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Comment by jc_dc | Hacker News Reader

PWA’s on Android can be installed directly from a website…it’s awesome, less friction and less scammy than the Play Store.

On iOS you need to use the Share > Add to Home Screen which normies have no clue about. You’ll find out if the site supports PWA features AFTER you add it to your Home Screen. This of course is done entirely on purpose to make them harder to find and less appealing than the revenue generating App Store.

For me, I use iPhone entirely because pixel doesn’t support cardav and caldav out of the box…if I can’t use PWA’s on my phone then I’m going back to android cause I can solve the email problem easier than I can solve the productivity tools not being available via PWA’s.

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Google should in theory have the same play store revenue motivation to hide PWAs, right? Granted, they also want people to stay on the web to continue using Google.com, so I guess those are two competing priorities.

That to me is a bit of an indicator that Apple just doesn’t believe in the merits of the technology. I think they might be asking the same question in asking: what problem is this solving?

Every platform with a web browser has a better way to run applications, which is to just run an application. A web site that is masquerading as an installed application is basically just a less capable application.

As a side note, I’m also not really sure how an app store can be considered scammier than the entire web. The web is a Wild West with far fewer “rules” than the Play Store.

>Google should in theory have the same play store revenue motivation to hide PWAs, right?

Google in theory has a financial motivation to make their competitor Apple look like the bad actor.

Google have an interest in moving people away from desktop applications because they don’t have a desktop OS (not counting Chromebook).

We run 3 SaaS apps. One is strictly native, and the other two are strictly web. Writing for 4 platforms on the native app is an extremely expensive exercise and then we are also subject to the insanity that is the App Store. Long story here, everything from App Store review times on mission critical software to the fact that their billing mechanism simply doesn’t work for B2B SaaS…and by the way, we get zero traffic from the App Store as that’s simply not where our customers are looking for the solution we provide. Fortunately, bulk of our customers start on desktop where we self distribute (code signing on windows and notarization on mac) with ev ssl on marketing sites. Why is the App Store scammy over the open web…search for any number of popular apps and look at how many have been cloned. Sure, you can do this on the web with paid ads and enough SEO effort but it’s much harder.

To this day, Apple continue to allow keyword stuffing, advertising on trademarked names, and blatant copyright infringement in app descriptions and even I (fairly tech savvy) accidentally purchased a clone of poly bridge for my kid cause they’ll list the clone above the real one on an exact term search. What was apples response when I said I purchased the wrong app? Tough cookies!

This is the same reason I hate shopping on Amazon. I simply prefer to have a direct relationship with the companies I buy things from, and from what I can tell, our customers prefer have a direct relationship with us.

But back to why PWA’s are awesome…simply put, iteration time. We can publish dozens of improvements every day and roll back instantly when an issue arises. We simply can’t do that with native as long as the Apple / Google act as a gate keepers. When we allow proper sideloading without the scare tactics and dirty tricks, we’ll take the time to build native again.

> why PWA’s are awesome

You've described some advantages to you as a developer. For the average user, apps that change all the time and effectively make them a tester aren't such a no brainer!

Resolution time on native is longer than web. Bugs happen, native, web, doesn’t matter…bugs happen.

Re benefit for who. We will invest our time where it makes the most sense. If you’re familiar with platform risk, you’ll understand that we’re not exactly eager for our existence to be subject to the whims of Apple and Google.

Kind of, it's just that the approach Google takes is a lot more palatable than Apple's. As someone who has written a PWA (albeit one that almost entirely relies on SSR), Google's PWA approach is definitely better than Apple, but there's some marked issues.

For one, the actual PWA packaging process gets shunted off to a Google server; I think you can make a "thin client" APK from a manifest using a tool they wrote some time ago[0] (Twitter Lite is one of these), but I've not really looked into it. It's not quite the extension to Chrome you'd really want it to be; if you use a non-Chrome browser on Android, it means you can't really ditch the Chrome dependency if you want to use a PWA. (Further not really helped by the fact that Google is basically the only PWA implementer on Android, since Firefox does not consider PWAs a priority whatsoever.) Similarly, Google's servers need to be able to read out the manifest declaration, which makes them unfeasible for intranet software unless you want to punch a temporary hole and expose it to the internet for a bit.

The other kinda annoying thing Google does is really aggressive degradation between PWA and homescreen shortcut. If the manifest isn't entirely up to snuff in terms of what's listed, there's no attempt at trying to resolve the issue, it just instantly degrades to a homescreen shortcut. A basic example of this is the requirement to use a service worker (even if the service workers entire job is to do nothing); it's not really stated in the manifest spec that it's required, but if you don't have one, the PWA straight up refuses to install as a PWA.

Google's strength with the play store really mostly comes from their bundling advantage; Play Services and the attached Store and Google Apps are required for OEMs to add to their devices (might change with the DMA?). That's the kinda odd reality that makes Apples desire for control seem so extreme - we know what an open platform looks like on Android. It works pretty well for the most part and the incumbents advantage for a store is large enough that almost every app developer submits to the Play Store regardless.

[0]: It's called Bubblewrap - https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/bubblewrap

Tend to agree with all of this. Manifest is way too finicky.

Would be interesting to see how the play store changes in the event of Android honoring code signing for side loading like windows. Eg..no scare screen on side loaded apk’s as long as they’re code signed.

I suspect the App Store would live on as a consumer focused App Store and the enterprise apps would direct distribute which makes sense anyhow cause IAP does t understand account based pricing.

Android doesn't do scare screens actually. The only real difference between installing an APK from the play store and an APK you found on the internet is that the application calling the installer has a one time "OK" to make sure you are the one who wants to install an APK; Play Store has this as well, but the default distribution has it turned on, by going in the settings you can fiddle with it and turn it off if you want to.

The only thing actually needed for feature parity with the Play Store is mostly just that F-Droid can't auto-update; the Play Store can skip the update/install prompt screen, F-Droid can't. They added install origins to APK files last year iirc, so there's a likely chance they're allowing it though.

I’ll have to test this tomorrow. Last time I tried sideloading direct from our website I had to flip a switch in settings which came with a scare dialog. If I remember correctly, it was a system wide setting too and didn’t allow for trusting specific sources. If we can self distribute on Android, that will be 3 out of 4.

Yeah, still have what equates to a scare screen. Tells you file may be harmful upon download, then you need to change a setting which is streamlined to what it was before, but still a scare screen. Now you can allow from source…but the source isn’t the web address, it’s the initiating application eg. Chrome or Files so there’s a huge security hole with this implementation presumably on purpose to manufacture the incident they need to justify their behavior.

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