PWAs get pitched as a universal replacement for native apps and, separately, dismissed as a gimmick that never works properly — the honest answer sits between those two extremes.
What a well-built PWA actually offers
Installability without an app-store review process, offline functionality through service workers, push notifications on most platforms, and — critically — a single codebase shared with the web version of the product. For content-focused apps, internal business tools, or products where app-store distribution isn’t the priority, this is a genuinely strong fit.
Where the gap with native is real, not just perception
Deep platform integration (certain hardware APIs, background processing limits, some payment flows) still favors native, and PWA support on iOS specifically has historically lagged behind Android in ways that matter for some features. Performance for complex, animation-heavy interfaces also still tends to favor native.
A genuinely good fit
Internal tools, content and media apps, e-commerce experiences where a lighter installation barrier matters more than deep platform features, and products where the web version already exists and a PWA is a relatively small additional investment on top of it.
The honest evaluation
List the specific platform features the app actually needs, then check whether a PWA genuinely supports all of them today — not in theory, but on the actual devices your users have. If the list comes back clean, a PWA is often the lower-cost, easier-to-maintain option. If it doesn’t, that gap is worth knowing before committing, not after.