this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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Honestly I just love the idea of PWAs so much, but I've so rarely seen anything that truly seems to take advantage of what they can offer, so I'm just a little sensitive to dismissal of them.
I definitely get it. I remember reading Mozilla's blasé attitude towards them years ago, with them justifying not supporting PWAs because no one uses them, and thinking that obviously no one will use them if you don't make Firefox a good alternative for using them!
The customer my company works towards have chosen to move a lot of their operations to PWAs because they're so versatile and can be easily integrated to all the systems they need to run them on. We target phones, tablets, heavy machinery, and desktops.
Originally when the iPhone launched the entire idea was to not have apps, but use PWAs. That was maybe a bit early since PWAs weren't that mature yet, but with modern web platform technologies you can do a lot with PWAs, so I think if that sort of concept was launched today it'd do better.
Not only were they not mature yet, they didn't exist. Web apps as a concept did...sorta, barely, but the ServiceWorker API that defines true PWAs wasn't introduced to Chrome until 2015—and Safari (on both Mac and iOS) didn't get it until 2018, over a decade after the original iPhone launched.