I'm running a small service, sub 150 users, no online signup kind of business, B2B. Small EU country. 95% of users ask 'do you have an mobile app?' in first 5 minutes of onboarding. Telling them how to install a PWA (and what it is and so forth) is an uphill battle. Unfortunately App Stores rule the non technical crowd.

This is not an accident. This is exactly why Apple (and Google also) have made the PWA experience bad for years. They must force users to believe their app store is the only source of programs.

To many users, an app seems to be perceived as the blessed way to access the web. While on a mobile, they are mostly a way to organize symlinks or bookmarks. Except, off course a web browser does its best to protect the user while most apps don't.

Meanwhile I continue doing the Lords work by telling kids that apps are not the internet. Hopefully, that 95% percentage will eventually decrease.

Why do they need to install a PWA?

We do mobile friendly Web UIs, that is enough.

Their customes, employees, go to the respective company website, get a responsive UI for their device, done, the services require to be online anyway.

There may be a time where we have to push back, though, and this may be it. "There is no app" may sound terrifying now, but once we've educated users, it will only get less scary, until we might actually claim back some ownership of our own stuff from the likes of Apple.

This may just be more of a design and communications challenge for you, than your users. I have seen several design templates that use various forms of visuals to assist the user through the “add to Home Screen” process, which is just three steps; Share—-> More —-> Add to Home Screen. It Is arguably even a faster process than going through the App Store, even if users may be more familiar with it.

You could accompany it with some copy explaining how it keeps the service efficient and affordable, i.e., possible stating if you were to offer an app you would have to increase the price by 75% to pay Apple their fee and for the extra costs.

I suspect other arguments for PWAs would not really matter, like that you have no need to track them or use other abilities an app affords, etc. Most people only care about very few things engineers actually care, let alone know about.

I’ve always been an advocate of PWAs whenever it makes sense and will even design and architect to that objective. But even when I would deal with clients, I think the real “up hill battle” is that apps allow for higher fees and charges because they’re more work and come with greater expenses for for-profit apps, so there has been very little incentive to spread general user awareness about the “add to Home Screen”/PWA.

It’s a bit of a paradox, but I guess that seems to be an under-appreciated driver in something like “advanced consumer capitalist economies”, where the “rational actor” simply does not exist anymore.

BTW, you don't need the app store for that. You can use Firebase App Distribution which doesn't require you to go through the review process.

Basically you just ask their email address and add it to a list in Firebase. Upload your ipa to firebase and the user will receive an email with a link to download

What kind of users are these? Power-users or normal users (Android etc.) or dum..Apple users?

Because in my circle, power-users and beyond. Everybody is angry with apps needed for everything, you want buy bread in store, "do you have our app?" It's a meme here. And in our local subreddit, 600k users. Sentiment is the same.

We also tried to bypass stores apps with generating new accounts and distributing QR/cards for free to everyone. It was kinda popular.

And problems are more real with each day, eg.: scammers have their work way easier, since dumb users can take a huge loan directly from banking app in their phone.

Also small EU country, btw.

>95% of users ask 'do you have an mobile app?' in first 5 minutes of onboarding

Did you ask them why?