The problem is the data. Imagine a text editor where all your text documents are gone after you cleared the data of a different app, the browser.
I wrote a fitness app as a PWA some time ago and its pretty annoying to download all the instruction videos again every time you clear your "browser data". Plus all infos about which exercises you did and when is gone for good of course.
One way to address that issue is the native file system access APIs[0] coming soon, available today in Chrome Canary and Edge Canary. There, you'd be able to save your documents to the user's file system, just like a native app would. Those files will be exempt from any browser data clearing.
> all infos about which exercises you did and when is gone for good of course.
Might be good to store that data on the server. I realize not all PWAs have a proper backend server, but that sounds like a good candidate.
[0]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=853326
Great, so there is light at the end of the tunnel!
> store that data on the server
Well, we talked about that already:
Persistent storage can help protect
critical data from eviction, and
educe the chance of data loss.
Persistent storage is not deleted by the browser,
even if storage is running low. It will only be
deleted if the user chooses to remove it via
their site settings.What could possibly go wrong with that?
Come on, stop giving people false hope, that API is like 3rd incarnation of the same thing by Google, always shot down by Mozilla and Apple. Even today if you restrict yourself to Chrome your PWA can use the older version of the same thing, but what's the point if that works only in Chrome?