> only to have Android Studio force me to update Gradle and dependencies and whatnot, and break everything
This. And people are surprised that many just wrap websites as apps on Android.
This. And people are surprised that many just wrap websites as apps on Android.
Try and do it. if you run into a deal breaking issue with PWA features, then wrap it in a minimalist app shell.
Best case: everything works on Android and iOS and it's also a website.
Worst case: you will end up doing some platform specific code and dealing with the app stores like you were going to do anyway.
Average Case: everything will work on android and some things will be broken on iOS.
Unfortunately you can't just ship a PWA with no wrapper. You have to build a special wrapper app that hosts the PWA and you have to use Android Studio and Gradle and all that crap.
Updating the wrapper is surely still easier than a whole app, but it's nontrivial and it's frustrating to still have to deal with the platform BS for a pure web app that uses no platform APIs at all. More work than I wanted to deal with for a hobby project, anyway.
You can… but it won’t be in the Play Store. Disqualifying for many, but not all.
I don't think so.
Even now if I need a "native" app I'm looking very seriously at React Native first before rolling two totally separate apps in different languages.