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Comment by scarface_74 | Hacker News Reader

You mean like all of the people who choose to use PWAs for Android?

I’ve never once heard anyone say “you know Electron is such a great experience on the desktop, I would love to have all my mobile apps to be web based too”.

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App Development for Android is much easier. No Bullshit recurring Fees, no need to buy specific Google Hardware etc...

How many different Android devices does a serious developer need to buy to ensure their app works well across the spectrum from the top end Android phones to the sub $100 Blu R1 phones?

How many different versions of the operating system do they need to support because of how soon Android phones are abandoned by the manufacturers?

But this still doesn’t answer the question, if PWAs are so great on Android, then why are the same companies who are making iOS apps making Android apps instead of just telling Android users to use the web version?

None, there is a decent emulator included with Android Studio

And you think the emulator actually takes the place of real live hardware, the quirks , the performance, etc?

depends on the complexity of the app. An app that can reasonably be a PWA (e.g. it is more or less a webpage wrapped in an APK) can probably be tested well enough on a dozen emulator pofiles and a few physical devices you have lying around.

And those are the very apps that are going to run worse on low end devices with poor rendering performance…

Can guarantee you’ve never shipped an Android app at any notable scale. You need many more devices to validate Android apps.

You need only one, to run the emulator.

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