Glossary
PWA (progressive web app)
A progressive web app (PWA) is a website engineered to behave like an installed app: it runs on the browser engine, caches itself through a service worker, and can be added to the home screen with its own icon and window. For an IT team it's the cheapest way to get an internal tool onto every phone, and the hardest one to manage, because no store and no MDM install command is involved.
How it works
A service worker does the heavy lifting. It's a JavaScript file the browser keeps alive outside any tab, sitting between the app and the network, able to intercept requests and serve them from a local cache. That's what gives a PWA offline screens, instant reloads and background sync. It only registers over HTTPS, and only for the URL scope it was served from.
The second piece is the web app manifest, a small JSON file declaring name, icons, start_url, theme color and display: standalone, which is what removes the browser chrome. Chrome on Android turns an install into a WebAPK signed by Play services, so the app shows up in the launcher and the app list like a normal entry. On iOS and iPadOS, Safari's Add to Home Screen does the same visually, and since iOS 16.4 in March 2023 a home-screen web app can receive web push notifications and show a badge. Apple briefly removed home-screen web apps in the EU with iOS 17.4 in early 2024 and reversed that decision weeks later.
What a PWA still can't do on iOS is the part that matters to you. There's no MDM command to install one: the user has to add it by hand, or you push a web clip through a configuration profile on a supervised device, which places the icon for them. Push works, but only once the app is on the home screen. Background execution is tightly capped, Safari exposes no Web Bluetooth or Web NFC, there's no per-app VPN, no managed app configuration, and your inventory report will never list the PWA as an app with a version number. On Android the gap is narrower, though a managed bookmark or a forced install through Chrome policy is still not the same as a managed app.
Why it matters for a fleet
One codebase, no store review, a fix live in ten minutes. For a dashboard, a form, a ticket queue or an intranet tool, that economy is hard to argue with, and the update problem disappears because there's no version in the field to chase.
The honest verdict: a PWA is a good answer for read-mostly internal tools and for shared screens, and a poor answer when you need hardware access, guaranteed offline behavior, attested device identity, network isolation or proof of who installed what. If a regulator or an auditor will ask which version of the app ran on which device, package it natively. Several teams ship both and accept the duplication.
How Appaloosa handles it
Appaloosa manages what the operating systems let a management server manage: public apps through Managed Google Play and Apple VPP, and your private APK and IPA builds, uploaded, versioned and assigned per group. A PWA isn't one of those, so treat it as a destination rather than a package. Kiosk mode can lock a shared tablet to a single web tool, which is where PWAs earn their place in a fleet, and anything needing inventory or app-level policy belongs in the enterprise app store as a native build.
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