Progressive web applications

1

What do people mean when referring to PWAs?
By referring to web apps as progressive are they trying to say that a particular web page of a website or a collection of pages can be saved for offline viewing ?

2

I don’t think it has anything to with if the pages can be saved offline or not. I found this explanation on medium which says it best I think.

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are web applications that are regular web pages or websites, but can appear to the user like traditional applications or native mobile applications . The application type attempts to combine features offered by most modern browsers with the benefits of a mobile experience

3

Progressive web apps are reliable (they should work offline), fast (the code is stored in the users device instead of downloading every time from the web) and engaging (can have its icon on the user’s home screen and is shown without the browser).

Google has a big course on it, read more here:

https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/

2 Likes
5

iOS still don’t support push notifications on PWA’s :frowning:

6

When you are using Instagram on Google Chrome it will ask you to add the shortcut icon to your mobile front screen. This is one of the characteristic of PWA. Its a cross platform which can work on any platform Windows, Mac, Android, iOS etc… Try to search “How to create Progressive Web App” - You will get many tutorials. Try to implement those & host it on Heroku or Firebase. When you visit that link you will get some pop-up message to add the app to your screen…
Happy Coding

8

Progressive Web Apps are web applications that load like usual websites but with such options as working offline, push notifications and device hardware access. As a rule, these features are applied only to native mobile apps. Still, at the moment PWAs can boast these as well, as they possess the best features of both the web and mobile apps.

9

A Progressive Web app is an application that is designed with certain additional features such as service worker and manifest.json file on top of HTML, JS and CSS. These extra features would give the web application the ability to run offline.