Reading the threads about this on here, I suspect we're in some kind of bubble, in that outside of HN I've honestly never met anyone who uses this feature or would care if it disappeared. Can anyone enlighten me?
This is the only way to write apps for iOS without getting married to apple. We just wrote one for blind users and didn't want to have to worry about app rejections, API deprecations, user interface guidelines changes, etc. Having it open in a standard browser window is not helpful for those that have built up muscle memory.
Modern browsers are becoming very capable and this allows people to write apps for all platforms without jumping through a bunch of hoops.
but if apple and google led the charge with adoption, they could easily change that. it's really not about today, but 5 years down the line.
from a tech perspective, there's no reason by then we couldn't be building native-feel and experience apps as "downloadable websites"
the problem you're talking about is the current distribution sucks, but that's by design. we all know by now how much apple needs their app store. so it's not (in 99% of cases) "ahhh our users need this feature now", it's "this could be the future but they're stomping on it"
Can’t speak for others but I use it in the context of a web app that really needs to be full screen on a mobile and that is delivered by/connects to embedded hardware without internet access.
We use this technique for Soundslice (web-based music learning software). We don't have a native app, so we encourage people to install our site to their home screen as a PWA; see our help page here: https://www.soundslice.com/help/en/player/tips/247/native-ap...
Many of our customers (who are decidedly outside the tech bubble) off-handedly refer to this as "installing our app." And evidence suggests they find it to be perfectly reasonable/normal, even though they didn't use the App Store. Some of our users even use the Chrome feature where you can install our site as a desktop app.
The main advantages of the PWA for our users are:
* It gives you quick access to our app via its own dedicated button. (In fairness, Apple isn't taking this away. They're just making it so that the button opens your normal web browser.)
* It opens our website full screen — that is, without browser chrome (location bar, back button, etc.). At face value, you may think "big deal, so what?" But if you're practicing music on a smartphone, you'll want as much screen space as possible for the music. Opening directly in full screen is a nice quality-of-life improvement.
This is a fairly niche case, but for Destiny players, DIM (Destiny Item Manager) is pretty indispensable and is a great PWA. https://destinyitemmanager.com/en/
On a more serious note, despite Apple's attempts to hobble/kill PWA, it is a very important platform for serving platform-agnostic apps not bounded by a walled-garden. Call me cynical, but the future is looking increasingly authoritarian, with governments everywhere calling for _less_ computing freedom. It is a terrible time to try to hobble this technology.
I still think that this isn't about the DMA itself, it's about how the DMA fits into all the other laws and treaties that exist in the EU, including ones created after the DMA was created.
Apple is going to force the EU to make decisions, and make them now. If they get fined and forced to make changes, that is cheaper and less risky than potentially unbounded liability (and forced changes) in the future.
