PWAs are the Future, but the Future isn’t Here Yet
Progressive Web Apps circumvent the review process and profit sharing required by Android and Apple app stores, making them ideal in a lot of use cases, but Apple’s refusal to allow push notifications on PWAs cripples them.
If the idea of building a mobile-responsive website and a mobile app seems redundant to you, you’re not alone. Since people view the two on the same devices, why should any company or brand have both?
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) solve that problem. Technically, they’re websites, but you wouldn’t know it to look at them. They function just like apps and you can save shortcuts to your app library or home screen that look just like apps.
Having just one PWA instead of a separate website and mobile app is already attractive, but the cherry on top is that PWAs aren’t required to give Apple or Android a cut of user purchases like apps are. Companies receive 100% of their mobile-user revenue with a PWA instead of the 70% they get from users on their mobile app.
So it would seem that PWAs really are the future for mobile, but there’s one major strike against them: Apple doesn’t allow PWAs to send push notifications like it does traditional apps.
For the company running the app, this is a problem because, as any marketer will tell you, push notifications can be some of the primary sales and revenue drivers for certain kinds of businesses, like retail and ecommerce.
It might cost a lot more to build a mobile-responsive website AND a mobile app, but if that app can alert users to flash sales and time-gated promo codes, it will likely make that money back over time. Without push notifications to alert users, a PWA could delay the sales cycle or even fail to get a number of sales that a push-notification-enabled mobile app would get.
Plus, in this modern era, an app that doesn’t have notifications provides a poor user experience. Many users are so accustomed to the functionality of push notifications that they may get frustrated with PWAs that don’t have them, particularly if they don’t realize that it isn’t an app, given how similar they appear to be.
At the time of writing, Apple is the only obstacle blocking progress on the Progressive Web App front. They support them, sure, but they choose to handicap them in a way that renders them a meaningless consideration for a huge number of businesses.
Apple hesitates to fully support PWAs because they don’t want to give up the revenue they earn from in-app purchases.
Unfortunately, there’s not much developers or end users can do about that. Microsoft took a similar, closed approach a couple decades ago – they resisted the open app ecosystem because it threatened their revenue – but it didn’t last then, and hopefully it won’t last now with Apple.
In the meantime, one of the better options is to try a double hybrid approach: build your PWA for Android devices and then wrap it into a hybrid mobile app for iOS using React Native Webview or Cordova. It isn’t ideal but it solves the problem and could still save you in development time. Plus, when (if?) PWAs are fully supported on iOS, you can scrap the hybrid wrapper and go full PWA on both platforms.
One day, Apple may come around on push notification support for PWAs. They hold the future in their hands, and what a glorious future it could be. One without any real need to develop separate mobile websites and applications, where companies of all kinds can save time and money on development and save 30% of their gross revenue, all while users continue to get the functionality they have come to expect.
