Standalone App vs PWA w/Push Notifications
I'm seeing this question pop up a lot now that FC released their official PWA feature and there are a couple devs selling a push notification add on. James William Elrod what would you say the benefits are of going doing a standalone app (like this) over PWA with push notifications?
Honestly, the push add-ons do work, so the old argument that "PWAs can't send notifications" just isn't true anymore. But notifications are only a tiny piece of the puzzle. The real difference comes down to the gap between an installed web page and a true, compiled native app experience.
A PWA is ultimately still a website running inside a browser shell, which means standard web scrolling, rendering delays, and browser limits. A standalone app gives your community real native React components for the everyday features—the feed, spaces, courses, messaging, and profiles. You get actual 60fps scrolling, instant touch feedback, native haptics, and smooth transitions that a mobile web browser just can't match.
Beyond how it feels, there’s the credibility and access factor. Being searchable on the Apple App Store and Google Play carries huge authority, especially for paid communities. Telling a new member to search your name in the App Store lands completely differently than sending a link and walking them through a multi-step process to save a web shortcut to their home screen. On iOS especially, web push tokens silently break if a user ever clears their browser data or deletes the web icon, whereas native device tokens re-register automatically on login.
Going native also doesn't mean giving up your site's custom functionality. The daily community touchpoints run on pure native code, while complex custom setups—like WooCommerce checkouts, event bookings, or custom landing pages—open logged-in right inside a themed WebView inside the app (basically a PWA fallback for all the non-standard stuff). You get high-performance native screens for 90% of what members do, without losing the long-tail flexibility of your site.
Add in offline feed caching, FaceID/TouchID login, deep-linking that opens exact app screens instead of browser tabs, and real admin controls like version updates and maintenance gates, and it’s just a totally different operational asset.
In the past least for us, the decision between a PWA and a native app came down to cost and complexity—going native meant fighting store approvals and getting locked into crazy monthly SaaS fees for software you don't even own. Our whole goal at Two Birds Code is to completely break that mold. Between an affordable managed service that handles the store deployment for you and a full-source dev bundle for people who want total code ownership without vendor lock-in, going native isn't a massive financial hurdle anymore—you get the benefits of a real app right out of the gate.
James William Elrod this does make sense. The only exceptions I see are:
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Most of what you mention is technically sound but the end user wouldn't experience much of a difference (especially load time if you have a good server)
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Custom snippets and 3rd party plugins that extend FC capabilities won't work with an app (My main struggle point)
Chris
On the first one: the PWA is free, so I would just try it. Genuinely. If you load your site as a PWA next to a native app and don't feel the difference, the PWA is all you need and you should keep your money. A good server closes the load-time gap, but it can't change how a web page in a wrapper feels under your thumb — scroll physics, touch response, transitions. That's a rendering difference, not a bandwidth one. Whether that matters depends entirely on who you're serving. For a D&D group, a rec-league team, or a hobby club, a PWA is more than enough. If you're marketing to paying customers, go ask an average person how to install a PWA on their iPhone versus how to install an app. That gap — discovery, install friction, credibility — is the real one, more than the framerate.
Our app is native for the core social experience — feed, spaces, courses, profiles, messaging. etc. Everything else falls back to a themed, logged-in WebView, so most snippets and third-party plugins that live on their own pages still work. Where you'll hit friction is if a snippet or plugin changes how FC itself handles those core features — reshapes the feed, alters the API responses, injects custom UI into a post — because the native screens don't render your PHP. That needs a custom module or custom dev. So the honest question is: how far outside stock FC behaviour are your customizations? If they're deep in the core experience, a PWA is genuinely the better fit today. If they're mostly bolted-on pages and integrations, the app handles them.
In practice most communities I've seen care more about the community than the snippets, and the customizations tend to be additive rather than structural — but that's for you to judge about yours. The only real answer is knowing your community and where you are with it: the PWA is a great start, and for a business it's a fine first step.
James William Elrod greatly appreciated as always!
James William Elrod I'll add that the app experience is a lot more polished. To your point, though PWA works, it's still a browser experience. Guess it's good to have options.