5 ms·
Ask HN: Do customers use your company's PWA?
We've got both a native app and a website. I believe the web app has the full functionality of the native app. So I'm thinking about making a manifest so it can be "installed" as a PWA.
Making the manifest shouldn't take much time so it should be harmless, if nothing else, but I wonder if it's worth advertising via a banner or investing in deeper PWA features like offline availability.
So from a business perspective: if you have a PWA, do people bother installing it? Particularly when you also have a native mobile app. Is it worth spending effort on?
- timmyc123 5y agoSweetgreen is using a PWA on Android, installed via the Play Store.
- brundolf 5y agoIt's interesting that you can do that, though I don't think we'd want to retire our existing native apps
- 1123581321 5y agoI guess I don’t understand the feature development part of the question. If you have enough users on the mobile or tablet web app and the specific PWA feature (like offline) makes the app more useful, then you would invest in it to the degree warranted and wouldn’t worry about installs, just usage. If your company is dead set on putting all effort into the native app, regardless of additional benefit relative to improving other platforms, and you’re looking at changing that priority, that’s different, of course. We’ve found trying to drive home screen installs to be generally useless. But announcing new mobile web app features through the usual channels (“what’s new” monthly emails etc) does seem to affect usage.
- brundolf 5y agoIt's more a question of "is there a user segment whose first choice among the three would be a PWA, given the option". And then I guess also, "does the general public even know about/understand the concept of PWAs to begin with?" Mainly looking for anecdata here
- AlanYx 5y ago>is there a user segment whose first choice among the three would be a PWA, given the option One meaningful user segment is corporate workers with relatively restrictive IT departments, where you're not able to install native apps. I'm in that category, and use several PWAs.
- brundolf 5y agoInteresting, I never would have thought of that angle