PWA Browser Scorecards
pwascore.com
pwascore.com
You can feel the dev team trying to get as close as they can without shooting their golden goose App Store.
So many apps could be PWA…and we could expect so much more from the median PWA.
That would be a nicer world.
This scorecard says that Chrome for Android already does pretty well, but how many users use PWAs on Android?
I'm really tired of hearing this quite frankly, because the reasons as to why that happens to be the case in some scenarios is not "just" a coincidence, which has been explained ad nauseam.
>This scorecard says that Chrome for Android already does pretty well, but how many users use PWAs on Android?
While I've not seen any stats, I personally use them where possible. Interestingly, my boomer Dad, who is completely clueless when it comes to technology, independently discovered them. He has no idea what a "PWA" is, but he always asks me to "make this website an app for me".
That may have being true a few years ago, but now days unless you are really pushing for very specific stuff GPU stuff. With CSS GPU acceleration its barely noticeable for normal UIs. Now there are tons and tons of PWA that is done in a very in efficient way, then you get a really laggy app.
BeforeInstallPrompt is non-standard. They removed it from the specification because Mozilla had no plans to support it and Apple wouldn’t commit either.
Here’s the discussion:
> There is also some disagreement on the a `BeforeInstallPrompt()` event (BIP). Despite BIP having been in the spec for a few years, neither Safari nor Firefox have opted to support it. As it stands, Mozilla does not plan to support BIP. We are unsure what WebKit's plans are - @hober maybe could let us know? If WebKit doesn't plan to support it, then we should probably remove it from the spec.
— https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps-github/2...
So yet again, this is a case of Google wanting something, Google implementing it unilaterally, Google not being able to convince any other rendering engine to implement it, then the non-standard, Blink-only behaviour is being presented in situations like this as if Safari alone is failing to support a standard.
Web standards are not whatever Google wants. They are arrived at through consensus.
Remember the iOS 17.4 thing from February 2024. Apple completely disabled PWAs in the EU, claiming alternative browser engines created insurmountable security problems that would require building "an entirely new integration architecture" that wasn't practical given DMA timelines. Then after two weeks of backlash they reversed it. If the technical barriers were real, how did they solve them in 14 days? That looks less like a technical limitation and more like testing how much they could get away with.
Or push notifications, Safari on macOS got them in 2013. Safari on iOS got them in 2023. Same WebKit engine, same APNs infrastructure, 10 years apart. What's the technical explanation for that gap? And even after iOS finally got push notifications, they only work for PWAs installed to home screen, not in Safari itself. That's a restriction that doesn't exist anywhere else. Android Chrome has had this working in the browser since 2015.
That's the genius of plausible deniability, every individual decision has some technical justification you can point to. BeforeInstallPrompt lacks consensus (true). Safari has limited resources (as has Chrome). Security is hard (definitely true). But the cumulative effect of all these decisions, year after year, is that PWAs on iOS are hobbled compared to native apps in ways that just happen to protect a $20B+ App Store business.
Your fact-check on BeforeInstallPrompt actually demonstrates why the other patterns are harder to explain away. It shows Apple can legitimately decline features through proper standards processes, which makes the decade-long notification delay and the iOS 17.4 reversal look even more suspicious by comparison.
Yes, and this pattern keeps popping up:
- Google wants something
- Google writes a spec.
- Google implements it.
- No other rendering engine wants it.
- It starts popping up on sites like this.
- People complain that it’s Apple’s fault for not implementing the standard.
Google keeps doing this over and over again. This is embrace and extend all over again. Web standards are not whatever Google wants them to be. They need to be arrived at through consensus.
Google gives Mozilla billions and billions of dollars and they still can’t get Mozilla to agree to these things. Google can’t get anybody outside of Google to implement these things.
Stop ignoring the fact that Mozilla is also saying no to a tonne of stuff. Stop ignoring the fact that no other rendering engine wants these things.
This is not “Apple is holding things back”. This is “Google is trying to unilaterally control web standards”.
Again, the iOS 17.4 situation. Apple claimed building PWA support for alternative browser engines wasn't "practical to undertake" due to security architecture requirements. They removed the feature. Two weeks later they brought it back. I'm asking one more time, what changed in those 14 days? If the architecture work genuinely "created insurmountable security problems that would require building "an entirely new integration architecture" that wasn't practical given DMA timelines", how was it completed so quickly?
