Has PWA become popular on unencumbered platforms like Android or Windows?

No.

Even if unencumbered on iOS, it will still fail, because PWA is an intrinsically confusing technology. The pitch to non-technical users is terrible. Just like passkeys, which has also been terrible.

It’s not that confusing. To a user it could be the same as an app, just one you can be prompted to “install” instantly without a download and without wasting space on your device.

If Apple weren’t incentivized to block PWA use, they’d allow them to be “installed” with the same type of little top banner that prompts you to get/open an App Store app. Instead they relegate it to some obscure buried option inside the Safari Share menu.

>Has PWA become popular on unencumbered platforms like Android or Windows? No.

Obviously. When a major Gatekeeper systematically holds it back to prevent it from challenging its taxation funnel, then it has no chance of competing and will thus not be chosen on competing platforms either, which will prevent its adoption and any investment in it.

>Even if unencumbered on iOS, it will still fail, because PWA is an intrinsically confusing technology.

PWA is not an "intrinsically confusing technology" and making such an absurd statement without proper elaboration reeks of pure bias.

> "Has PWA become popular on unencumbered platforms like Android or Windows? No."

Yes, PWAs have become popular on these platforms. I work for Microsoft on the Microsoft Store (app store on Windows) and I work with the Edge team, and I work on PWABuilder.com, which publishes PWAs to app stores. Some of the most popular apps in the Microsoft Store are PWAs: Netflix, TikTok, Adobe Creative Cloud, Disney+, and many others.

To view the list of PWAs in the Store, on a Windows box you can run ms-windows-store://assoc/?Tags=AppExtension-microsoft.store.edgePWA

I run PWABuilder.com as well, and I can tell you that many, many PWAs get published to the Google Play Store, including some very popular ones.

I agree there is some confusion around PWA installation. There are some proposed web standards with Google and Microsoft's backing to help with that, e.g. Web Install: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers/blob/main/...

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