Why are PWA user install stats so hard to find?

I work as a developer / consultant. Sometimes I show «install as desktop app» on Edge/chrome on windows and people are genuinely surprised, and don’t know about it. I’d bet the conscious usage is very low.

Chrome(OS) and others might use PWAs behind the scenes, so depending on how you count, maybe the numbers are much higher than I’d think?

> Apple said PWAs had "very low user adoption"

Installing PWA isn't obvious for users on iOS Safari or even macOS Safari. It's very obscure

> A Chrome OS ... desktop PWA installs have grow by 270%

Google Chrome would "beg" you to install PWA if the web was developed in the correct way with correct manifest and ServiceWorkers.

Recent interesting thread about PWAs:

Ask HN: Who has had a successful PWA product?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40724774

My guess is that indeed the usage is low and people didn't bother to update stats or put more efforts into it. But the real reasons, in my opinion --

On the desktop, PWAs are simply less relevant. People are mostly online, and there is little difference between PWA and a "real" website, so people would just go to the website instead of "installing" it. Most "heavyweight" applications like VSCode, Photoshop and Premier Pro need to be run natively (although many of their features are available in the web version). Google Docs, probably, but otherwise there is very little incentive for using PWAs.

On mobile, many of the same points apply, although PWAs have more access to permissions and are often viable replacements to native apps (especially apps that are just websites anyway, like Uber Eats). I think mobile apps would be the ones driving the growth of PWAs. But of course... Apple. Apple doesn't want this ecosystem to grow to take revenue from the app store, and just made it difficult to develop and use PWAs. (There are legitimate concerns over how PWAs are used, but there are also solutions.) As a developer you don't want to spend time developing PWAs that only run on Android phones, so you might not bother at all.

The only ones I’ve ever used are gmail and google calendar on my work computer, and that’s because we don’t allow third party fat clients.

I’m not looking to use PWAs.

Because PWAs are mostly hype originally aggressively promoted by Google, but now even Google is tired of promoting them.

One of the few places where hype is still real is Hacker News, and even here people can't even come up with examples of good PWAs beyond, and I kid you not, Twitter.

Going from 1 install to 270 installs is a 270% increase, too. So I would take such stats with a grain of salt weighing about 270 tons. Google is dominating mobile market and Chrome is dominating the browsers market, and that's the best stats they can come up with?

I personally very much enjoy using PWAs for things that are actually more like apps than websites. Things like Discord could benefit from a PWA version, but the ones I actually do use are for standard Fediverse pages, YouTube, Chrome Remote Desktop, Pokemon Showdown and a bunch more.

Sadly I do think that PWAs aren't very popular in the grand scheme of things since I think they often make more sense than a separate app that you download just for it to basically be a copycat of the website and to still not work offline.

I don't think anyone actually uses these in the real world.

My understanding is that a PWA is just a website with a few extra features. The ability to "install" it is one of those features, but it's still a PWA even if you don't install it and just use it as a normal website. So basically a website with a service worker that has some offline functionality is a PWA. Tons of people use those without even knowing it, and there's no good way to measure that.

I’m a little confused. Most people are talking about PWAs as though adding a website shortcut to your Home Screen is a PWA. When I search for what a PWA is on Google, it says they can be placed in the app stores. So are they in the app stores or do users have to do the shortcut thing?

Guess the place to start is find out how many sites support PWA behaviour — could do this by finding all the sites in the HTTP Archive that have a manifest and scanning them

Then you’re going to beed to see what stats they’re willing to share

Quite a few sites seem to support PWA even on iOS — that’ how I use Instagram on my iPad

Because the amount of people that install PWAs is too minimal to measure meaningfully.

At my previous consultancy client, a B2B SaaS, we thoroughly implemented our products as PWAs...

A big, big part of what needed to be done was explaining what & why to users, we figured since it's B2B we could afford the extra end-user education.

In a B2C context though, yeah I think the adoption rate is just very low due to its obscurity, most people don't know it exists, and me, having developed multiple PWAs, don't even use a single one

Updated to say it seems people find anecdotes useful and interesting, my apologies for discouraging this.

Previously I wrote:

> Replies with personal anecdotes and opinions are not super helpful, sorry! I'm specifically looking for reliable empirical measurements and data.

Because they would easily grow bigger than the duopoly App stores

I'd hazard a guess that one key reason PWA apps are not more popular is the lack of an app develepment framework that would enable more sophisticated offline behavior.

I suspect the overlap between PWA users and those who value privacy and have the technical means by which to achieve it is high.

I searched for weather in my area in Google then added that page as a PWA in Android.