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perons | 1 year ago

One comment that I haven't seen yet and that puts PWA for Games in jeopardy: the maximum caching allowed for Safari PWA's (thus the whole iOS ecossystem) is only 50mb. Most mid-core / hardcore mobile games are bigger than that after downloading remote assets when the app loads for the first time, and this means a player of a mid-core PWA game would have to redownload a good chunk of the assets everytime the game loads.

I could be mistaken though, but I tried looking for how PWA's work with caching and it is a whole layer of uncertainties that depends on which browser/OS/ecosystem you are in, and if the user clears it's browser cache. In the end, it seems like PWA will only work reliably when the PWA is super light, and doesn't need a lot of caching, so for gaming that would mean only lightweight, casual and hypercasual games.

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streptomycin|1 year ago

The 50mb limit no longer exists, it's much higher now https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198133#c15

Safari will delete your cached data if your app goes unused for a little while though. Native apps may do the same thing though... at least on Android I get notifications about it deleting cached data for native apps I haven't used recently.

henriquelalves|1 year ago

That's nice, thanks for correcting me! Although it's quite a nuisance that most PWA info I looked for before posting had the old 50mb (mis)information.

anderber|1 year ago

Safari has always hampered PWAs, and probably for the reason that they want you to use the appstore instead ($$$).

scarface_74|1 year ago

It came out in the Epic trial that 90% of App Store revenue comes from games. Those aren’t going to be web apps anyway for monetization reasons.

If PWAs are so bad on iOS and great on Android, why do companies bother with writing Android apps, web apps for computers and iOS apps instead of just telling Android users to use the web apps?

DrBenCarson|1 year ago

Is Android dramatically better for PWAs?