The antitrust pressure on apple is forcing the last holdout (iOS Safari) to step into line.
We've got our B2B customers using web apps on iPads managed via MDM solutions right now. Camera, location, push, Home Screen icon, etc all working flawlessly.
It took us almost 3 years to get to this point, but it's very stable now.
I agree you still need App Store presence for B2C, but there are paths here too with vanilla web stacks.
Agreed re: B2B, but I've looked at a handful of the Webapp / PWA solutions for B2C app store and it's still pretty far away.
B2C users really demand a consistent experience despite the state of the device, and it's hard to get a web stack to do this well. Logical offline behavior is one, but even things like the click response being slightly too slow vs native UI can turn people off.
Beyond that, you hit the same problem with RN / Ionic: Native plugins don't work as well, native support isn't there, and it becomes very hard to debug. This is especially true if you "present" the app to the user as native but use a web stack. For a website in a browser users tend to have patience for things like slow buttons, for native they do not.
As a point of comparison, think about how responsive a game engine can be. That is the user experience people expect on mobile. It's a heavy lift to get web there, and if you don't someone else will build a native experience that will.
It’s getting there. Look up react-native-web, tamagui, and solito. Almost all the code is shared between web, iOS, and Android and the web experience feels like a native app[0].
Is there a specific use case you have in mind that would be infeasible to do as a web app? I'd even be interested in arguments about poor UX, because a lot of this has been resolved recently.
Top of my mind. Discovery, apart from devs (even that is a stretch), when I say app people quickly open play store/app store. When I say you just gotta click add to the home screen. They're like, you don't have an app? Isn't that just a failure of UX?
I once tried to convince a founder so hard to go with webapp, I gave every advantage I could think of, then in our survey not one of our users was comfortable, they all weirded out. But hey web app works if it's forced like in a enterprise or MDM setting, but people would rather open app stores.
Despite the flak, consumers trust app stores at some level than a random website, even if its more secure since it can't access a lot of APIs, but they don't know that.
Every framework ionic, flutter etc I've tried since Cordova has had some weird feel to it. I can quickly recognize a webapp packaged as native in the first two mins, most of the users I worked with just think it's slow or janky since they Don't understand it's a webapp vs native.
The antitrust pressure on apple is forcing the last holdout (iOS Safari) to step into line.
We've got our B2B customers using web apps on iPads managed via MDM solutions right now. Camera, location, push, Home Screen icon, etc all working flawlessly.
It took us almost 3 years to get to this point, but it's very stable now.
I agree you still need App Store presence for B2C, but there are paths here too with vanilla web stacks.