> The only reason people make apps that don't need to be apps is to get another marketing channel through App Store distribution and another user reach channel through notifications.

I wrote a longer response but decided to scrap it. The behaviors and expectations are different than you might expect from a pure engineering POV. Its not just sales and marketing. For better or worse, people want to interact with companies' apps on their phone via installing something "trusted" through their appropriate app store. Not responsive mobile web, not even PWAs (which are difficult for people who are not tech savvy).

At my most recent exited startup, we had a web app which was mobile responsive. People asked for a mobile app. We gave them a mobile app that was simply a webview that loaded the web app. Customers loved it. We got almost no inbound from it at all for various reasons, but existing user satisfaction, engagement, etc went through the roof. They could finally "use our app on mobile" even though they always could, and we consistently pointed them to the mobile web experience to do so. This is a market full of people who are average to below average levels of tech savviness.

Right, maybe I'm bit too cynical and there are actually valid use cases. Thanks for expanding on it.

Notifications alone are a legitimate use case that isn't always spammy growth hacking BS. It would be great if the notification story was better with PWA, but it just isn't on Apple and even on Android the well has been poisoned enough that no one is turning on browser notifications even if they legitimately want to be updated.

We're considering building an app pretty much solely due to notifications, because our only option currently is e-mail and deliverability while good can never be perfect.

AFAIK the web push notifications are already implemented with iOS 16.4

They just have to convince the user to add their PWA to the phone home screen. I guess the issue is that users hate being instructed to "install" "apps" which don't need installation to function.

This is the best part of PWA. Each user can do what they want.

You just want to use it on the web? Just so that. You get the full experience because there is no resource split between the web site and native apps.

You want to find the app in your favourite app store? It's there. Just install it.

You like the web version but want to add a shortcut to your app list? You can do that and there is enough metadata available to provide nice icons and titles.

But owners of these properties do not want users to have that choice, they want users in a mobile app where they can collect more telemetry and spam notifications to get engagement. There’s a reason Reddit aggressively pushes you away from their mobile site.

That doesn't seem like a reason to be negative about PWAs.

Unless you are an owner worried about PWAs being normalized so that your tracker infested app stands out.

Or a user who has already gone through the era of "enable notifications" spam and is excited for the "install our site" era.

With Reddit specifically, I think they at least have one legitimate reason in addition to the normal nefarious ones. Their new web interface is incredibly slow, especially as you continue browsing over time. On phones, that's likely to cause more serious performance issues than it does on desktop devices.

You can thank the mess of the React eco system for that. There is a new-new one in the works which doesn’t suffer from the same problems.

> You get the full experience because there is no resource split between the web site and native apps.

It won't be a "full experience". It's amazing to me that people are talking about GUI apps and keep pretending that GUI-wise the web is anywhere on the same level as anything native. I wonder why the https://open-ui.org effort exists if that is the case (because it isn't, of course).

Because it's web apps an all the way down, even on native. Half the apps you use on mobile are augmented webviews.

> Half the apps you use on mobile are augmented webviews.

And those almost invariably suck. A few try and invest in smooth-enough experience because customer retention affects their bottom line (e.g. Foodora is a suprisingly nice app), but those are not enough to say "You get the full experience".

Right, which I think is one of the reasons why apps have come to suck more and more. They aren't actually apps, they're just webpages.

But a lot of customers of your "thing" want to be able to download it from the app store.

> I think the negativity is well deserved because if it doesn't need device integration it doesn't need to be an app.

It does if you enjoy eating and paying rent, and don't like the only real alternative (i.e., cramming it full of advertising).

The benefit of a PWA is you can list a website without an app in the App store and get more hits that you might of never seen.

There's no question that these are beneficial to devs, but as a dev, I object to the notion that benfiting devs at the expense of users is a goof thing.

Expense of users? How so? If a PWA is not a fair transparent experience, then I would definitely opt for a more native app, but otherwise I don't think they'll care so long as your website is usable on mobile.

and App Store distribution comes with quite bit money. Regular user seems to more comfortable to just download from app store type of places.