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Seriously, though. What is a progressive web app?

Amberley Romo on August 06, 2018

“unofficial” community logo for PWA I’ve been familiar with the “progressive web app” (PWA) concept for a while now. But there’s always been an it...
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Stephen Chiang

I love the PWA concept and it's a great way for smaller web apps to grab some of the share for the user's time without having to compete in an app market. Because it is progressive, it is supposed to work no matter what browser is used, but the challenge or frustrating part is that you can't control which browser the user is on so the level and depth of PWA support is not predictable. My personal portfolio is a PWA (just for fun) and doesn't tap into any native mobile features like camera, but the offline access and caching alone is pretty awesome. Nice article and well written!

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Carlos Eduardo

I could't fail to notice that one of the links quoted will be written in the future!! Okay, not exactly. The article "Yes, That Web Project Should Be a PWA" wasn't written in 2018, it was written in 2017. There is a quote in the body of your aticle and in the timeline.

Beside that, great great article.

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Amberley Romo

Nice catch -- updated!

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Angel Daniel Munoz Gonzalez

Great article!

I would just add that if you are into Windows Development, PWA's Have access to WinRT API (all native stuff from windows devices) if you publish them as an application in the windows store!

you only need to create a project in VS2017 select the PWA template, open the manifest file, point your App to your already published PWA and that's it.

while not many websites need WinRT API access, I think it should be possible for games built with something like Phaser 3 to use the PWA off-line capabilities or even push notifications.

If you are into the windows stuff perhaps access to the windows store either for exposure or as a mechanism to distribute content for micro-transsactions

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Owlypixel

It seems like Microsoft wants to make PWAs first-class citizens on Windows. As they announced recently, PWAs there have really tasty features like:

  • The ability to set the dark and light mode. Having access to the API to know whether the color is dark or light gives your app the ability to sort-of blend in🕵️.
  • Web standard for sharing. Your web app can be shared to target, which is actually a big deal.
  • System media controls. You can control certain aspects of your app like volume from the keyboard, just like a native app.
  • Hardware and file system access is a really significant feature too.

Besides, the Dev Center gives you some pretty cool analytics about your web app and integration with the Feedback Hub is nice too.

All this really makes me want to try it out sometime.

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Angel Daniel Munoz Gonzalez

Yeah! there are a couple UWP apps that I have wrote about here on dev.to that I'd like to port into a PWA for the Windows Store, I have a proof of concept for a grocery todo list for my wife and I, but I'd like to do something more insightful like the system media controls and file system access

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Finnian Anderson
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Nick Taylor

Great writeup Amberley. I must admit, that aside from my blog, which uses Gatsby and comes kinda PWA out of the box, I have not really had a chance still to build a PWA. Gonna Bookmark this one. 😉

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Amberley Romo

Thanks Nick! With Gatsby it does come out of the box (sort of). Did you include the gatsby-plugin-offline and gatsby-plugin-manifest? Just updated the PWA page on the v2 docs next.gatsbyjs.org/docs/progressive...

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Nick Taylor

I went with a template a while back that uses an older version of Gatsby, but I do have the offline plugin installed, github.com/nickytonline/iamdevelop.... No manifest plugin though. Is that a newer plugin or I guess I'm just missing it? 🙃

I need to upgrade my blog to the latest and greatest as there have been many improvements since the version I'm using.

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Nick Taylor

Upgraded my starter theme for gatsby and added the manifest plugin (already had offline). Works great!

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Andrew Tanner 🇪🇺

Thanks for the summary. I've been meaning to get my hands dirty with PWA's (as well as everything else) so this is a great reference for when I get around to it.

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Jason Steinhauser

I ❤ consolidated history posts like this. Fantastic work, and this is a resource I will keep bookmarked!

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Danny de Vries

Really liked this interview with Matt Gaunt on 'Designer vs Developer' where they talk about some difference between the web, PWA's and native.
youtube.com/watch?v=x2o-oy0o5Mo