Push notifications on iOS versus macOS. 2013 on Mac, 2023 on iPhone, same WebKit engine, same APNs backend. Apple controls the browser and the notification system on both platforms. Why the 10 year gap for what should be the same technical implementation? The thing is, whether or not Google tries to control standards doesn't explain these Apple-specific patterns that are clearly driven by Apple's conflict of interest. Mozilla declining BeforeInstallPrompt doesn't explain why features Apple already built for macOS took a decade to reach iOS. These are implementation decisions about Apple's own technology on Apple's own platforms.
You can argue Google is problematic (I'd also agree on that!) and also admit that Apple's decisions around PWAs are clearly driven by their conflict of interest to protect their $20+ billion dollar App Store business model. Those aren't mutually exclusive. But you haven't explained the iOS 17.4 reversal or the notification delay at all. Could you address those specifically?
The target changed. The EU rules implied that there was a requirement for parity between Safari and the other browsers. Implementing that parity by adding a tonne of new APIs for other browsers is understandably infeasible to achieve in a short timeframe. Can we agree on that?
So the other option to achieve parity is by removing the functionality from Safari. Which is what they did – in a beta not a release version if I remember correctly. That got a big reaction, and the EU backed off. So Apple no longer had to achieve this parity in a short timeframe, so they could just keep the status quo. And I think we can agree that keeping the status quo is easy to implement, right?
So what we’re really saying here is that adding a load of new APIs is hard, and not adding them is easy. In that light, Apple saying “hey this is hard” and then a few weeks later going “never mind” makes total sense. And since that time, they have been adding a load of new APIs for other browsers to achieve parity – just not on the super short timescale.
> Push notifications on iOS versus macOS. 2013 on Mac, 2023 on iPhone, same WebKit engine, same APNs backend. Apple controls the browser and the notification system on both platforms. Why the 10 year gap for what should be the same technical implementation?
I don’t believe Apple have ever claimed it was a technical limitation have they? If you ask real users – even here on Hacker News – a bunch of them will say they don’t want websites to send them notifications on their phone. The user demand isn’t as high as you think it is.
> even after iOS finally got push notifications, they only work for PWAs installed to home screen, not in Safari itself.
You will see this in a lot of Apple decisions around web standards. They see visiting a website and installing a PWA as expressions of different levels of trust and they are trying to avoid permission prompt fatigue. Do you want any random website to send you notifications? No. Do you want websites to constantly prompt you for permission? No. If they do that, will lots of users accidentally say yes? Yes. Are the answers to these questions different for something a user explicitly installs? Yes. If you read through the discussions on the web specification proposals, you’ll see this kind of thing come up several times, from Mozilla as well.
> You can argue Google is problematic (I'd also agree on that!) and also admit that Apple's decisions around PWAs are clearly driven by their conflict of interest to protect their $20+ billion dollar App Store business model.
I definitely think that Apple makes choices that deprioritise the web. But I also think that 90% of the things people here actually complain about are actually reasonable, and it’s only a small minority that are less justifiable. I also think it’s less a case of moustache-twirling “let’s hold the web back to boost native apps” and more “why should we?”
End-users strongly prefer native to web. End-users are not asking for PWAs in meaningful numbers. At this point people often blame Apple for holding PWAs back, but this isn’t the case.
Apple are not holding PWAs back on Android. Google implement all the APIs they feel like on Chrome for Android. PWAs on Android are not held back. PWAS on Android are a best-case scenario for PWAs. But end users still overwhelmingly choose native apps over PWAs on Android.
If PWAs were preferred by users and artificially limited by Apple, then we would see end-users pick PWAs on Android. Developers wouldn’t build native apps on Android so much, they would just build PWA+iOS and skip the native Android implementation. They don’t do that.
The causality is the opposite direction to what you think. Apple aren’t causing PWAs to fail; PWAs failing causes Apple to not care about them.
> Source this immediately.
> That's pure gaslighting
> You are now dictating how I have to adjust the style of my writing so you can be bothered to finally answer my questions after you've repeatedly evaded answering question? You never had any intention of answering them. Apple's conflict of interest which you're hellbent on denying is indicative of your own conflict of interest. Shareholders tend to be defensive of their own investments.
> You evaded and dodged questions by Gish galloping and didn't expect that I would relentlessly press you on answering them. After you've realized that I will not give up on demanding substantiated answers to those inconvenient questions, you pivoted to arguing about tone. Your strategy is obvious.
> @dang can you please review these coordinated false flags?
You are being flagged because you are dragging this thread down into the mud. Note that your earlier comments where you were behaving more reasonably are not flagged, but as you descend into baseless accusations and conspiracies, your comments are getting flagged.
I pointed you to the site guidelines before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you make more of an effort to follow them, you might not get your comments flagged so much. But more importantly, you would stop making this thread an unpleasant distraction from the main topic.
