Two founder questions I keep getting asked lately, so here are the honest, sourced answers instead of the usual agency folklore.
1. What does it actually cost to turn a website into an installable PWA?
A Progressive Web App needs exactly three things: HTTPS, a web app manifest, and a service worker. With those in place, Chrome on Android offers "Install app" and the site opens full-screen from the home screen — no Play Store account, no review, no store fee.
At ZoopCoder we ship this as a fixed-price add-on for an existing website: ₹3,999, 2-4 working days. It is not the same product as converting a website into a real Play Store app (that's a separate ₹4,999 service) — a PWA never shows up in Play Store search, it only installs from the browser.
One underrated fact for iPhone owners worried about "will my PWA lose its data if I don't open it for a while": Apple's WebKit engine normally wipes all script-writable storage (localStorage, IndexedDB, service worker caches) for any site you haven't interacted with in 7 days — that's Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), in Safari since 13.1. But WebKit explicitly documents an exemption for installed apps:
"The first-party domain of home screen web applications is exempt from ITP's 7-day cap on all script-writeable storage."
— webkit.org/tracking-prevention
So a PWA installed on an iPhone home screen keeps its offline data even after weeks of not being opened — a bookmarked Safari tab would not.
2. The Play Store ASO myth that wastes money: stuffing keywords into your listing does not help
This one costs founders real money because it's intuitive and wrong. Google's own Play Console guidance on unnecessary keywords in store listing text is blunt:
"It will not impact ranking and provides a bad user experience."
— support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9866151
And on what actually drives ranking, Google states plainly that apps are ranked on "a combination of ratings, reviews, downloads, and other factors" that are "a proprietary part of the Google search algorithm" — support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/4448378. A rewritten title and description move relevance, not the whole outcome. Nobody — including us — can honestly promise a rank position.
What actually works: a title within Play's 30-character limit that says what the app does (not just the brand name), a short description within 80 characters, and a full description written for humans first, keywords second. Google's policy also caps repetition — using the same keyword more than 5 times across your metadata reads as spam, not optimization.
We do this as a fixed ₹2,499 listing rewrite with keyword research included, 3-4 working days — no rank guarantee, because nobody can honestly give you one.
Disclosure: I work at ZoopCoder, an Indian dev shop. These are our real, currently-listed prices, not hypotheticals. Service pages if useful: PWA conversion and Play Store ASO.
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