I've always thought the same. Obviously there isn't much of a technical hurdle since they have the engineering talent. But, keeping track of all these cross-region rules and training your staff+customers on it has to be quite costly in multiple respects (time, energy, mental models, etc.)
My personal opinion is that keeping the browser engine locked down isn't much of a profit generator, unlike maintaining full reign over the app store would be.
Is Chrome's PWA support on Android a massive glow to Android Play Store's bottom line?
I don't buy this line, that Safari is intentionally hobbled to prop up the App Store. What's iOS missing for PWA's to be a viable money-maker for companies? Surely there so much money on the line that we would see companies using them. What does Match.com's portfolio of dating apps need to be viable as websites instead?
In reality, when you actually pay attention to Apple's software engineering practices you realise how incredibly cheap and stingy they are. All the apps are so under funded and under developed. Bugs are introduced all over their native platforms all the time and never fixed.
> Is Chrome's PWA support on Android a massive glow to Android Play Store's bottom line?
Probably, but Android allows side-loading. iOS does not.
> What's iOS missing for PWA's to be a viable money-maker for companies?
Brace yourself.
1. Notifications are hobbled. This is HUGE. Silent pushes, rich notifications, NSE, reliable badge counts, and reliable delivery. This is made worse by:
2. Hobbled background priority. PWAs are aggressively suspended and killed. No long running processes. No guarantee of process execution. IndexedDB and in-memory state may be wiped at any time.
3. PWAs can’t access most system frameworks. Bluetooth (CoreBluetooth). NFC (Core NFC). Background location tracking. HealthKit. HomeKit. CallKit / VoIP. Siri Shortcuts / App Intents. AirDrop. Apple Pay (full API). CarPlay. System share extensions.
4. No access to native rendering pipelines. Performance is severely limited.
5. PWAs have unstable, purgeable memory. No persistent file storage.
6. Limited UX and lifecycle control. No termination callbacks. No suspend notifications. Reloaded arbitrarily. Back/forward gestures conflict with browser.
7. No access to native UI components like FaceID, native text fields, drag and drop across apps, context menus, and haptic feedback.
Apple has done everything they possibly can to ensure PWAs are broken on iOS.
It's not just that, Apple also gets $20+ billion per year in AdSense revenue from Google for being the default search engine in Safari. A change of even 10% marketshare would cost them billions, and this money is pure profit.
The more likely explanation is that when every app can bundle their own browser engine, we will not see a competition explosion. Instead, Electron apps will come to mobile, with every app shipping its own browser stack.
You can’t tell me Gecko, which has already failed on desktop, will suddenly be popular on mobile. You can easily tell me every app shipping their own Chromium would be very popular with developers.
Firefox is really good now on android. It's my go to browser now for everything. It just needed full addon support but when that was finally there it was great.
This is true, however I think an App Store rule that to ship a browser engine, you have to be a browser, defined as having a browser that is maintained on MacOS, Linux, and/or Windows and which can be made the default browser on those platforms. Or even simpler, it has to present web browsing to the user as the primary function and not secondary to accessing content/shopping/gaming.
Seems either approach would rule out your Slack, Amazon app, etc. from shipping their own outdated 900MB Chromiums but allow Chrome, Firefox, K-Meleon, whatever.
Has PWA become popular on unencumbered platforms like Android or Windows?
No.
Even if unencumbered on iOS, it will still fail, because PWA is an intrinsically confusing technology. The pitch to non-technical users is terrible. Just like passkeys, which has also been terrible.
> "Has PWA become popular on unencumbered platforms like Android or Windows? No."
Yes, PWAs have become popular on these platforms. I work for Microsoft on the Microsoft Store (app store on Windows) and I work with the Edge team, and I work on PWABuilder.com, which publishes PWAs to app stores. Some of the most popular apps in the Microsoft Store are PWAs: Netflix, TikTok, Adobe Creative Cloud, Disney+, and many others.
To view the list of PWAs in the Store, on a Windows box you can run ms-windows-store://assoc/?Tags=AppExtension-microsoft.store.edgePWA
I run PWABuilder.com as well, and I can tell you that many, many PWAs get published to the Google Play Store, including some very popular ones.
>Has PWA become popular on unencumbered platforms like Android or Windows?
No.
Obviously. When a major Gatekeeper systematically holds it back to prevent it from challenging its taxation funnel, then it has no chance of competing and will thus not be chosen on competing platforms either, which will prevent its adoption and any investment in it.
>Even if unencumbered on iOS, it will still fail, because PWA is an intrinsically confusing technology.
PWA is not an "intrinsically confusing technology" and making such an absurd statement without proper elaboration reeks of pure bias.
It’s not that confusing. To a user it could be the same as an app, just one you can be prompted to “install” instantly without a download and without wasting space on your device.
If Apple weren’t incentivized to block PWA use, they’d allow them to be “installed” with the same type of little top banner that prompts you to get/open an App Store app. Instead they relegate it to some obscure buried option inside the Safari Share menu.
Technically you can even write your own webview, but you can't make it the default, nor will it be able to JIT-compile JS, since that requires an entitlement that Apple never grants. Having no JIT is murder on both performance and battery life.
Everything that's inconvenient for your preferred narrative can just be dismissed as conspiratorial thinking, makes the world so much easier - doesnt it? I've compiled some of the evidences that makes clear how one of the Gatekeepers (Apple) has a tremendous conflict of interest, which manifested itself in systematic sabotaging of PWAs over the years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45534316
My personal opinion is that keeping the browser engine locked down isn't much of a profit generator, unlike maintaining full reign over the app store would be.