Judah Gabriel starts this post off with the question “Why even put your app in the app stores? Just live on the opened web!” — and I don’t fully disagree, until you think about where your users will come from.

The answer, in a nutshell, is because that’s where the users are. We’ve trained a generation of users to find apps in proprietary app stores, not on the free and open web.

There are many more lessons learned about the process — from creation to submission — but here’s the tldr…

Turning a web app into a Progressive Web App (PWA) and submitting it to 3 app stores requires about a month of work, a few hundred dollars, and lots of red tape.

(We’re planning a deep-dive on PWAs for an upcoming episode of JS Party. Subscribe to be notified.)