elsat on Nostr: PWA vs app store apps ...

PWA vs app store apps

quoting note1duu…89pt

Listening to legend cashu developer calle 👁️⚡👁️ (nprofile…xnfk) on Citadel Dispatch with ODELL (nprofile…fslc), talking about cashu.me and PWAs and this triggered some thoughts.

Needless to say PWAs are an effective way of distributing applications permissionlessly, especially on iOS, but there's a few drawbacks I wanted to mention.

- Hard to install: the fact that you have multiple steps that need explanation (go to the hamburger menu, tap on install, but on iOS use Share...). As insignificant as this sounds, it's a major UX hurdle for users and why I think PWAs are not more widespread. Apple and Google know this very well.

- Harder to discover: though not needing an app store is an upside, it hurts discoverability, especially on app stores with a social layer like Zapstore (nprofile…tdq0)

- Reliance on domain names: Not a huge problem but definitely not as sovereign as private keys

- Hard to verify releases: since you pull data and UI from a website, it's unclear when you have upgraded, impractical to sign and next to impossible to audit a particular release. Websites typically perform lots of deployments every day

I have plans for Zapstore (nprofile…tdq0) itself to become a PWA to distribute PWAs, too, and looking forward to find out how to minimize these problems without losing the freedom the web provides.