- "...market is expected to reach a value of 10.77 billion dollars."
- "PWAs cater to over 6.3 billion smartphone users globally."
- Dramatic improvements in speed, conversions, retention rate etc.
These stats don't tell me how many users and what proportion of users actually add PWAs to their home screen. For companies like Starbucks who have deployed a PWA I'd love to know what proportion of their web traffic ends up installing the PWA, and how it compares to native for example. Does anybody know where I can find this information generally?
The closest thing I could find to real data is this:
- Apple said PWAs had "very low user adoption" when they recently cancelled (and then un-cancelled) them for EU users.
- A Chrome OS blog post where they say "Since the beginning of 2021, desktop PWA installs have grow by 270%" (published early 2022).
Thanks!
Chrome(OS) and others might use PWAs behind the scenes, so depending on how you count, maybe the numbers are much higher than I’d think?
To be clear, it's not really critical. They can do their job perfectly well using the app in any browser. But having it full screen does improve the UX quite a bit.
On my RadioSide, when the user selects to add to home screen or install as an app, it makes an icon and that's that, from the user's point of view it looks like an app, works like an app, quacks like an app, without the risks and hassle.
Most users have no idea that it's possible thus presenting them with an "install this" they already get anxiety attacks of downloading and running stuff and taking risk, I am talking about average users.
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Installing PWA isn't obvious for users on iOS Safari or even macOS Safari. It's very obscure
> A Chrome OS ... desktop PWA installs have grow by 270%
Google Chrome would "beg" you to install PWA if the web was developed in the correct way with correct manifest and ServiceWorkers.
and i might argue it's deliberately so!
Doesn't seem that obscure and for me the issue is much more with websites not making it clear when a PWA version of the site is available.
When my family was discussing getting an older member a smartphone, I briefly thought about it and realized that the whole lore of what's srollable would be impossible to explain. If you don't want a feature used, put it "below the fold" in a popup.
Instead, you need to tell users “Hey, we have an app! No no stop, wait, don’t go looking in the App Store it’s not there. Instead you need to hit the share icon. Yeah it looks like a box with an arrow coming out of it, down the bottom of the screen. Yeah if it’s not showing you need to tap the gray bar at the bottom first. Then the share button. Then look through for something that says install to Home Screen. Yeah scroll down a bit and maybe scroll across until you see it. Yeah there you go.”
https://medium.com/@julianneagu/installing-pwas-on-chrome-ea...
Ask HN: Who has had a successful PWA product?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40724774
On the desktop, PWAs are simply less relevant. People are mostly online, and there is little difference between PWA and a "real" website, so people would just go to the website instead of "installing" it. Most "heavyweight" applications like VSCode, Photoshop and Premier Pro need to be run natively (although many of their features are available in the web version). Google Docs, probably, but otherwise there is very little incentive for using PWAs.
On mobile, many of the same points apply, although PWAs have more access to permissions and are often viable replacements to native apps (especially apps that are just websites anyway, like Uber Eats). I think mobile apps would be the ones driving the growth of PWAs. But of course... Apple. Apple doesn't want this ecosystem to grow to take revenue from the app store, and just made it difficult to develop and use PWAs. (There are legitimate concerns over how PWAs are used, but there are also solutions.) As a developer you don't want to spend time developing PWAs that only run on Android phones, so you might not bother at all.
Android is the dominant mobile OS in the world.
> As a developer you don't want to spend time developing PWAs that only run on Android phones, so you might not bother at all.
You will be developing two apps anyway, so...
I’m not looking to use PWAs.
One of the few places where hype is still real is Hacker News, and even here people can't even come up with examples of good PWAs beyond, and I kid you not, Twitter.
Going from 1 install to 270 installs is a 270% increase, too. So I would take such stats with a grain of salt weighing about 270 tons. Google is dominating mobile market and Chrome is dominating the browsers market, and that's the best stats they can come up with?
That's a 26900% increase.
No, it's a 270x increase. In percent that's much higher.
If we do the 270% increase from 1, the stats become funnier.
Sadly I do think that PWAs aren't very popular in the grand scheme of things since I think they often make more sense than a separate app that you download just for it to basically be a copycat of the website and to still not work offline.