PWA apps, or Progressive Web Apps, are really handy to have an native app like experience with web apps that support it. I recently got a new Mac and for the life of me could not get pwa apps to work. The browser showed it being installed and acted like it was successful, but when you go to open it from the website it would not work.
I tried installing a PWA on multiple browsers, and with multiple different PWA web apps, all with the same issue. Normally when you install a PWA app, it puts it in the Applications folder of your user's home folder, but I was not seeing it there. I thought it was a permissions issue, where the browser didn't have permissions to install it on my system. I knew more recent versions of Mac OS added a lot more permissions around apps making OS changes without permission. But I wasn't prompted that the browser needed permission to install it, nor did it show a missing permission for the browser in my privacy and security settings. After endless research I concluded it was a bug in Mac OS 15.
Next, I upgraded my Mac to Mac OS 26. And to my dismay, that didn't solve it either. Back to the drawing board I went in search for what would prevent PWAs from being installed. Finally I found something. Something I thought was impossible.
Solution: For whatever reason, the Applications folder of my user's home folder, didn't have permission for my user to Read/Write. I'm baffled at how this could happen. But at any rate, once giving my user permission to Read/Write in my own user folder, reinstalling the PWA worked perfectly.