I mostly use Webapps (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.tobykurien.webapps/) for access to socials and have quick links to services where I don’t want to login every time. Don’t know if there’s an alternative way to do this beside use apps like Insular or other App Isolation like, don’t even know why browser don’t do this by create profiles or container. I mean apps are just web container most of the time, and I know the reason why service provider want let you just use their app, but what’s the browser excuse? What’s your approach to this considering that Webapps application is outdated?
You can set up websites to run as standalone apps by adding them to your Home Screen from the browser.
How native an experience you will get with that is dependent on the developer and the work they put in when it comes to caching, implementation of web workers, push notifications, meta data, etc.
I’m not particularly happy with the situation of PWAs on Android. Firefox, my browser of choice, is like 10 years behind in their implementation.
The only browser that integrates them nicely as a native app is the official Chrome browser (privacy nightmare) which does this by generating an APK on google servers and installing it (privacy nightmare^(2)).
Hopefully there will be a local solution for this in a FOSS privacy-respecting browser eventually.
I’m sorry but that not at all how PWAs work at all. PWAs are just websites. There is no APK. At its core it is a bookmark to a website without the browser UI.
Chrome definitely offers a lot more APIs than other browsers to allow a website to interface with a phone a lot better. Often outside of the standards the web has set. That can make browsers that follow the standards feel behind (Firefox) and really emphasizes browsers that purposely hinder their browser to incentivize native apps (IOS Safari).
Oh there is a APK, when using Chrome or Samsung Internet (installed via Samsung Store). The store is generating and signing the APK. Only with such a signed APK OS Level functions will work. A good example is the share_target functionality. If this is enabled by the PWA and installed as APK, you can share text and links with the PWA. The same applies for PWAs on the Desktop, for example with Edge on Windows.
If you use the same PWA with Firefox or Samsung Internet installed from Play Store, it can only add a shortcut on the home screen, without share_target functionality.
Additionally some service worker functionality is very basic on some browsers. On one hand this is bad for functionality, but good for privacy. Assume a PWA uses a background sync service for example. This can exchange a lot data and sync it with any target in the web, without user consent. This is only a small part where service workers do not respect users privacy.
If you look at that we come in fast steps to this insane and total crazy manifest v3 webextensions. They are completely privacy nightmare at least how Chromium designed them. The Mozilla implementation is a lot better, but incompatible to Chromium.
Welcome to the ugly world of new web technologies.