I think you're forgetting an important stakeholder here: humanity. We as a unit need to do things in an efficient way so we can save our limited resources for other, more important things.
Developers and their time matters more for the above since they're a smaller, minority population whose services are disproportionately necessary as opposed to users (who are more replaceable).
From purely a self-centered user's point of view, it doesn't matter, and might even be a negative since they don't get Apple's high-touch review. But it's not like Apple cares all that much about the opinions or user experience of the user either.
One positive I can think of is more diversity and availability, there are just many more PWAs available. Another is time saved - if a user can start using your PWA in a couple seconds instead of painfully installing the app over a minute, then over a billion users you've saved very significant time.
I would even argue this sort of time saving might cause "natural" selection.
It's not more efficient to build equivalent functionality for iOS, macOS, android, windows and several linux distros when a web app could solve the actual problem for all of them and allow users to pick different os'es for different devices.
For a basic app, well built for both platforms there should not be much difference. A web app also grants significantly more consumer freedom of choice.
> For a basic app, well built for both platforms there should not be much difference.
Ah yes, the elusive unicorn of a "well built basic app"
> web app also grants significantly more consumer freedom of choice.
Literally nothing in this conversation up to this point mentioned consumer freedom and choice.
What about consumer freedom and choice not to approach the heat death of universe through the use of websites-as-apps (on of the most inefficient ways to make apps)?
Because you don't always get a choice. Not all developers have the resources to make special UIs for iOS/Android/Windows/Mac/Linux. Sometimes it's either PWA or nothing. (Well, I know there are other cross platform technologies, but IMHO they're all even worse than PWAs.)
I have an app like that... I make it by myself, and I have no desire to make 5 different GUIs. And yet thousands of people on iOS use it as a PWA. That seems pretty pro-user.
The downside is, my app performs worse in Safari than any other browser, so these iOS folks with high end iPhones are getting about the same experience as Android users with $100 phones. I bet I would have even more iOS users if Apple let them use a better web browser :)
We, as technologists, shouldn't have gotten herded like cattle into the abusive iOS ecosystem. It's extortion.
Many of us hate iOS, Apple's taxation, and Apple's asinine rules with a burning passion. But we have no choice but to develop for the OS that 50% of Americans choose. It sucks.
It's as if AOL won and we had to build what Time Warner wanted and had to pay 30% of our revenues.
It's as if we're living in a Steve Baller hellscape, but everyone worships it because it was from the other Steve.
A lot of young companies are hindered by the pain and overhead of developing and supporting multiple native apps (including patching, tracking & resolving separate bugs etc), spending their precious resources on solved problems rather than user-centric things like better understanding the users by rapidly improving the app and getting feedback etc.
Picture a maybe-for-legal-reasons-theoretical app that needs to be supported on android and iOS plus would massively benefit from the ability to preview the mobile app in a supporting Web portal.
PWA gives us :
- A unified codebase across 2 apps and a Web portal (same project produces the ios, Android and web builds, reuse of css styles, UI components etc)
- Significant reduction in effort developing and maintaining 3ish separate codebases for the same functionality (not quite 3x reduction, there are platform specific issues you have to resolve but still really great).
- Way easier time resourcing the project, one skillet for the 3 frontends and the team can swarm to the required work (This was amazing in the current high demand market)
- Access to the huge array of existing libraries and UI components
For larger more established companies then sure go native. But for companies that have to efficiently use capital, any money spent basically building the same thing twice is money not invested in further understanding the user's needs and improving their experience.
I am an iOS and Android dev but I so agree that Safari needs better support for PWAs. App Store apps are dependant on the review teams approving your app (plus the additional delay in the review process of a day or so). Websites don't have this problem and anyone can access pretty much any website without any gatekeeper.
I’ve never seen anyone explain to me why, as an iOS user, this is a good thing of preferable to a native app.
I’ve seen lots of pro-developer arguments. And anti-Apple’s tight control arguments.
But no one has ever explained to me why as a user I should want a PWA that isn’t some form of the arguments above.