You're projecting and the quotes of mine you've listed are an adequate description of your debate strategy. Then you condescendingly link to the guidelines as if you weren't the one who broke them in the first place by consistently arguing in bad faith.
Can you also please cite your "EU backed off" claim? Apple reversed following developer/user backlash. If the EU changed position, kindly link to their statement.
Where's your source for the iOS 17.4 "parity" claim? Apple stated "complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines would require building an entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and was not practical to undertake." That's about security architecture and engineering, not browser parity.
Notice what's happening? iOS 17.4 brought PWA removal, security citations, pressure reversal. Currently we're seeing product withdrawal threats, security citations, DMA court fights, market hostage situations. You claim this company lacks conflict of interest and makes neutral web standards technical decisions?
I need a straight answer. Does Apple have a conflict of interest? They run a $20+ billion App Store taking 15-30% of transactions. PWAs let developers bypass it. Do you acknowledge this financial incentive structure exists, or are you still seriously claiming that Apple has no motivation to limit PWA capabilities?
Your argument needs us to believe Apple's PWA underinvestment decade, iOS 17.4 reversal, EU threats, DMA battles, and Android gaps are coincidental technical decisions unrelated to App Store revenue. That's not plausible.
The push notification logic contradicts itself. You claim users don't want them, Apple didn't implement for a decade, then implemented in 2023. Why would they do that? No demand doesn't justify engineering resources. macOS Safari got them in 2013. Low demand doesn't explain that. You haven't explained the 10-year gap between identical technology stacks.
The Android argument supports our point. PWAs need iOS support for developer economics. Without iPhone access, cross-platform value collapses. Developers can't justify PWA investment without iOS access. Saying "PWAs fail on Android" while iOS is hobbled shows exactly what we're arguing about Apple gatekeeping shaping ecosystems.
You claimed "PWAs failing causes Apple not to care." That reverses causality in a deceptive manner. Apple's underinvestment, iOS 17.4 obstruction, decade of gaps cause PWA struggles. You point to that struggle justifying the behavior. That's circular reasoning absolving Apple of responsibility for a situation they created.
You've shifted explanations three times. Google embrace-and-extend, then "parity requirements," then "user preferences" (for which you provided no data), now Android dynamics proving our gatekeeper point. Each time evidence contradicts, new apologia emerges. That's motivated reasoning protecting predetermined conclusions, not reasoned argument.
I'm asking directly. Does Apple's App Store create a PWA development financial conflict of interest? Yes or no? Your writing requires ignoring incentive structures, believing Apple makes innocuous technical choices while fighting regulations, threatening exits, and maintaining decade-long feature gaps that 'coincidentally' always happen to protect their most profitable business.
Yes. Let’s use Web MIDI as an example. This was proposed by Google, and implemented by Google. It was initially rejected by both Mozilla and Apple on privacy and security grounds. Mozilla eventually gave in and implemented it. Then it came to light that porn sites had been using Web MIDI to fingerprint and track users.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23679063
I think Apple made the right call there. Just blindly saying yes to functionality is not good for the web.
But I don't think Google's to blame for making a different choice about it. It's picking a different privacy / functionality trade-off, but it's doing it with open standards that others are free to implement if they want.
It's putting some pressure on Apple because users often care more about functionality than about privacy, but not so much that they're worried about it, I think. They seem to be doing well!
They only started back paddling after the app store was introduced and consequently crystalized into a multi billion $ market
https://infrequently.org/2015/06/progressive-apps-escaping-t...
When Apple launched the iPhone, Steve Jobs told people that if they wanted to build apps for the iPhone, they should build them as web apps. This wasn’t specifically about PWAs, just web apps in general. Users demanded native apps, so Apple launched the iPhoneOS SDK and App Store the next year.
Kinda... Google and folks have been cracking down on security pretty hard, to the point where certain things would probably stop working if you weren't maintaining the security of the endpoint or something correctly. There are APIs (more and more everyday it seems...) that only work with "secure contexts" like HTTPS, and they're working actively on tightening HTTPS requirements (like shortening certificate lifetimes, valid ciphers etc). Sure, this helps improve security, but not without breaking compatibility.
I know Chrome / Edge kept having issues with it being behind experimental flag and even the flag breaking and going away between builds.
Never heard of Safari supporting tabbed mode for PWA's
This is probably the biggest issue for me with PWA's windows.open actually opening a new full OS window sucks rather than a built in native tab strip.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
It is not, thank you. Fixed!
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/393149332
Not sure why there isn't more traction here, tabs is the biggest thing holding back PWA's for me.
