While Apple don't invest in PWA, PWA is doomed from a commercial point of view.
It is a really sad situation because the user experience of PWA is match better than installing apps from the store (with higher install rate than native).
Twitter is (or was) one of those examples. It took months until I realize that I was using a PWA than a native app.
Something is very wrong if you can't tell the difference. The difference is night and day on iOS.
PWA app has significantly lower responsiveness, constant mis-touches on buttons, loading screens for every click etc.
That's certainly not inherent to every PWA, e.g. there is no need to have a "loading screen for every click".
Ultimately, it’s a business decision, because paying for 3x the people or 3x the time to implement one feature on web, iOS and android is not something that people like to do, let alone the headache of coordinating feature parity and release timeline with said teams.
I'd rather they kick out every app with an unjustifiably-long launch time or with janky non-native behavior in places where it has no reason to be so, but since they're evidently not gonna do that, may as well have PWAs.
People have A/B tested "click this app store link to install" and "click this to install this webpage as a web-app" and found the latter gets more installs?
Once to get to app store
Once to click install
A double tap to verify after face/touch/passcode on ios
(I use iOS.)
I'd hope PWAs on Android take at least two actions to install (though perhaps not three). One-tap is how you end up with every user having tons of apps installed they never intended to.
I can't believe people keep saying this with a straight face. It's as if they've never seen an proper native app before (any of the third-party clients to Twitter come to mind before they were axed). Or haven't seen actual good fast implementations like the one Twitter actually bought and surprisingly still kinda maintains (see on desktop, https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/)