I think one of the uphill battles you're going to have to fight with PWAs is end-user habit. If Joe consumer is looking for a great way to see a weather forecast he's going to look for an app. Jane wants to play podcasts - she's looking for an app. Ezra wants a Jewish calendar - app store.
99 times out of a hundred for the smartphone carrying crowd, the app store has become a replacement for google searches when it comes to tools/games/toys for their slab-o-glass...
You don't have to change users, you have to get Google and Apple to change. There's no technical reason they couldn't include web apps in their app stores. In the article the author speculates that both Google and Apple are working on this. I could see Google embracing web apps, but I'd be surprised if Apple does.
I would be seriously surprised if any smartphone company added PWA's to their app stores. Web apps inherently can't take advantage of many platform/model specific features. Even thing like UI elements, fonts, gestures etc. OS manufacturers want their feature sets used because it adds value to their ecosystem. As a consumer of smartphone apps, I tend to agree with them.
Microsoft announced at BUILD this year that PWAs would be ingested by the Bing crawler directly into the Windows Store, with tools for sites to opt out or further control their listings (including monetizing them).
The Windows Store has supported server-hosted web apps [1] for some time now, and provides a large subsection of the platform-specific libraries to hosted web apps. Hosted Web Apps are based on earlier drafts of PWA standards, but the expectation from BUILD and other Microsoft talks is that they will bring platform-specific libraries along for the ride as the converge to more recent PWA standards.
Apple and Microsoft are actually dragging their feet to embrace PWA's until they can be regulated by their app stores and monetized. It's actually really annoying if you're interested in developing PWAs, because one of the nicest features is that it's a pseudo-native app that is cross compatible and doesn't have to be registered in any app stores.
not only in the stores, widgets and general integration with the os (like actionable notifications etc.) are one of the things that make native apps a necesity. To appear in the widget screen in ios or make a homescreen widget in android you must have a native app.
That's progress, but that's not exactly a home screen widget. Eg, I can see "20C" and an icon showing it's rainy right on my phone's home screen. I don't think you can do that with the web yet, hopefully people are working on it.
Keep in mind this is in the US. People in developing countries, on older and slower devices with limited bandwidth, are even less likely to download new apps.
Oh they actually do. The thing is that people already have all the apps what they need, so there is no regular need to download other apps. But when such need arrives though, they head to the appstore.
The reality in developing countries is actually completely opposite. People in those countries love apps and use WiFi etc. to downlod them in coffee shops/schools/offices... so they can keep using the service only by downloading the minimalistic json instead of downloading whole service with UI/GFX etc. each time they need it.
I tried using some of those PWA now online and they do work better than traditional webapps, however they are still slightly laggish and have unfinished feeling when compared to native apps.
PWA is going to be almost certain flop. It's trying to do almost same what React Native has already done but with PWA you have to convince the users to switch from the secure, trusted, well working apps to "inferior and unsure webapps" and from just pressing the app icon back to the old school "open browser, select address bar, enter address, press enter"-hassle. Changing this mentality that people have build for almost 10 years now is probably going to be as easy as to make Trump change his opinion about the wall.
You know that one of the major features PWAs offer is creating an app icon so you can launch it just like an app in a headless browser and use it offline, right?
Or maybe web apps are going to be good enough and cheap enough to develop that app stores will end up full of stale apps. If everything is on the web, that's where users will get their stuff.
For instance, how often do you try to get a desktop app for something instead of a Google search? Does anyone start by browsing the Mac App Store?
99 times out of a hundred for the smartphone carrying crowd, the app store has become a replacement for google searches when it comes to tools/games/toys for their slab-o-glass...