I think the lack of friction is a real and present benefit. And the benefits of native development (eg interaction outside of the browser sandbox, high performa

I think the lack of friction is a real and present benefit. And the benefits of native development (eg interaction outside of the browser sandbox, high performance) are not required for a lot of apps. And, it would hopefully kill off all of the pointless individual news sites app that exist for no reason. If Google and Apple coherently get behind the concept, it could be a big deal. There is a lot you'd need to do right: making sure things like notifications and storage are managed clearly; allowing users to "uninstall" / wipe apps that have gotten too large; something to combat and manage the slow sludge that will accumulate with endless "driveby" app installs (imagine if every news website was a PWA with offline content, you go for one article and oh look now you have all of their CSS and JS with offline support stored on your device, and maybe random data [say, how far you scrolled in the article + the article contents for offline support] stored in leveldb, with no way for the browser to know if automatically clearing it will break things for the user); etc. The problem is that Apple have shown no interest in doing this. And I cannot see Google internally organising themselves well enough to be coherent about this either (c.f. the messaging / hangouts / allo / duo disaster). Which would be a real shame.