Unpopular opinion:

I often hear that an advantage of PWAs is that porting them to desktop / mobile requires little or none effort. IMO desktop and mobile apps fundamentally differ in the way we use them, so that building 2 versions of an application often seems easier to me.

agree

It's one of "those" slogans... like the bullshit they tell you when you learn OOP first time 😀

if you keep things properly decoupled tho, the frontend logics can be independent from the frontend rendering part, so porting an app becomes a rewiring a new rendering layer to an existent underlying logics.

@thatsnotnice Decoupling the front-end logic and using it with different rendering models such as the web and React Native would also be my approach.

It’s easier to maintain one codebase than 3 or 4 depending on the different platforms you’ll need to support.

@smtlk You can still share a codebase with different endpoints. See above comments.

People port PWAs to mobile apps? Why? And how is it easier to port PWAs than normal web apps? Being PWAs doesn't make them immune to bad code architecture.

I don't know where you heard that, but that doesn't make any sense.

@shellbug By "porting" I mean targeting phones and desktop at the same time with a single PWA. Mobile and desktop interfaces usually differ quite a lot so that changing some content dynamically and using media queries doesn't do the trick most of the time.

The myth that convergence should mean one codebase with one interface running everywhere is still alive and well. Most people want an interface tailored to their device, not one which is almost good enough everywhere. Decouple the interface from the functionality and you have a nice hybrid that can please more people more often.

@SteveWinfield you’d still have two different codebases, one for web and one for native.
Its almost the same idea however the big difference being that react native builds into native apps while ionic renders inside a web view
Its still likely that when the view changes you will have to make those changes in two places.

@powerfulparadox good luck finding the budget for building separate UIs for each individual device and good luck maintaining that all while being pushed to release updates on all UIs simultaneously

@smtlk Using both a web and a native view doesn't necessarily mean that you got to maintain different codebases since it all depends on your level of abstraction. Surely, you'll have to make changes in two places if the thing you'd like to change isn't abstracted away. Nonetheless, that'd also be the case in a PWA because an ideal application would adapt its interface depending on the device: The whole structure, texts, forms, etc. is different.