A Progressive Web App (PWA) is a website that behaves more like a native app. It can be installed to the home screen, work offline through a service worker, send push notifications on most platforms, and access camera or geolocation through standard browser APIs. Twitter Lite, Starbucks, and Pinterest popularized the pattern in markets where data costs and device storage made native downloads a tougher sell.
PWAs sit awkwardly on iOS, where Apple has historically limited features available outside the App Store. Push notifications arrived on iOS Safari only in 2023, background sync remains restricted, and certain hardware APIs are blocked entirely. Android and desktop browsers are more generous, which makes PWA economics strongest for content-heavy products, internal tools, and emerging markets where a 30 MB download is friction users will not pay.
For product teams weighing a PWA against a native app, the right question is not which technology is “better” but which constraints matter. If discovery through the app store is the growth channel, native still wins. If the audience is already loyal and the goal is to remove friction from installation and updates, a PWA can be both cheaper to build and faster to iterate on, with one codebase serving phone, tablet, and desktop without separate release cycles.