What is the current take on publishing PWAs to app stores? As I understand it, doing it on Google Play is relatively straight forward, but on Apple App Store / iOS things seem different. I know PWA builder claim to have a solution for it but it is also listed as experimental.
I am mainly refering to if things have changed after the no PWA in EU scare.
For reference
https://www.reddit.com/r/PWA/comments/1934oyf/repackaged_pwa_on_ios_store/
Videos
While it is possible in both cases, publishing a PWA on the Apple Store is an incredible difficult journey, because Apple engineers try to build obstacles all the way long. This is by decision as Apple is making profits from its app store and PWAs would indeed subtract some of these gains. This is also the reason why Safari, as browser, is incredibly behind the other competitors in supporting PWAs APIs (PUSH API for example, as they promote their Apple Push Notification Service (APNs)).
Long story short, I would concentrate on Google Play Store, where you can publish a PWA after having wrapped it into a Trusted Web Activity (TWA), allowing Chrome (v72 or later) to run a website in fullscreen mode without a browser toolbar within an APK (Android Package). You can find further details in this tutorial to publish a PWA on the play store.
UPDATE Thanks to PWABuilder publishing to appStore became much easier. Here is a blog article describing this step.
You could use Capacitor to create a native App.
It is newer than Cordova.
Here you can see the Stackoverflow TagTrend: Capacitor vs Cordova
... or wait some month. Sooner or later you will get PWAs into the Apple Store. I don't think they are able to stop this process.
Hey all, long time PWA believer here. So much so, that we just built an app store just for PWAs. It's called Store.app.
Not trying to promote anything, as we just launched in "developer beta," but was hoping to start a convo with the community to gather feedback on how we can better serve web devs and help to bring PWAs mainstream.
Our goal is to provide web developers with the benefits that native app devs have had for years, namely: 1) 3rd party validation; 2) quality feedback loops from user reviews, and most importantly, 3) new organic users. We also plan to release open source documentation, design standards, and more.
Again, we believe PWAs are the future and we welcome any feedback!