Charlie Martin
Jul 28, 2017 · 1 min read

There are two ways of looking at this:

  1. Apple refuses to support a cool new technology called PWA, because it doesn’t align with their business interests, which is selling native apps.
  2. Google is promoting a lesser technology (PWA over native), because it aligns with their business interests, which is crawling HTML for their search engine.

My point is that PWA is also a large company pursuing its business interests. People will say that PWA is not just a Google thing, which is true, but its MOSTLY a Google thing and some other large companies whose business models rely on the web over native.

So we don’t have one evil company putting its business interests over the greater good here. We have two huge companies competing to own the future of technology. If you are a capitalist, this is great. Innovation is happening in two exciting directions.

Who should win ultimately just comes down to which method leads to better products for the end user. At this point, this is still native applications. You simply have far more options, like access to the accelerometer, smoother animations, OpenGL, etc, etc etc. The list of benefits of native over web is enormous.

The only way that PWA can and should win is if the improved developer experience of write once, run anywhere translates to better products. Right now it doesn’t. Another option is how can we improve the developer experience of creating native apps and there is some exciting stuff happening on that front like React Native, as you mentioned.

    Charlie Martin

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    Compute programmer. Psychology/Sociology enthusiast. Lifelong student.