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Comment by marvinblum | Hacker News Reader

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marvinblum·

For Pirsch, we have a PWA you can install right from your mobile browser :)

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Yeah but its PWA, that's the problem

What's wrong with a PWA?

They simply don't work as well as non-web apps. People continue to insist that they do, but from my experience, they just don't have the same smoothness as a native app to show that it's not a web app.

Do you have examples of such apps? Generally curious since I would assume that there might be other factors at play that make such apps "not smooth".

Try something simple like Instagram via the browser versus as an app, it's simply smoother on the app. I would have to dig up more examples but IG immediately comes to mind as a recent experience.

sure for something you're spending hours on like instagram. for my business data analytics, I don't care. If I'm doing any serious work I'm on laptop anyway, mobile is just for casual checks

a native mobile app is a gigantic time, productivity, and cash investment. if a business can get most of the value from a PWA, they will be far better off investing that time and innovation into other parts of their business than building a native app for the "smoothness"

There are lots of ways to make it cross platform pretty easily if you plan to do so from the beginning, such as React Native and Flutter. Even now, if the site is in React, it is not too difficult to port it all to RN, which also has a web version that is quite similar to React proper. Plus, RN and Flutter have PWA support already too.

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