The more likely explanation is that when every app can bundle their own browser engine, we will not see a competition explosion. Instead, Electron apps will come to mobile, with every app shipping its own browser stack.
You can’t tell me Gecko, which has already failed on desktop, will suddenly be popular on mobile. You can easily tell me every app shipping their own Chromium would be very popular with developers.
Seems either approach would rule out your Slack, Amazon app, etc. from shipping their own outdated 900MB Chromiums but allow Chrome, Firefox, K-Meleon, whatever.
No.
Even if unencumbered on iOS, it will still fail, because PWA is an intrinsically confusing technology. The pitch to non-technical users is terrible. Just like passkeys, which has also been terrible.
Yes, PWAs have become popular on these platforms. I work for Microsoft on the Microsoft Store (app store on Windows) and I work with the Edge team, and I work on PWABuilder.com, which publishes PWAs to app stores. Some of the most popular apps in the Microsoft Store are PWAs: Netflix, TikTok, Adobe Creative Cloud, Disney+, and many others.
To view the list of PWAs in the Store, on a Windows box you can run ms-windows-store://assoc/?Tags=AppExtension-microsoft.store.edgePWA
I run PWABuilder.com as well, and I can tell you that many, many PWAs get published to the Google Play Store, including some very popular ones.
I agree there is some confusion around PWA installation. There are some proposed web standards with Google and Microsoft's backing to help with that, e.g. Web Install: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/...
Obviously. When a major Gatekeeper systematically holds it back to prevent it from challenging its taxation funnel, then it has no chance of competing and will thus not be chosen on competing platforms either, which will prevent its adoption and any investment in it.
>Even if unencumbered on iOS, it will still fail, because PWA is an intrinsically confusing technology.
PWA is not an "intrinsically confusing technology" and making such an absurd statement without proper elaboration reeks of pure bias.
If Apple weren’t incentivized to block PWA use, they’d allow them to be “installed” with the same type of little top banner that prompts you to get/open an App Store app. Instead they relegate it to some obscure buried option inside the Safari Share menu.
Everything that's inconvenient for your preferred narrative can just be dismissed as conspiratorial thinking, makes the world so much easier - doesnt it? I've compiled some of the evidences that makes clear how one of the Gatekeepers (Apple) has a tremendous conflict of interest, which manifested itself in systematic sabotaging of PWAs over the years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45534316
