Ask HN: Why are PWA user install stats so hard to find?

I want to know how many people install progressive web apps. All of the sources I could find say the same things over and over:

- "...market is expected to reach a value of 10.77 billion dollars."

- "PWAs cater to over 6.3 billion smartphone users globally."

- Dramatic improvements in speed, conversions, retention rate etc.

These stats don't tell me how many users and what proportion of users actually add PWAs to their home screen. For companies like Starbucks who have deployed a PWA I'd love to know what proportion of their web traffic ends up installing the PWA, and how it compares to native for example. Does anybody know where I can find this information generally?

The closest thing I could find to real data is this:

- Apple said PWAs had "very low user adoption" when they recently cancelled (and then un-cancelled) them for EU users.

- A Chrome OS blog post where they say "Since the beginning of 2021, desktop PWA installs have grow by 270%" (published early 2022).

Thanks!

I work as a developer / consultant. Sometimes I show «install as desktop app» on Edge/chrome on windows and people are genuinely surprised, and don’t know about it. I’d bet the conscious usage is very low.

Chrome(OS) and others might use PWAs behind the scenes, so depending on how you count, maybe the numbers are much higher than I’d think?

> It's very obscure

and i might argue it's deliberately so!

The only ones I’ve ever used are gmail and google calendar on my work computer, and that’s because we don’t allow third party fat clients.

I’m not looking to use PWAs.

At my previous consultancy client, a B2B SaaS, we thoroughly implemented our products as PWAs...

A big, big part of what needed to be done was explaining what & why to users, we figured since it's B2B we could afford the extra end-user education.

In a B2C context though, yeah I think the adoption rate is just very low due to its obscurity, most people don't know it exists, and me, having developed multiple PWAs, don't even use a single one