Download the Twitter and PWA apps. Compare the two.

If you think the only difference between them is push notifications and one click install then of course you will think PWA will be a success. But a lot of us can easily see the difference.

And based on the last 15 years of real world experience there are enough users like us to sink the hopes of PWA apps.

When you have a strong reason to not optimize one of two ways of building your mobile app, you are not going to optimize one of two ways of building your mobile app. Not having push notifications – for years on end, with no inkling if that might ever change, because the platform makers have strong reason to sabotage it – is a pretty strong reason, specially when your measure of success is literally how often users get distracted pulled into your app.

In 2023 there is absolutely nothing that would technically not allow us to build a buttery smooth 90fps experience in any mobile browser running on a recent-ish phone. Of course that is not to say it's particularly easy. But then again, so isn't building a performant native app.

The twitter PWA is actually a very good PWA. But it doesn't implement some gestures like swiping left to see more feeds on the home screen, and has little to no animation support (retweet dialog pops up, instead of animating in like it does in the native app). It also does not do paint holding, so you get a temporary white screen when swiping back to the previous screen. But all of those problems could be fixed, with current web tech, afaict.

Is there any other lackings (which might be fundamental and unfixable for a PWA) that you had in mind?

I am genuinely curious about this. I prefer native apps to web apps, but I have notifications disabled for every app I install except those that my wife and parents use to contact me. I’m sure I’m not alone in this behaviour - I hate notifications and any workflow model based around them.

Is my viewpoint very uncommon? Are notifications generally used and loved by users? Do app developers have good stats about this?

Thinking as a fellow notification disabler, and having no data, just intuition: People want their attention to be tapped. I am not exactly sure why that is (although I am sure that it can't be good) but notifications are a tap on peoples attention.

Building certain apps without notifications seems like it would simply not be acceptable to must users. Most phone apps still vibrate or ring – that's basically a notification. I would go as far as saying its uniquely distracting notification is the primary feature of the phone app but, at the very least, a phone without one would be something very different. And since messengers basically compete with phone apps now, for most people that would probably not work.

It's not an uncommon viewpoint. But the fact of the matter is that without notifications it is hard to build a habitual trigger loop to re-engage users (a lot of things just fall out of mind and sometimes you'd like a reminder or a notification of something special). If you are careful with what type of, how many, and how you send notifications, then not as many users will disable them.

Yes absolutely. People will learn a new way of interacting with webapps. Currently nobody installs a pwa. But maybe that'll change. Going through the web browser is inconvenient for some apps (unnecessary extra menu on top). After installing however, the experience is very similar.

And what about the 80%+ of app revenue that are from games?