Ask HN: What's your experience with building mobile apps using PWA? At my service company, for one of the clients - who wants a small mobile app in a very short time, we've decided to go with PWA(Progressive Web App) for bunch of different reasons like: ease of development, ease of distribution, etc. What is your experience with PWA-s? Is it noticeably clanky compared to react-native apps? Are there any noticeable, well-known issues/bottlenecks with PWA-s? Thanks in advance! |
I am working on my own PWA, source code here: https://gitea.speedtech.it/roberto/BrainMinder.
At the moment I don't use many PWA features on this PWA, like notifications for example, but in another PWA I built I used camera access to take photos and scan barcodes and it works well.
I use GoLang, HTMX, W3CSS, and Handlebars. The codebase is the same for all the environments: phone, tablet, desktop.
I considered Ionic Framework for the front end, but it uses only web components with shadow DOM and HTMX doesn't work well with this technology on forms submit.
W3CSS is fast and small, easy to understand, change and manipulate.
PWA is sort of like if you tied an electron app to the user's installed browser, so you are still going to have browser specific quirks. Not all browsers support installing a PWA (most notably for me, safari on macos).
On mobile (especially iOS) PWA can have considerable limitations compared to a traditional app, but less limited than running the app "as a websute". Local storage limits come to mind. I believe a PWA on iOS can only store 50mb?
Distributing it is in theory VERY easy. but its not a common way that users install apps, so it comes with more explanation than simply saying "download from the App store".
React native is a whole other thing entirely, and is not limited to simply being an embedded website in a browser wrapper.
If there already exists a web version of the application, then the saved effort might be worth these quirks, but if its a greenfield project I'm not sure the "Ease of development" actually beats something like React Native.
I never did bother finishing the Android Chrome PWA part, because as others noticed it doesn’t get you much, and users really don’t seem to bother with the iOS one which does work. (iOS has navigator.standalone for detecting this).
iOS is arguably not “real” PWA but these days has equivalent functionality for much of it that is even supposed to work. It is on the todo list this week to get iOS push happening as proof of concept.
By far the biggest problem is lack of user familiarity. The app stores are understood, while the process for installing these is not. You can trivially package such things for the app stores, but then you have to jump through the increasing amount of hoops about that.
Most regular users aren't aware of PWAs either, and use the App Store as a way of finding apps. We've since released a simple wrapper of the PWA on the App Store as well but had to get really messy to conform to Apple's payment requirements.
If you're curious, here's the tool: https://justsketch.me
x1000
Normal people have got to the point they trust app stores a lot more than the web. I know of several startups that were seen as not credible by potential customers due to a lack of app store presence.
Fantastic tool btw!
Reliable Install, native share, background tasks, etc