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Bring back? Did PWAs ever take off? The lack of mobile adoption compared to native apps, websites using notifications to spam users, the difficult discovery, a
by tapoxi 5y ago
Bring back? Did PWAs ever take off?
The lack of mobile adoption compared to native apps, websites using notifications to spam users, the difficult discovery, and the lack of a huge advantage on desktop (window compared to tabs, sometimes a desktop icon) really hindered their adoption. I use zero PWAs today, and I don’t know anyone who has either, even on Chromebooks.
- mohanmcgeek 5y agoConsidering the fact that my food ordering apps and e-commerce apps are all PWAs, I would say they definitely took off. Maybe you're on iPhone AND that's the problem?
- csw-001 5y agoIsn’t every Electron app essentially a PWA? Or am I misunderstanding the definition of PWA?
- Bilal_io 5y agoA progressive web app does not require you to download an executable. You simply install it from the browser. Here is an example https://mdn.github.io/pwa-examples/js13kpwa/ https://mdn.github.io/pwa-examples/js13kpwa/ You should be prompted to install or add the app to your home screen, depending on the platform and browser you're using. Another big example of a pwa I use is Twitter on the desktop.
- 7sidedmarble 5y agoThe features that are core to how PWAs work really don't even need you to install the site per se. The caching and stuff works without installing it.
- Bilal_io 5y agoCorrect. "Installing" is more like creating a shortcut that looks like any other app, at least on Android and Windows.
- bkyiuuMbF 5y agoIt seems close to pointless, but a dedicated window per PWA pinned to your taskbar/start menu is handy. It also doesn't get clustered together with other browser windows which I like. And the icon is visually different. If you don't want the feature then you just don't install the "app" (strong word for it). I like it for a couple of things (JIRA, email) but not others (social media). I wish they hadn't removed the feature and I'm probably going to switch browsers because of it although I'm loathe to do so.
- aaaaaaaaata 5y agoWith the potential for contextual menu, and some stored local data, mhmm. It's really a UX thing. So glad it's getting more attention.
- csw-001 5y agoGotcha! That makes more sense to me now.
- javchz 5y agoA PWA it's a lot better. With electron, each app had their own browser as a dependency. So if you have discord, vs code, slack, notion, Figma, you basically have 5 versions of chrome installed (like 60mb each minimum). Instead a PWA it's more like a WebView/Direct access that uses the main browser with some extra APIs that a webpage doesn't have, but that's it. It's a lot safer as you don't need to install another version of chrome
- Bilal_io 5y agoHow can we innovate and allow PWA to take off when they've been sabotaged by Apple and then Mozilla? The "bring back" here is referring to Mozilla specifically which used to support them and then stopped.
- tapoxi 5y agoHow do you innovate when the concept is confusing and user interest isn’t there? How does a browser with 10% marketshare somehow make a difference regarding adoption?
- aogaili 5y agoWe are deploying it to businesses and they are loving it, it is confusing because of Apple mostly. Installing PWA in chrome is becoming better than native.