this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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I dont use many PWA's since I had to run them on chromium before. But as a web Dev and even more so as a user, I feel like PWA's are the way to go. They completely avoid all the app stores drama plus the 30% fees. Also the devs get to deploy instant updates without the delay going through the app stores. Just like any other web app. If done right I could see them replacing most native apps. Assuming we can get apple to allow PWAs full CPU usage. Currently they are throttling them from what I understand.
Edit: To clarify I'm speaking about mobile. I've never even tried PWAs on desktop and can't imagine why I would use that over browser+bookmarks.
But it's easier to block trackers & ads on a PWA, and life made me very cynical about "the industry" 😅
And FWIW, Firefox already supports them on android; this is about desktop support.
I was going to say, "am I losing my mind?" I've had PWAs on Firefox for years. I've never once cared to use one on the desktop I guess.
Indeed. I'm not sure when they added mobile support back, but it wasn't there when I last looked for it. Guess its time for me to move my PWAs out of brave now. Thanks.
My only problem with PWAs is that they have arbitrary security requirements. Anything non-localhost needs https. No self-signed cert allowed. Enforcing people to buy a router that supports dyndns for their self hosted apps is odd. I'm wondering who makes these rules.
You can do DDNS for free, using a client app on your server, rather than router.
I use cloudflare-ddns
Oh right. Thanks, indeed. However, for private apps on LAN addresses it's still a problem.
Yes it is. PITA to work within your own network.
I run a DNS server for this purpose.
Didn’t apple disable PWA’s in Europe?
Yes, they did that when the EU made the ruling about allowing other app stores. Apple doesn't like PWAs cause they lose their 30% cut. Hopefully we some ruling or law that they have to treat them equal to native apps.
Which would probably have Jobs rolling in his grave. He was all for web apps. Hell, their first attempt at widgets on macOS were just web apps. That's why he was so adamant about getting rid of Flash. He knew the technology was viable.
https://www.techmonitor.ai/digital-economy/big-tech/apple-reverses-decision-to-ban-progressive-web-apps-following-user-backlash it was. But, they bring it back
PWAs are god awful on IOS.
They are god-awful everywhere. I don’t get why people can be like “yeah I want all of my apps to be janky crap that is usually missing a lot of features you’d get for free using the platform toolkit”. The only exception I’ve seen thus far that was actually good is Figma and god knows how much effort they had to put into that to make it behave even remotely reasonably.
The idea is that Google and Apple on Android and iOS have purposefully gimped PWA functionality in order to maintain the popularity of their app stores. Which I get, because web apps are much more useful and functional on full computers. So it’s not really the fault of the PWAs that PWAs suck. But unfortunately, they do suck.