[theK]

PWA was an awesome idea and should have been the way forward.

Unfortunately both Google and Apple very early on identified that it was in their best interest to keep the concept around in a half-dead state and ensure nobody really built on it...

[mmis1000]

PWA on android's side is at least usable.

You get notification. You can autoplay video/audio. You get whaterver video or element full screen with all necessary UI. You get rotation lock. You have a fullscreen to do what ever you want for any purpose. You probably can't touch hardware APIs(for example: bluetooth/nfc) like native app. But that isn't really needed for most apps either.

On the other side. Apple seems sabotage the PWA as much as possible. You can't autoplay video/audio. You can't even fullscreen anything other than video, and when fullscreen video, UI is ignored. Also there is no way to disable gesture so your app will misfire system gesture. And you can't lock the rotation either. There is no way to auto rotate the video player or whatever when maximized either.

It's really a golden example for pretend to do something while actually not. It seems you can do pretty much everything with ios pwa. And when you try to do it. You will figured out it will have a worse experience than native app because all sort of issues.

[popcornricecake]

To be fair, Android also sabotages PWAs, it's just done behind your back. You see, in order to get a PWA to properly install, you'll have to use Chrome, and you'll have to have a Google Play account and Chrome will submit the PWA manifest for validation to a Google server, which in turn will decide whether the PWA is worthy, and if it is, it will generate a so called WebAPK, which is then installed on your device. If it's not worthy however, then it will become a bookmark instead, and many of the features that can be described in the manifest will not work at all.

So if you wanted to use a different browser or install a PWA without a connection to the internet, or without Google Play, all you get is a bookmark.

[alternatex]

Google invented PWAs and broke their back trying to make them a thing. I'm not a fan of Google but credit where credit is due.

They were also highly incentivized to develop the APIs that make it all work as Chromebooks are basically hosts for browser apps. Apple, as well as the other tech giants involved in the W3C had no such incentives and were dragging their feet.

[candiddevmike]

Google seems to be all in on PWAs, they even have a way to monetize them in the play store via TWAs.

[theK]

Admittedly I am not up to date on the latest developments but as far as a couple years ago the PWA runtime on both ecosystems was significantly stymied in comparison to the APP runtime. No access to real storage functionality, significantly less platform APIs, yada yada.

Sure, you could build "better (installable) websites" but even to get standardized stuff like background execution or notifications working was either impossible or a long series of jumping through hoops. Even installation prompts bugged out way too often.

But to be clear, if that isn't the case any more I will be positively surprized by either platform provider.