Re: Fixing a problem that no longer exists?
> There's no reason to believe PWAs will survive.
Actually, this isn't the first time Google have done this. Chrome Apps but those were locked to their store and exposed a number of Chrome specific APIs because web standard APIs at the time had some shortcomings, like being able to obtain unlimited storage. I wrote a substantial Chrome app for annotating speech, only to have Google make the entire platform redundant.
While that might seem that Google could just axe PWAs too, PWAs are not a Google thing, it's a web-standards thing - and lots of the key parts of these new standards are already deployed widely. Notifications, for example. All depend on the background JavaScript code called a service worker, and now you'd be hard pushed to find a popular site that doesn't use this.
The 'progressive' part of PWA means an app that progressively takes advantage of any exposed modern features. There isn't any difference between a Javascript web app and a PWA.
If I have a criticism of Google, they retired Chrome apps two years before they introduced the same basic feature for regular web-standard apps, and that sucks.
We should applaud PWAs. One-click near instant installs, inherent cross-platform compatibility, and inherent sandboxed security. They wont do everything you have a native app, but most of the apps we run for things are well within scope. The Chrome PWA proposition is really just a convenient wrapper around conventional web apps, letting you launch them directly from your OS without loading a browser bookmark. Where's the problem?