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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

This is a constant argument i have with by business partner. He's always asking me "when are we making an app for our <SaaS>" and I always reply back: "We already have an app! It's just a PWA"

PWA's are freaking awesome for both users and developers. Users don't have to install a massive app and me as a developer can focus on making one platform better rather than 3.

And they are pretty freaking powerful in what you can do. Not to toot my own horn too much but I created an "app"[1] for viewing cities on the other side of the earth from where you're standing. It's got camera, gyro and GPS to determine what you're looking at to the folks I've shown it too, anyone non-technical has been completely fooled and thought it was a proper app.

[1]: https://earthview.sunny.gg

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Imo, you already lost the argument when you have to explain that PWA is the "app". For most users, app is something they install from App Store or Google Play. I get the point of view from developers point of view, but unless the majority of the users are technical people, there's no reason to use PWA these days.

The problem is if we dont have it available, we can't get the users to use it even if we wanted to. <

Idk if its not in their best interest or something, but app stores should just allow installing an "app", which is really just a bookmark to website and hides all of the normal browser UI without having to bundle the entire browser with the app.

The point of app stores is that they somehow curate the experience. They can't do that if you just ship a bookmark.

Also I don't think web views in most app stores (namely mobile stores) ship an entire browser. As a matter of fact you're literally not allowed to ship browsers in iOS and that's a huge slice of the market on its own.

Though you’re limiting your growth potential here by letting your ideology get in the way. Mobile platform users when surveyed almost always overwhelmingly prefer native apps and it’s not even close.

I anticipate if you start getting public feature requests a native app will be at the top of the list.

I agree, presentation is a big issue with PWA's since you have to know how to add it vs just searching in the app store. I'm sure were going to get a native app eventually, though customers have not asked for one yet and seem to be pretty happy with the PWA.

It would be amazing if everyone would boycott the app stores as much as possible and normalize PWAs. People would learn if they got common enough. But alas, I doubt this will happen.

PWAs suck and when I have to use one I immediately go find something else.

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