely identify user w/ device identifiers
* No browser UI and quirks
* Persistent storage on user's device
Additionally many of the APIs are mature and haven’t changed significantly in a while, which means the body of relevant reference material online is huge — it’s not necessarily outdated just because it’s a couple years old, predating [X buzzword feature] getting added to [Y trendy JS framework] and turning popular convention upside down for the fiftieth time.
Well, that’s how it on iOS at least. It’s more murky on Android because Android Framework is kind of a mess, but it still has some advantages over the web.
A native app can track you all the time.
Also, PWAs on apple have only "persistent" storage for 7 days.
Notifications are coming in 2023.
But the big one — access to the address book picker - is still behind an Experimental flag !!
It simply comes down to the fact that the user experience is not as good as native.
And you can't run a successful business without making your users happy.
The first popup was dismissible, so I kept swiping. Within two videos the same popup was back and it was not dismissible.
Companies intentionally cripple the web experience.
If that's the best example of a PWA, give me a badly implemented native app any day of the week and five times on Sundays.
Also mobile Web is good enough for most forms over data kind of applications.
Other than games, where Web 3D APIs are stuck in 2010, many "apps" could be easily done as mobile Web, specially all those that are basically mobile Electron.
This means that while they can be good, they very often aren’t because they aren’t getting the budgets and caliber of engineering talent they’d need to be good, and so it’s much more common that they fall somewhere on the less-great side of mediocre.
Users then associate this degraded quality with web apps and disinclines them from using them, even on platforms where PWA installation is promoted (like with Edge/Chrome on Windows and Chrome on Android).
Safari’s limitations play a part too but even if Safari vanished tomorrow PWAs would continue to get lukewarm reception so long as companies aren’t putting the same kind of resources they’d put into a flagship native app into their PWAs. At the end of the day, if you cheap out you get a crap experience.
Edit: just tried the Spotify pwa and it's not bad. Maybe not as good as native, but that's partly because of the big "Get App" button in the bottom right corner.
Any other games the app might be included are out side of the scope of the imaginary app in my mind.
Disclaimer: I work for Google, but never paid much attention to that corner of the company.
I wonder what those are. Because the apps where they want actual fast responsive apps with smooth animations etc. (and tracking :) ) are all native as far as I can tell.
Basic messaging functionality, ...