Earlier quoted context omitted.
PWA’s on Android can be installed directly from a website…it’s awesome, less friction and less scammy than the Play Store. On iOS you need to use the Share > Add to Home Screen which normies have no clue about. You’ll find out if the site supports PWA features AFTER you add it to your Home Screen. This of course is done entirely on purpose to make them harder to find and less appealing than the revenue generating App…
Google should in theory have the same play store revenue motivation to hide PWAs, right? Granted, they also want people to stay on the web to continue using Google.com, so I guess those are two competing priorities. That to me is a bit of an indicator that Apple just doesn’t believe in the merits of the technology. I think they might be asking the same question in asking: what problem is this solving? Every platform…
For one, the actual PWA packaging process gets shunted off to a Google server; I think you can make a "thin client" APK from a manifest using a tool they wrote some time ago[0] (Twitter Lite is one of these), but I've not really looked into it. It's not quite the extension to Chrome you'd really want it to be; if you use a non-Chrome browser on Android, it means you can't really ditch the Chrome dependency if you want to use a PWA. (Further not really helped by the fact that Google is basically the only PWA implementer on Android, since Firefox does not consider PWAs a priority whatsoever.) Similarly, Google's servers need to be able to read out the manifest declaration, which makes them unfeasible for intranet software unless you want to punch a temporary hole and expose it to the internet for a bit.
The other kinda annoying thing Google does is really aggressive degradation between PWA and homescreen shortcut. If the manifest isn't entirely up to snuff in terms of what's listed, there's no attempt at trying to resolve the issue, it just instantly degrades to a homescreen shortcut. A basic example of this is the requirement to use a service worker (even if the service workers entire job is to do nothing); it's not really stated in the manifest spec that it's required, but if you don't have one, the PWA straight up refuses to install as a PWA.
Google's strength with the play store really mostly comes from their bundling advantage; Play Services and the attached Store and Google Apps are required for OEMs to add to their devices (might change with the DMA?). That's the kinda odd reality that makes Apples desire for control seem so extreme - we know what an open platform looks like on Android. It works pretty well for the most part and the incumbents advantage for a store is large enough that almost every app developer submits to the Play Store regardless.
[0]: It's called Bubblewrap - https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/bubblewrap