How Web Has Evolved: Progressive Web Apps(PWA) vs. Native Apps

  • After playing around with PWAs, their OS APIs integration (UWP and Android) and WebAssembly, I have came to the conclusion that for plain CRUD apps, mobile Web and PWAs are the way to go.

    Now for highly interactive experiences that go beyond the typical CRUD app, then native apps are still the way to go, specially when some Web APIs happen to be constrained to what is actually available, e.g. WebGL vs OpenGL ES 3.2/Vulkan/Metal, WebAudio vs audio engine, SIMD access, Workers vs actual multi-core,...

    In any case, from my point of view, PWAs are a good argument against being forced to use any Cordova, Ionic or React Native flavor.

  • > Push notifications — All platforms now support Push Notifications via Standard or proprietary API except iOS. iOS has all the pieces in place but Apple has taken a stance that due to battery life issues they won’t support it. On Mac, Apple has a proprietary implementation with a similar flow as the standard API.

    For me this is still the biggest problem with iOS. They need to implement a way of getting push notifications to the device, from a web app.