4 ms·

I'll pipe in with my experience. I worked for a company that built applications for a mostly non-technical customer group. We built a very small PWA for them to

I'll pipe in with my experience. I worked for a company that built applications for a mostly non-technical customer group. We built a very small PWA for them to perform some daily record entry, which often occurred out in the field or in rural areas where connection is spotty. We thought it was a great use-case. They couldn't have cared less about the offline use or having the option to install it. They just liked the app. I think service workers and PWAs in general definitely serve a purpose in enhancing web applications in ways that the user might not explicitly realize, though.

mephitix 8y ago
Thanks! But my question - probably not phrased well - was whether you told them about the app or whether they organically found the app and were ok with how to install it. I feel that if you know your customers well and vice versa (usually a high-touch sales model), you can tell them where the app is, how to install it, and like you said, they don't care. If you have a PWA sitting in the wild and have a low-touch sales model, I wonder how many people will actually go to that site and hit 'install to homescreen' vs looking for an app. It is a very strange approach on an iPhone. A concrete example - I don't know our company. I'm a farmer and I want a daily record entry app on my iPhone. Do I go to the app store, look for an app and go through the usual dance OR do I look on the web, find the PWA, see a prompt to 'install to homescreen!' and I'm ok with hitting OK on it. If I don't hit that 'install to homescren!' button on iPhone, I won't get things like web push notifications (which you still don't get on iPhone) which are pretty important to some apps. If I come to you, or if you send out a message personally to me and tell me to 'install to homescreen' then I'm totally fine with it.
- gramstrong 8y ago
  I will say that our marketing and sales teams probably did a poor job of communicating the capabilities of the app to our customers. I'm not even sure if most of them knew how it worked. I don't think our customers found the PWA features "organically", either. If they saw the install prompt, they most likely didn't understand it, ignored it, or both. I tried showing it to some at a conference, but like I said, they were uninterested in those features in comparison to the app itself.
  - mephitix 8y ago
    I see. I am guessing for your app (record entry) it didn't matter that they were uninterested in those features. I'm working on an app that is highly reliant on push notifications (like chat). So if I made it a PWA, it would be DOA if my customers didn't hit 'install to homescreen'.
    - untog 8y ago
      Not entirely- you can still receive notifications even if you're not installed to the home screen. The progressive path isn't great, but installing an app from an App Store is a huge jump for users to make, so neither is ideal really...
      - mephitix 8y ago
        On iOS you can't get notifications if you've closed out of Safari... it's not really usable. A simple scenario is - you're inviting someone to a chat room. You send them an invite and now you have to wait. Usually what people do is other things - like go to a different website, go to a different app, etc. In only the case where you're sitting on the same website will you get a notification. It doesn't work. It gets worse - let's say you installed the app to your homescreen. You run through that same scenario above - you navigate through your web app into /chatroom and click on an invite button there. Then you navigate away to another website/app. When you come back to the homescreen app, the entire site has reloaded and it will take you automatically to the main screen of your web app: / Note - these broken behaviors are only on iOS.
        untog 8y ago
        Oh, yeah. I don't consider iOS a full PWA platform for exactly these reasons. Sad really.
- jaxn 8y ago
  There are a lot of use cases where getting someone to install an app is a big lift. With PWAs, discoverability can be search ads, included in existing communications, linked from another app, etc.
- smhg 8y ago
  You are right about high-touch sales in my case. I indeed provide guidelines to 'install the website as an app'. This works every time. Not because the guidelines are that good, but because in reality it seems to be quite easy for the average SMB owner. Both in Safari and Chrome. Except offline, I don't use any 'hardware' api's though.

mephitix 8y ago

Thanks! But my question - probably not phrased well - was whether you told them about the app or whether they organically found the app and were ok with how to install it. I feel that if you know your customers well and vice versa (usually a high-touch sales model), you can tell them where the app is, how to install it, and like you said, they don't care. If you have a PWA sitting in the wild and have a low-touch sales model, I wonder how many people will actually go to that site and hit 'install to homescreen' vs looking for an app. It is a very strange approach on an iPhone. A concrete example - I don't know our company. I'm a farmer and I want a daily record entry app on my iPhone. Do I go to the app store, look for an app and go through the usual dance OR do I look on the web, find the PWA, see a prompt to 'install to homescreen!' and I'm ok with hitting OK on it. If I don't hit that 'install to homescren!' button on iPhone, I won't get things like web push notifications (which you still don't get on iPhone) which are pretty important to some apps. If I come to you, or if you send out a message personally to me and tell me to 'install to homescreen' then I'm totally fine with it.

gramstrong 8y ago
I will say that our marketing and sales teams probably did a poor job of communicating the capabilities of the app to our customers. I'm not even sure if most of them knew how it worked. I don't think our customers found the PWA features "organically", either. If they saw the install prompt, they most likely didn't understand it, ignored it, or both. I tried showing it to some at a conference, but like I said, they were uninterested in those features in comparison to the app itself.
- mephitix 8y ago
  I see. I am guessing for your app (record entry) it didn't matter that they were uninterested in those features. I'm working on an app that is highly reliant on push notifications (like chat). So if I made it a PWA, it would be DOA if my customers didn't hit 'install to homescreen'.
  - untog 8y ago
    Not entirely- you can still receive notifications even if you're not installed to the home screen. The progressive path isn't great, but installing an app from an App Store is a huge jump for users to make, so neither is ideal really...
    - mephitix 8y ago
      On iOS you can't get notifications if you've closed out of Safari... it's not really usable. A simple scenario is - you're inviting someone to a chat room. You send them an invite and now you have to wait. Usually what people do is other things - like go to a different website, go to a different app, etc. In only the case where you're sitting on the same website will you get a notification. It doesn't work. It gets worse - let's say you installed the app to your homescreen. You run through that same scenario above - you navigate through your web app into /chatroom and click on an invite button there. Then you navigate away to another website/app. When you come back to the homescreen app, the entire site has reloaded and it will take you automatically to the main screen of your web app: / Note - these broken behaviors are only on iOS.
      - untog 8y ago
        Oh, yeah. I don't consider iOS a full PWA platform for exactly these reasons. Sad really.
jaxn 8y ago
There are a lot of use cases where getting someone to install an app is a big lift. With PWAs, discoverability can be search ads, included in existing communications, linked from another app, etc.
smhg 8y ago
You are right about high-touch sales in my case. I indeed provide guidelines to 'install the website as an app'. This works every time. Not because the guidelines are that good, but because in reality it seems to be quite easy for the average SMB owner. Both in Safari and Chrome. Except offline, I don't use any 'hardware' api's though.