Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I love PWAs, I use them a lot. Some PWAs I prefer over regular apps, Outlook, Teams (although that doesn't mean I like either app generally...).

But I feel like the only reason I know about PWAs is because I'm a developer, and I really don't think about providing them to customers / introducing them. Explaining a PWA, how to install it and all... it's not really apparent to end users what is going on / why they have to go through these steps.

I feel like PWAs are this wonderful little secret ... but have been for so long I wonder if non technical folks will adopt them.

View on HN

It's not hard to get customers to install them. I actually had to intentionally add extra steps to the process, so the customer understood they were installing a PWA, many of them installed it without realizing that they were installing it.

It might actually be too easy.

>through these steps

You mean the single step of clicking "yes" when prompted to install.

I find that doesn't happen as consistently as I would expect / folks to notice.

It's one thing to ask technical folks to do a thing, another less technical.

I think, one requirement is that the user has to interact at least 30sec with the app, which makes the whole thing feel a bit random.

You need to design some intentional onboarding for this to work consistently.

I do have to remind myself that a tech audience will approach things differently.

Including one that I probably wrongly assume is true of everyone - that they will be very selective about what apps they install.

It's really two steps, one to initiate the installation and then to approve it ("yes").

You can wrap the initiation any way you like. I prefer to make it resemble an app store people are familiar with. Screen shots, user feedback, a description with a "download" button. This communicates the intention pretty well even though it adds an extra step to the process.

I find the biggest hurdle is that people don't realize they can install an "app" so easily and so I try to bridge the knowledge gap.

Is the installation different in IOS vs Android? I thought that with Android you get prompted to install it, but in IOS the user has to go out of their way to install it.

Manually installing is a bit more hidden than on Android. It's also not possible to show a an installation prompt in Safari.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com