Chavah puts one PWA in three app stores instead of writing three native apps

Chavah Messianic Radio was a free, Pandora-like web player for Messianic Jewish music, and its users had been asking its developer the same question for years: 'Is there an app for Chavah? I don't see it in the store.' He had answered that the website worked fine on a phone — until he admitted that was only partly true. Real web apps were crippled on mobile, above all by iOS Safari, which would not let audio keep playing when the app was backgrounded or the screen was off.

His decision was not to write native apps for three platforms but to treat the web app itself as the product and put it in the stores. Chavah became a Progressive Web App, then was wrapped for each store with the least native code possible: for Windows, PWABuilder generated the .appx package directly from the URL; for Google Play, a generated wrapper project produced the Android package; for iOS, Cordova plugins faked the native behaviors Apple would not give web apps, and a rented $25/month Mac-in-the-cloud ran Xcode without buying a Mac.

The process was a running comparison of the three stores' barriers — costs, registration, packaging, review — and the developer scored each one. Google charged a one-time $25 fee and approved within minutes; Microsoft charged nothing and did a real review in days; Apple charged $99 a year (waived for his non-profit), demanded Dun & Bradstreet verification that took about a week, and forced the Cordova detour. His verdict: the stores' real gatekeepers were Apple's perverse incentive to keep the web from becoming an app platform.

Chavah ended up listed in all three stores, and the write-up of the process became a canonical 2018 document of the state of PWAs in app stores: 528 points and 406 comments on Hacker News, where readers argued about whether web apps deserved first-class mobile treatment and the author reported that daily sign-ups had tripled from about five before the store listings to about fifteen after.