Given the annoyance the author expresses at the difficultly in getting the app into the Google and Apple app stores, I'm surprised they didn't just make a webapp instead. Since they were already using React, that would seem pretty natural. This app doesn't use any mobile-specific features, so it seems like doing a webapp would fit well.
It's mostly psychology. People have been wired to equate apps = app store. Trying to educate users to simply click "Install this to homescreen", while seemingly simple, seems like a huge gulf for most people. I'd imagine that app installs for app-store variants to PWAs is 100:1.
I was thinking exactly the same. And if you “add to Home Screen” on iOS you even just get a tile.
The only thing I haven’t figured out yet is that sometimes opening sites which are added to Home Screen yields a dedicated browser and sometimes it just opens a new tab in safari. This happens to hacker news as well resulting in having many open tabs at the end of the day.
Ok. So then I would need to proxy hacker news and mitm with my own certs and add the header or ask dang to get that tag added. Not sure which one is more feasible.
It sounds like they mostly just wanted to learn a bit about mobile development.
And also, it's probably easier to sell something like this as an "app" than as a web site (ironically, I guess, thanks to those app stores that the poster is complaining about).
