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[return to "Do not download the app, use the website"]
1. joseph+89[view] [source] 2025-07-25 23:13:12
>>foxfir+(OP)
I wish Apple and Google would make rules to the effect of "if your app's entire functionality could be done in a regular website or PWA, then you can't put a native app on our stores".
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2. kingo5+4a[view] [source] 2025-07-25 23:22:54
>>joseph+89
Given how much it seems Apple detests PWAs, I don't ever see this happening. One can dream.
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3. llm_ne+Ad[view] [source] 2025-07-25 23:51:57
>>kingo5+4a
I feel like Apple is some lazy target for people to point to why PWAs have little uptake.

Android has long had PWA support. Almost no one uses it at all. In fact iOS users have long had significantly high web browser usage than their Android compatriots.

"It's because iOS doesn't support it...somehow. Despite entirely separate bases that could be served in entirely different ways, it's actually Apple's fault"

A couple of years ago Apple pretty much fully supported PWAs, including push notifications. Still negligible uptake on either iOS or Android. It turns out that it was the PWAs vs the Apps all along, and had nothing to do with Apple. The web and the average web technology stack has turned so toxic -- those enormous frameworks that yield an atrocious user experience -- that people prefer the app.

Still though, somehow Apple's fault. Increasingly such adherents have to reach to successively more niche weird Google additions to Chrome to justify why somehow Apple is to blame. Because Apple doesn't support the new half-baked AdBlastNoBlock3000 API that Google jammed into Chrome. Etc.

It's just weird. At some point people need to be a bit more honest with themselves about why apps are preferred over PWAs or even just basic websites when an app is avialable.

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4. frollo+Ie[view] [source] 2025-07-26 00:03:10
>>llm_ne+Ad
Apps are normally made semi cross-platform nowadays. Not much point in maintaining a PWA that's effectively an Android-only app.

But even aside from Apple's lack of support, the PWA standard seems kinda bad. Weird boilerplate like the serviceworker.js even if all you want is to make it addable to home screen.

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5. llm_ne+Cx1[view] [source] 2025-07-26 15:51:00
>>frollo+Ie
>Apps are normally made semi cross-platform nowadays

"normally" is carrying a lot of water there. While the back-end is shared, obviously, a large number of orgs have two distinct fully native development projects for the platforms. There are zero empirical metrics I can cite, but in my experience the cross platform thing is a minority. Cross platform tooling is often the talk among the aspirational "One day I'm going to write a novel, and then a hit app" sorts, but it just doesn't dominate in the actual industry.

But if it did, Flutter dominates the cross-platform world, and what do you know, Flutter can generate PWA apps.

>But even aside from Apple's lack of support

Apple has supported PWA for a couple of years. It was a lazy excuse by cheerleaders who had nothing factual, but Apple supporting PWAs didn't move the needle at all. Because it turns out that a billion Android devices not being targeted with PWAs had literally nothing to do with Apple.

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6. frollo+wo2[view] [source] 2025-07-27 01:50:07
>>llm_ne+Cx1
React Native is pretty typical now. Of course it's not magic, but it gets you most of the way there.
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