Comment by Sara on "How do progressive web apps render natively? (Or do they)"

Interesting decomposition. It seems to me that one aspect that is usually not discussed much in regard to PWAs is their discoverability after being developed. If PWAs are supposed to work like native apps, it implies that the aspect of discoverability is as significant as technical considerations. At the moment, it remains rather fragmented as compared to established app stores. For example, I looked into https://unstore.io , which attempts to make a similar ecosystem for web applications as compared to native ones, and I started to think that perhaps distribution might be another challenge facing PWAs. What are your thoughts on whether PWAs would require additional discoverability layers to catch up?

Thank you for your comment. Well as you may have followed the short read, PWAs are not exactly apps, they still remain to be pure web applications with a url. It's just Chrome that makes it look like they are a real app. The apk is generated by Chrome directly. This gives power directly to the browsers. Other browsers for instance do not do that, they just create Android shortcuts. Some interesting idea that just came to me is that maybe app stores can make a special section for PWA and then it's up to them to generate the same apk just like Chrome does. But yeah, the store has to be installed on the phone, otherwise discoverability is hard. In the end, a PWA is just a manifest file + everything happening in the web application. I use twitter like that and I know many people who use facebook like that - this way at least Facebook or Twitter cannot mess with the local data of the user's device.

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