> Funnily enough, installing an app directly from a website is both faster and more convenient. This only holds true if one directly navigates to the website i

> Funnily enough, installing an app directly from a website is both faster and more convenient. This only holds true if one directly navigates to the website in question, which I would argue is unusual at best. The next closest thing to searching the App Store/Play Store is searching for the app with Google, where one will be met with pages of results that are likely not helpful, particularly for the type of highly general queries that tend to be used when shopping around for an app (e.g. "recipe app"). Additionally, the App Store and Play Store provide some signal of app quality by way of reviews and ratings, which helps skip over the more obvious clunkers and lemons and filter out the options that don't have the features required. You don't get that with PWAs, making for more time wasted evaluating each PWA in the category. ———— On the question posed by the title, from the developer side of things a factor I don't see discussed as much is that for various reasons, a lot of devs don't want to write for the web ecosystem due to the tech stack involved. If it were easier to opt out of JavaScript and its associated ecosystem in favor of whatever devs prefer instead, takeup of PWAs would be more enthusiastic. WASM is promising for accomplishing this but doesn't seem to be where it needs to be quite yet.