It seems most popular websites are not rolling out their PWAs on purpose
PWAs don’t have store presence and they restrict the computing and tracking powers which are easily available to a native app. It looks like this is the only case why most companies are holding off releasing PWA versions of their mobile sites and seem to have stuck in the past of mobile.
Let’s start with Google, the one who helped jump-start the PWA movement. Its ‘Contacts’ and ‘Calendar’ webapps are redeveloped from scratch but still completely refuse to work on the mobile web or in offline mode. Calendar bluntly refuses to even open on mobile, it’s just about adding a little responsive code to get it on mobile.
Google Keep can handle offline states once in memory, fast first paint but cannot launch a new instance if the device is offline. It annoys users with banner to download native app every single time you launch it.
Above: left ‘Google Keep’ when you try to start it with no internet. It simply gives up. And on the right we have ‘Twitter’, it atleast tries, displays some of the UI. It even lets you compose a tweet till you get online.
‘Gmail’ on desktop is a true PWA , launches and works offline, but again refuses to even launch on mobile web in its new form.
Long before apple started native apps for iPhone, its first ‘apps’ were webapps. At that time Google embraced mobile web completely and developed new mobile experiences.
I know, developing something new requires efforts time and money. But google has done all of that for desktop webapps, rewriting them according to their new material design guideline s, have most of the PWA capabilties. They are just stubborn and plainly refuse to work on mobile web.
Consider the Facebook mobile website. It doesn’t even have a sticky header section. On simple swiping on the screen, the header goes up and when you spend significant time scrolling and now wish to switch to other tabs in the header it’s nearly impossible without scrolling to top. This UX frustrates user and makes them want to download the app. And it’s not that like technically difficult to implement a sticky header or they have stopped developing new features for mobileweb facebook. They already have a sticky banner to ask users to download “Lite” version of app. This is clearly a management decision because unlike its desktop webapp which can do almost everything the native mobile apps can do, the mobile webapp is just a historic relic.
(above: facebook webapp, you can see it has header for newsfeed, friend-requests, notifications, etc. But on scrolling for a little bit , the header too goes up with the content, and then say you wanted to search for a profile or view notification , you will have to scroll all the way to the top and then navigate to respective tab. Spoiler: keeping that header always stuck to top is super easy to implement, instagram has both header and bottom navbar in its mobile webapp)
Instagram has almost a complete PWA, it even has notifications. It has all the features but decides to skip messaging to keep its native users. Facebook messenger does something similar. It has a responsive webapp that uses notifications on desktop, but outright refuses to even open on mobile. (btw, chat used to work on mobile webapp of facebook a few years back. The reason to remove it was purely to push ‘messenger’ native app)
Above: You can see ‘Messenger’ doesnt even allow you to login. And says the only way you can use this service is through native app.
The only company that has truly embraced PWA is twitter. It is using every possible feature PWAs can offer, features that it can turn on and off based on the platform capabilities and enjoying the benefits of a single codebase.
What features these giants have skipped from their webapps are
1) proved to be possible for implementation on mobile web, many small players have proved power of mobile web
2) Easy to implement , with little to no coding effort in their current or brand new sites
3) helps them in longer run with single code base, and can lead to faster updates.
The only obvious reason left out for them not doing it is deliberate management decision to stick to native apps. Unlike Native apps, PWAs cant stay in the background continuously tracking user’s location, microphone, SMS and call logs. This tracking data is valuable for companies and management will definitely be happy sacrificing everything else over user data.
The choice is now ours, we can switch to alternatives forcing these giants to move to mobile web. If they are unwilling to adapt, new players are ready to take their place.