this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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I don’t disagree with you much, except on the part of permissions.
Native apps will always have more access to your data compared to PWAs. PWAs work on the browser’s permission model, whereas native app work on your OS’s permission model. For a malicious PWA app to do something wrong, it needs to not just bypass browser’s permission model, but the OS as well, making it more safer.
On the maintenance side, it’s not just the cost but time as well. You could make a change in your PWA and everyone will have access to the update instantly, whereas you have to do manual steps to get it all the way to a published state and wait some time for approval.
Things are rarely deprecated in the web space, so it’s very unlikely something would stop working, which isn’t the case for native apps where existing features break often. I’ve developed both kinds of apps and my pain has been more with native apps, although sometimes I have no other choice because everyone prefers the native ones for the ease.
Then you need to also develop for Android and iOS separately. Yes there are tools like React Native and Flutter but they’re not super easy to maintain either.
Testing takes time too. While web apps a dev can instantly see changes as they change their code, and debug it easily too, native apps take time to deploy.
Moreover, for an iOS app it’s not just $100 a year, but now you need a Mac computer to build and test it easily as well.