Someone's dislike of PWAs is irrelevant to whether or not someone else should be able to use them if they want to. It's also irrelevant when it comes to users who want to benefit from competition in the app distribution market. If you don't like PWAs, you're free to not use them, and you're even free to benefit from the improvements their competition brings to the whole mobile software ecosystem.

It's also ironic to bring up Apple's hindering of web standards as evidence of anti-monopolization of standards, considering the fact that the lack of PWA support forces users to use the proprietary App Store monopoly to install apps instead.

> If you don't like PWAs, you're free to not use them, and you're even free to benefit from the improvements their competition brings to the whole mobile software ecosystem.

IMHO, that's very naive. Look at ElectronJS apps. I hate ElectronJS, still the most used apps on my Desktop computer are ElectronJS. Why? Because I don't have a choice, because it's cheaper for the developers.

Before ElectronJS, I actually had real desktop apps. So yeah, I see the case against PWAs.

Better: I could stay in favour of keeping actual native apps on mobile, in Kotlin/Swift :-)

Well, vote with your time and money.

PWAs would be cheaper to develop overall than building 2-3 separate code bases. Which would mean more software available generally, particularly from bootstrapped companies.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that native go away.

> PWAs would be cheaper to develop overall than building 2-3 separate code bases.

But that's my point: that's exactly the promise of every single cross-platform system out there. But in my experience, that's generally not true for non-trivial apps (ever heard "write once, debug everywhere"?). And second, it usually makes for worse UX on all platforms.

I feel like many people consider PWAs as a totally new thing, but at the end of the day, it's a cross-platform system. There are tons of those; just look around, cross-platform is not a silver bullet.

> But that's my point: that's exactly the promise of every single cross-platform system out there.

Every non web cross platform system doesn't have nearly the investment as browsers do for quality and compatibility. It's not even close. Like, orders of magnitude. I don't like the cross platform toolkits either.

Let's not pretend the web as a platform is the same m'kay? People use it every day from all of these devices, like billions of people. This isn't some unknown, where this speculation is reasonable either. There are issues, but it's not equivalent.

I kindly disagree ;-)

Most users don't know WTF a PWA is, let alone have an opinion of them.

Nope, but many users will tell you that they like iOS better because it's "easier to use" or it "looks better" than, e.g. Android.

And that's most certainly because Apple enforces more UX consistency on iOS apps.

Google breaks consistency and wrecks the user experience with each successive Android release.

Right. But that's a point in favor of Apple ensuring consistency on their platform, isn't it?

Or a else point in favor of Apple getting complacent and doing dumb things with their platform too.

newsflash to your newsflash: most „native” apps are lazy wrappers around shitty webviews anyway.

My rule of thumb is that for any application that relies on an internet connection for most of its functionality, I'd rather just use a real web browser.

My banking application is like this, and the irony is that it’s kinda sorta second factor to their browser UI, so I’ve got to live with it.

Yeah, banking apps are currently in worst possible spot, neither truly native not truly web

I am aware of that and I hate those apps, because those are worst of both worlds - it works as bad as any overcomplicated web app but they also have access to native apis and information that would be inaccessible through web browser (or at least be blockable)

Why? Most of those """native""" apps are a pile of HTML and JS anyways.

I hate PWAs not because I like shitty native apps (it seems like it's not obvious, somehow).

I hate PWAs because I like good native apps, and PWAs give an opportunity for developers to replace their native app with a cross-platform web app. And in my experience, cross-platform generally comes at the cost of app quality on a single platform. Instead of hiring developers who know iOS, you now hire web developers who debug their web app on many platforms they don't really know well.