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Comment by allan_s | Hacker News Reader

I think learning PWA is not worth the extra-work

just create a web app (SPA or plain old multi-page app) and embed it in a react-native-webview. (or any equivalent)

You will just need a thin layer of react-native-code to handle push notification/a nice splash screen/deeplinking and for 99% of your user it will be the same

We've been doing that at Rosaly.com for now 2 years, and we've never have any issue from Apple/Google reviews and our "think layer" is now ~200 LOC of react native around a multi-page old website (plain html and link to other page, with a "app" design, no react/angular) and it's totally transparent for our users, while allowing us to deploy 10 times a day.

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It's hardly any work at all. If you've made a webview you have icons and splash screens, you have what you need to make the manifest.json.

You can create the simplest of service workers and your done.

If you want better offline ability, you need more TLC in the service worker - which you would need anyway if you want your webview to work offline as well.

The "extra work" takes a few hours. The boons of the PWA over the webview, updates are much much easier to roll out. You don't have a bunch of ancient versions running around. If you don't need access to native APIs this might be worth pushing users to use it.

I think, PWAs need so serious evangelism.

So much FUD around them...

PWAs have enough support that the ever-growing feature set is great. Particularly with push notifications coming to iOS soon. It's already at a place where most app development should just default to it for the sheer simplicity, control, and platform support you get out of the box.

People pick suboptimal tech choices all the time. They will continue to do so. I'm ok having competitive advantages over the wider field.

Which fud am i spreading ? I just said its not worth it when for as much work (by that i mean little) you can have a expo app embedding a webview , same result and you can publish it on the apple store, which at least was not possible for pwa when i tested it in 2021 (as said in a sibling answer i started with a pwa)

I love Expo, but everything that includes an app store isn't little work.

It isn't little work in the absolute but if you want to publish on the stores you have to go through it anyway.

my point is that

  * with PWA you just can't on the Apple App Store (to the extent of my knowledge, I would love to be proven wrong, once again I started with PWA because I wanted it to be the silver bullet)
  * with Expo you can, it is work, but it's far less than without, in 2021 we used bitrise.io which required us only to drag and drop pre-made steps, it will soon be 2 years since the app has been first published and I still don't own a mac nor I have opened android studio even once. in 2022 I think Expo provide a Saas to make it even simpler.

But i have already what you said, my app is only webview +a layer of 200 lines to access notification/deep link. Read my comment once again :) And i started with a pwa so yes I know what is needed, i even got it published on the playstore. But what's the point if i can't get it published on the apple store ?

What about non-react apps? Just use React?

The key is "webview", so ignore the "react-native" part and insert "capacitor" or "ionic".

React-native doesn't let you easily reuse your webstack to build it. It's not a web view but a way to create a javascript controlled runtime for a native interface. In my experience it's a rewrite and every effort to share components between react-native and react-web hasn't panned out well.

My "app" inside the webview is html+css and 2 lines of js here and there, so if that works, anything you like will work

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