Google have an interest in moving people away from desktop applications because they don’t have a desktop OS (not counting Chromebook).
We run 3 SaaS apps. One is strictly native, and the other two are strictly web.
Writing for 4 platforms on the native app is an extremely expensive exercise and then we are also subject to the insanity that is the App Store.
Long story here, everything from App Store review times on mission critical software to the fact that their billing mechanism simply doesn’t work for B2B SaaS…and by the way, we get zero traffic from the App Store as that’s simply not where our customers are looking for the solution we provide.
Fortunately, bulk of our customers start on desktop where we self distribute (code signing on windows and notarization on mac) with ev ssl on marketing sites.
Why is the App Store scammy over the open web…search for any number of popular apps and look at how many have been cloned.
Sure, you can do this on the web with paid ads and enough SEO effort but it’s much harder.
To this day, Apple continue to allow keyword stuffing, advertising on trademarked names, and blatant copyright infringement in app descriptions and even I (fairly tech savvy) accidentally purchased a clone of poly bridge for my kid cause they’ll list the clone above the real one on an exact term search.
What was apples response when I said I purchased the wrong app? Tough cookies!
This is the same reason I hate shopping on Amazon.
I simply prefer to have a direct relationship with the companies I buy things from, and from what I can tell, our customers prefer have a direct relationship with us.
But back to why PWA’s are awesome…simply put, iteration time. We can publish dozens of improvements every day and roll back instantly when an issue arises. We simply can’t do that with native as long as the Apple / Google act as a gate keepers.
When we allow proper sideloading without the scare tactics and dirty tricks, we’ll take the time to build native again.