iOS and Android Have Different Goals for PWAs: The Real Difference Beyond Support or No Support

This is a reprint from my tips blog. You can find the original article here: [ https://tips.ojapp.app/en/ios-android-pwa-goal-difference-3/ ] Android vs. iPhone: Different Goals for PWAs When people talk about PWAs, the explanation often sounds like this: Android supports PWAs. iPhone does not support PWAs very well. If you only look at the PWA specifications, this explanation is easy to understand. Android Chrome supports manifest.json, Service Worker, installation, notifications, shortcuts, and many other PWA features quite strongly. iPhone Safari, on the other hand, does not behave the same way as Android. But after testing PWAs on both iPhone and Android many times, I started to see the difference in another way. More accurately, Android and iPhone have different goals for PWAs. That is the biggest difference I noticed while testing repeatedly. Android tries to turn web pages into apps Android PWAs are clearly designed in the direction of making web pages feel closer to native apps. The idea is to take a website opened in the browser and move it toward a native-app-like experience. This direction is very strong on Android. That is why many PWA-related features are well supported. manifest.json Service Worker Push notifications Install Prompt Shortcuts theme_color background_color maskable icons display modes orientation Of course, it is not perfect. Manifest cache can be stubborn, multiple PWAs on the same domain can become confusing, and real-device testing can still create plenty of traps. Even so, when you build according to the PWA specification, Android usually responds in a fairly straightforward way. For example, if you set display: fullscreen , the app feels much more full-screen. theme_color is often reflected in the toolbar color. orientation also works quite strongly on Android. In other words, for Android, a PWA is an app made from the Web . iPhone starts from the experience of placing web pages on the home screen iPhone is different. Even before the