Listening to legend cashu developer nostr:npub12rv5lskctqxxs2c8rf2zlzc7xx3qpvzs3w4etgemauy9thegr43sf485vg on Citadel Dispatch with nostr:npub1qny3tkh0acurzla8x3zy4nhrjz5zd8l9sy9jys09umwng00manysew95gx, talking about cashu.me and PWAs and this triggered some thoughts.

Needless to say PWAs are an effective way of distributing applications permissionlessly, especially on iOS, but there's a few drawbacks I wanted to mention.

- Hard to install: the fact that you have multiple steps that need explanation (go to the hamburger menu, tap on install, but on iOS use Share...). As insignificant as this sounds, it's a major UX hurdle for users and why I think PWAs are not more widespread. Apple and Google know this very well.

- Harder to discover: though not needing an app store is an upside, it hurts discoverability, especially on app stores with a social layer like nostr:npub10r8xl2njyepcw2zwv3a6dyufj4e4ajx86hz6v4ehu4gnpupxxp7stjt2p8

- Reliance on domain names: Not a huge problem but definitely not as sovereign as private keys

- Hard to verify releases: since you pull data and UI from a website, it's unclear when you have upgraded, impractical to sign and next to impossible to audit a particular release. Websites typically perform lots of deployments every day

I have plans for nostr:npub10r8xl2njyepcw2zwv3a6dyufj4e4ajx86hz6v4ehu4gnpupxxp7stjt2p8 itself to become a PWA to distribute PWAs, too, and looking forward to find out how to minimize these problems without losing the freedom the web provides.