Steve first talked about application development for iPhone at the same keynote I was demonstrating the new ID Tech 5 rendering engine on Mac, so I was in the front row. When he started going on about “Web Apps”, I was (reasonably quietly) going “Booo!!!”.
After the public cleared out and the rest of us were gathered in front of the stage, I started urgently going on about how web apps are terrible, and wouldn’t show the true potential of the device. We could do so much more with real native access!
Steve responded with a line he had used before: “Bad apps could bring down cell phone towers.” I hated that line. He could have just said “We aren’t ready”, and that would have been fine.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/8l9qw2/comment/dzdwc...
PWAs work very well on macOS. I use the PWA version of discord instead of their electron app because it feels a lot more "native" and responsive than the alternative.
They work fine for both iOS and macOS. Safari scores higher than Firefox on Android.
Don’t be fooled by scores like this that include non-standard behaviour. Including Blink-only behaviour that both Mozilla and Apple have rejected is obviously going to artificially inflate Chrome’s score.
Scores intentionally do not include non-standard or experimental capabilities. I'll make that clearer, thank you!
Last time I tried developing a PWA-first app on iOS it was horrible. Users couldn’t figure out how to install it, notifications, workers, haptics, etc had all sorts of arbitrary restrictions.
I help run PWABuilder.com, which packages PWAs for app stores. I think it would be helpful to our users to see your pwascore.com site. Maybe we can link to your site from ours.
Yes, we need to do this, but it has to be an actual test suite.
People need to be able to contribute tests to expose broken “supported” functionality.
This just perpetuates lies.
Kudos to the author, I have absolutely nothing against your efforts, but the approach is just flawed in my opinion.
The data sources are credited at the bottom, and I feel like they're both gold-standard references. I'm open to suggestions!
I can create a filter for that, thanks for the feedback! Importantly, experimental and non-standard features are not counted in the primary score.
Experimental capabilities have a little 'flask' icon next to them, and non-standard items have a little 'warning' icon next to them, mirroring MDN conventions.
This is not true. I haven’t gone through each item in detail, but there are no icons for Web Bluetooth, Web NFC, or Web USB. All of these are non-standard, Blink-only APIs that no other rendering engine has agreed to implement.
Mozilla on Web Bluetooth:
> This API provides access to the Generic Attribute Profile (GATT) of Bluetooth, which is not the lowest level of access that the specifications allow, but its generic nature makes it impossible to clearly evaluate. Like WebUSB there is significant uncertainty regarding how well prepared devices are to receive requests from arbitrary sites. The generic nature of the API means that this risk is difficult to manage. The Web Bluetooth CG has opted to only rely on user consent, which we believe is not sufficient protection. This proposal also uses a blocklist, which will require constant and active maintenance so that vulnerable devices aren't exploited. This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices.
— https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-bluetooth
Mozilla on Web NFC:
> We believe Web NFC poses risks to users security and privacy because of the wide range of functionality of the existing NFC devices on which it would be supported, because there is no system for ensuring that private information is not accidentally exposed other than relying on user consent, and because of the difficulty of meaningfully asking the user for permission to share or write data when the browser cannot explain to the user what is being shared or written.
— https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#web-nfc
Mozilla on Web USB:
> Because many USB devices are not designed to handle potentially-malicious interactions over the USB protocols and because those devices can have significant effects on the computer they're connected to, we believe that the security risks of exposing USB devices to the Web are too broad to risk exposing users to them or to explain properly to end users to obtain meaningful informed consent. It also poses risks that sites could use USB device identity or data stored on USB devices as tracking identifiers.
— https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webusb
As far as I can see, you’re counting these Blink-only Google APIs as standards that other browsers are failing to implement.
All I did was look at the most common things I know off the top of my head are mistaken for web standards when they are not. I did not review anything else. So if you just changed the status of those things, there’s more fixes you need to make.
For instance, I just took another look, and I saw that BackgroundSync is not marked as non-standard. But Mozilla are negative on it:
> We're concerned that this feature would allow users to be tracked across networks (leaking private information about location and IP address and how they change over time), and that it would allow script execution and resource consumption when it isn't clear to the user that they're interacting with the site. We might reconsider this position given evidence that these concerns can be safely addressed.
— https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#background-sy...
And Apple have concerns and have not committed to it either:
> Adding concerns: power as generally having activity running in the background is not great for battery life. In my experience as a user of "native" apps this can also be tricky to get right. Sometimes background syncing would have taken place, but the moment you open the app it does another sync and blows away the content you just started to read.
> Adding concerns: privacy as this would allow a website to monitor you switching IP addresses. As the draft notes there also some network attacker leaks due to this, revealing origins that you visit that use this functionality to them.
