alt Hacker NewsI have an app that is literally just a wrapper around the website. The mobile website and the mobile app are the exact same experience.
Before I built the app, people were constantly asking me to build a mobile app. Yes, I had a PWA but people still wanted an app.
I thought it was kind of silly but I eventually built that wrapper app. It immediately got thousands of downloads, users upgrading to paid plans increased by 10x, and app users have way better metrics that website users.
It's pretty interesting, but as a website owner, having an app is valuable.
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It could be that your app is amazingly well done. But most PWAs and web apps turned into an "app" are not meeting my quality standards. It's usually a clunky experience (well, like a browser).
I think once you've seen the actual possibilities of what e.g. an iOS app can do, when done correctly, everything changes for you.
Besides users being more familiar with apps in the past, PWAs are still kneecapped in some subtle ways to make them want apps. I wish PWAs were the norm, so much easier.
How often do you need to push app updates in practice? In theory that's a one-off deployment on the app-stores.
SaasS or one-time? Did people pay via native App Store integration? Or pay via the desktop website? App price? Answers would be super helpful. Thanks!
It is silly but you have to meet customers where they are.
I think the problem is also that PWAs don't have any discoverability, and no standardization. I did some consulting work for a company that had a PWA. They had a 200-line long react component that was intended to determine what modal to show the user depending on what web browser and OS they were using to instruct them how to install PWA depending on the combination of OS and browser.
This is a lot of friction for the dev, and it's not clear to an average user what a PWA is. But they are familiar with, and for better or worse, trust, the App store. If I didn't know what a PWA and a site said "open menu and click on 'install!'" I'd be very wary of following those instructions!
I think Android and iOS should provide some sort of hook between the app store and PWAs before they really start to catch on.