Yes, this is the answer. It’s easy to forget if you live in a tech bubble, but there are probably billions of smartphone users who don’t even know how to type a url into a browser and navigate to it.

I’ve worked on projects where we ran this experiment, and the success rate of “install this app and click on it” is several times higher than “navigate to this webpage every time you want to use our tool”.

One small correction though, android has made it easier to add a “progressive web app” to the home screen now. You can prompt the user with a dialog asking if they want to install it. I think there was at least some period where Google was really encouraging PWAs. iOS still sucks. I’ve had very poor success rates in getting users to install our PWA using the iOS workflow (and our tool is something they need for their jobs, so they are highly motivated to install it).