— https://github.com/WebKit/standards-positions/issues/14
If you look at the spec. it has “Unofficial draft” displayed very prominently all over it, and also states:
> It is not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track.
— https://wicg.github.io/background-sync/spec/
So again, this seems to be a Blink-only API that only Google have implemented, not standard functionality. How many of these fails are actually just Google doing their own thing with no buy-in from other rendering engines? “PWAscore” is a reasonable thing to build, but “Chromescore” where you measure against all the non-standard things Google have implemented by themselves is not a reasonable thing to build.
Also, you have “Not supported” for push notifications in Safari, but if you check Can I Use, you will see that it works for installed PWAs and is only unavailable to websites you visit. Since the purpose of your site is to score based on PWA support, this should be a success, not a fail.
Personally, I would remove all the non-standard stuff. Not give a big list of standard and non-standard stuff mixed together.
No, for the specific issue you mentioned, I found and fixed a logic bug. There are some features/capabilities which are manually assigned in cases where there's no CanIUse or MDN data. (Generally, I'm trying to minimize additions/overrides for maintainability's sake.)
> For instance, I just took another look, and I saw that BackgroundSync is not marked as non-standard. But Mozilla are negative on it: […] And Apple have concerns and have not committed to it either:
This is a very fair point, and again I think you for being very generous with your time and expertise. I've reported this as a bug in the data (https://github.com/mdn/content/issues/41455), and manually overridden the data for now as a workaround.
> Personally, I would remove all the non-standard stuff. Not give a big list of standard and non-standard stuff mixed together.
I've added a "Hide Experimental" checkbox, which can also be set/shared in a URL property. I'm not yet sure about making that the default, but I hope it's useful!
If you just did what they have but make it actually test to the spec, it’d be great.
“Caniuse” is not gold standard. It’s basically “Did the browser vendor claim to support a feature”.
iOS safari has so many bugs throughout everything on the web, if you actually have them red for every feature with a bad bug, they’d have so much worse of a score.
Eg. Does safari support audio element? Yes on the surface. But try to play from a cached blob. It’s hilariously broken.
See my comment history, there’s an app with a LONG list of safari media bugs. Yet your page lists them with a green check. Lies.
I’m not surprised if nearly every feature there “works” but try to build an app with it and you find yourself set up to fail.
This feels like a chrome ad
A significant number of things on this list are non-standard things that only Google have implemented for Chrome, that no other rendering engine has agreed to implement. Obviously this gives a huge artificial boost to Chrome.
(One of the search options on the 404 page goes to a possible PWA-related page, but it's also marked as "Limited" there.)
Biggest problem for me as a PWA dev is how eager mobile browsers are to delete your local data, which is not part of this scorecard. I guess that's tricky to quantify, but basically they all suck but Safari sucks more.
File-sharing services (e.g., sharedrop?) seems to be some of them but I'm not sure if its popular in terms of usage.
FWIW, in the US, PWAs are a non-starter for most apps due to Apple having so much marketshare and having horrendous UX for installing them. Anytime you have to provide your users "instructions" to do something on iOS, you've lost (and it's by design).
Added, thanks! I really like the suggestion to use some kind of indicator in category headings, too.
For example, is AR/VR a critical PWA feature or is that just advanced capability?
Where does PWA end and "replaces any conceivable native app" begin?
I think I understand the deeper point you're trying to make, which is that not all web platform capabilities are created equal when it comes to making PWAs a legitimate alternative to native apps.
I've tried to be thoughtful about this, and my solution was to weight the capabilities from 0.5–3. At the two ends of that range, I gave required PWA features a weight of 3, and nice-to-have/experimental features a weight of 0.5. As you can see, this doesn't really penalize Chrome for its "stunt features", and I think it provides a more realistic picture of what Firefox and Safari are capable of for most PWA use cases.
Additionally, experimental and non-standard features aren't used to compute the PWAscore. You can see raw scores (unweighted, and including experimental/non-standard features) in the tooltip of the "normal" score.
When I think of most apps on my phone, these capabilities are rare or non-existent:
- USB
- AV/VR
- Payment processing or IAP (almost certainly my own tastes here tho)
- Window management(?) - I'm not even sure what this means on mobile.
But obviously, whatever deficiencies exist in background work or notifications are probably important. Looking at CIU, Firefox seems to have resolved them in more recent versions. In fact maybe some other comment has already mentioned it but FF/Android 141+ seems to have resolved a lot of those?
Is there not much PWA stuff for desktop or... does it not matter since you can just pin tabs?
You can also ship PWAs on the Microsoft Store and allow Windows 11 folks to natively install them (for an example/shameless plug: https://homechart.app).