I think it's not correct to conflate the App Store and the Play Store like this. Apple is very hostile to PWAs in the App Store, whereas Google wrote a tool to easily package your PWA for the Play Store https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/bubblewrap
So for me, I publish to the Play Store to get some free users who find my app that way. App Store, not worth the headache of trying to skirt Apple's rules.
Ideally I think app stores should allow listing PWAs directly, rather than banning them (like Apple) or forcing them to use a wrapper (like Google). Whatever complaints people have about that (app can change without review, etc) also apply to the current situation in the Play Store. Once your wrapper PWA is accepted, you can change the website however you want. So what's the point of the wrapper?
> Ideally I think app stores should allow listing PWAs directly, rather than banning them (like Apple) or forcing them to use a wrapper (like Google).
I think it’d be a bit of a challenge — in both ecosystems, corporate MDM and parental controls currently define policies to control app installation by store-specific metadata. You’d need equivalent PWA standards these OSes could grab ahold of, to determine which PWAs to allow installation of, or to surface in app discovery views in the store. (Probably it’s be something akin to the old https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Conten... system, but probably reworked now that we actually know what things people care about preventing their kids — or employees — from accessing online.)
Which in turn, to support the spirit of PWAs as a vendor-neutral “web thing” — means that the OSes would need to agree on what exactly the set of content rating controls are that they’re allowing administrators to define policies against. I.e. the stores would need a more-unified data model; perhaps even an externally standardized one.
Why? Remember, current status quo in the Google ecosystem is that I can write a PWA, put a wrapper around it, list it in the Play Store, and then update the PWA however I want with no review. If that's good enough for whatever corporate/parental controls Google has to obey, then just listing the website directly should be too.
They could ask for whatever extra metadata they need upon submission of the URL to the app store. Or standardize it so we could just put it in some JSON file.
So for me, I publish to the Play Store to get some free users who find my app that way. App Store, not worth the headache of trying to skirt Apple's rules.
Ideally I think app stores should allow listing PWAs directly, rather than banning them (like Apple) or forcing them to use a wrapper (like Google). Whatever complaints people have about that (app can change without review, etc) also apply to the current situation in the Play Store. Once your wrapper PWA is accepted, you can change the website however you want. So what's the point of the wrapper?