On one hand, SPAs took off and became massively popular. On the other, I’m still curious why PWAs—especially the kind with service-worker-powered offline access—never really did. I don't like SPAs only if I find them bloated and with a messed up browser history that back button moves you out of the website.

Imagine an e-commerce site that lets you review your order history and product pages offline (even if a bit outdated). That kind of experience feels genuinely useful—much more so than the "you're offline, here’s a cute dog (I love the pictures though)" fallback most sites provide.

Over the weekend, I experimented with service workers for the first time (assisted by Vibe coding). My initial impression was honestly a bit magical—“this website works offline, unlike most mobile apps these days that are just WebView-wrapped SPAs and crash offline.” [1]

That said, debugging was rough. Vibe coding output had subtle issues I found hard to untangle as a newcomer, cache saved v/s cache matching was being done incorrectly in the code, which LLM wasn't able to point out (cors/non-cors requests had issue).And Chrome’s DevTools made debugging manageable, but Firefox’s service worker support felt clunky in comparison (personal take).

Curious if others feel the same—are PWAs underused because of DX hurdles, lack of awareness, or just industry momentum around SPAs?

[1]: https://ball-sort-game.vercel.app/

Offline is good for things like your ball sort game or a calculator. But the developers of that sort of thing want to make money, so they sell apps in the app store.

Offline order history is only a marginal improvement on the e-commerce experience from a customer and business perspective, so it's more appealing to us engineers who appreciate it as a feat of engineering prowess.

In other words, offline isn't PWAs killer feature. Besides, native apps can do it too.

PWA's killer features are circumventing the app store and the app store tax and not maintaining two codebases for Android and iOS.

Another Hacker News client would be a good example of a good PWA that you might install to your phone. It could have niceties like "save for later" or special styles applied to your favorite commenters. Offline support would be useful too, of course but not the main reason to develop a PWA.

Uncensored, paid content is another significant use case.