PWA (Progressive Web App)
PWA (Progressive Web App) — A web application that can be installed to a phone home screen and run with native-app-like behavior — a category that affects which apps you actually need to install from an app store.
What a PWA actually is
A progressive web app is a website that the browser can install to your phone’s home screen as if it were a native app, and which then runs in a mode that hides the browser chrome and supports offline behavior. Technically: a PWA is a web app that includes a service worker (for offline caching), a web app manifest (for installation metadata), and meets a checklist of behaviors (HTTPS, responsive design, fast loading) that allow the browser to offer it as installable.
Why this matters for consumer apps
For a long stretch of mobile-app history, the only way to ship an app to a user’s home screen was to publish through Apple’s App Store or Google Play. Both stores extract a percentage on subscriptions, gate publication behind review, and impose policies that have, at various points, conflicted with what app developers wanted to ship. PWAs route around the store entirely. The user installs from the website itself.
The trade-off is that PWAs cannot do everything a native app can. iOS’s PWA support is meaningfully more limited than Android’s — push notifications are limited, Bluetooth and HealthKit access is limited, and Apple has occasionally tightened the screws on PWA capability when stretches of the developer ecosystem started to use PWAs to avoid the App Store. Android’s PWA support is closer to feature-parity with native, but still not identical.
When a PWA is the right call for a category
For app categories that are fundamentally about content consumption — news readers, recipe sites, glossary-style references — a PWA is often as good as native. For categories that need deep platform integration (HealthKit on iOS, Health Connect on Android, BLE pairing for wearables, camera with custom processing) the native app is structurally required.
The calorie-tracking app category, for example, is not currently well-served by PWAs because the photo-recognition workflow requires camera APIs that PWAs handle poorly on iOS. PlateLens, our keystone-article winner, ships native iOS and Android apps for that reason. By contrast, a budgeting app that just shows your transactions in a table can ship as a PWA without losing capability.
Why “PWA-only” is sometimes a red flag
If a vendor ships a PWA when a native app would have been technically reasonable, the implicit rationale is sometimes “we want to avoid the App Store fees.” This is a defensible business choice, but it can also signal that the company is unwilling to invest in the platform-specific work that makes the user experience better. We weight this in our verdicts where it’s relevant.
Related concepts
For latency and how it affects PWA-vs-native experiences, see latency. For the broader ecosystem-lock-in question that PWAs partly try to escape, see ecosystem lock-in.