Progressive Web Apps and our regressive approach | Christian Heilmann

Why We Create Progressive Web Apps: A Conversation with Jeremy Keith

This is a really nice write-up by Sydney of the chat we had on her podcast.

Decoded: The When, Why, and Why Not of Progressive Web Apps

I really enjoyed talking to Sydney Lai about progressive web apps, resilient web design, and all my other hobby horses.

Alas, there’s no transcript and I can’t find a direct link to the RSS feed or the individual audio file on the podcast website so it’s not huffduffable.

For developers, Apple’s Safari is crap and outdated – Perry Sun | Blog

Apple dragged their feet in adding support for PWAs in Safari, and when they finally did, limited the capabilities of a PWA so that native-like app functionality wouldn’t be possible, like notifications or a home screen icon shortcut – to name just a few of the many restrictions imposed by Apple.

But it goes beyond that. On iOS, the only web rendering engine allowed is Apple’s own WebKit, which runs Safari. Third-party iOS browsers such as Chrome can only use WebKit, not their own engines (as would be permitted in Windows, Android, or macOS). And it’s WebKit that governs PWA capabilities.

Safari is very good web browser, delivering fast performance and solid privacy features.

But at the same time, the lack of support for key web technologies and APIs has been both perplexing and annoying at the same time.

The enormous popularity of iOS makes it all the more annoying that Apple continues to hold back developers from being able to create great experiences over the web that work across all platforms.

Works offline

How do we tell our visitors our sites work offline? How do we tell our visitors that they don’t need an app because it’s no more capable than the URL they’re on right now?

Remy expands on his call for ideas on branding websites that work offline with a universal symbol, along the lines of what we had with RSS.

What I’d personally like to see as an outcome: some simple iconography that I can use on my own site and other projects that can offer ambient badging to reassure my visitor that the URL they’re visiting will work offline.

Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud

The cloud gives us collaboration, but old-fashioned apps give us ownership. Can’t we have the best of both worlds?

We would like both the convenient cross-device access and real-time collaboration provided by cloud apps, and also the personal ownership of your own data embodied by “old-fashioned” software.

This is a very in-depth look at the mindset and the challenges involved in building truly local-first software—something that Tantek has also been thinking about.