PWA Instead of the App Store: Experiences of Replacing a Native iOS App and Technical Limitations

The talk is based on a real-world case: the Russian Agricultural Bank team had to rapidly migrate a brokerage app from native Swift to a PWA after banking apps were blocked in the App Store. We will break down why React was chosen over Angular, Vue, or Svelte, and how native mobile architectural decisions were adapted to the web stack.

A separate section will be dedicated to Safari and WebKit technical constraints that anyone taking this path will inevitably face: aggressive storage eviction, container isolation, the lack of a native install prompt, and flaky deep linking.

Using concrete examples, we will look at workarounds ranging from a deferred deep linking mechanism built on a cookie snapshot at install time to handling screen orientation and restoring form state. The talk will answer the key question: when is a PWA a deliberate, sound choice, and when is it a road to failure where you simply cannot do without native development.