A theoretical way to circumvent Android developer verification

I think this means we need to rely on web technologies more. PWAs are looking pretty good on mobile devices these days and you can publish any web app you want with no reviewing authority. The web has a bunch of crazy APIs now that let you build crazy things and for everything else you're a hosted server away somewhere that can run more complex jobs.

I believe devices I own should let me do whatever I want with them and I agree that the verification is BS, but I'll work around it in the ways I can which means building more for the web.

If that ever drops the open pretense (since both traffic and trust authority are largely centralized and thus easily controllable) then I'll only write for self hosted linux boxes.

We as individuals can only do so much. We'd need actual organization and some measure of political power to do anything more since normal people do not care about this.

I thought Brent Simmons did a great job laying out why PWAs don't work: https://inessential.com/2025/10/04/why-netnewswire-is-not-we...

The tl;dr is that a PWA implies an app which is based in the cloud. So suddenly you need a server, and you need to store user data, which means costs and dealing with privacy and security.

That explanation doesn't really make sense to me.

If something could be built as a native app without depending on a central server, it could also be built as a PWA without a central server. You don't need to store user data centrally at all, just because it's a webapp. You can just have the clients use localStorage or IndexedDB or whatever.

You still have to host the static files for the webapp itself, but that can be made very cheap.

Of course, API feature parity between native and web apps is a separate issue. But the argument about server costs doesn't seem like a good one.

Isn't localStorage limited to 5 MB of data?

You need native apps to access specific hardware, and to run some native code. WASM may help but it's limited, too.

Bad news for you, Google happens to have a tight grip on the entire web ecosystem -- browser, search, ads etc.

Sure, but localStorage isn't really ideal for storing large objects anyway, because it forces everything to be stored in one big string-to-string map. It's great for small amounts of data such as user preferences.

There are other APIs that allow you to store binary data directly (which you'll probably want if you're storing large files) and also to use/request larger quotas.

Yeah, better is the filesystem API

IndexedDB API is a bit more liberal in that regard

I read the article, and I'm pretty certain he's talking about a traditional web application. When we speak of PWAs we're thinking of a set of APIs that let a web app behave like a native application. i.e 'installation' + service workers, background sync, IndexDB/FileSystem etc. You could probably make a self-sufficient RSS reader with what's available.

Practically you are going to have a server distribute a native application anyways.

I obviously understand this and mentioned as much indirectly in the post. You can only do so much and the web is still more open than Android is about to be so again, you do what you can.

How many apps rely on specific hardware or native code though? I can only think of my banking apps when using nfc.

Basically every native app has a server behind it to harvest user data nowadays. So I don’t think it’s an argument for why PWAs won’t work.

If the app is made by a company, sure.

It seems to me that, ironically, PWAs are uniquely ill-suited for the type of non-corporate software where distribution outside mainstream channels makes the most sense.

Not the developer. This is all additional complexity and less privacy for the user.

PWAs are at the mercy of Gapple have always been handicapped in just the right places to not be viable vs installed apps. Most people don't even know how to install one.

Yeah but as I understand it Apple has become a lot more progressive on PWAs in the last few years. I’m under the impression theyre viable

This is harmful speculation. Many PWA features are broken in small ways which add up. The caniuse database does not test that a PWA feature meets the spec and there is no better database. Nobody can say that PWAs are "looking good" without such testing.