PWAs are the Future

These are just the ones that spring to mind offhand. I’m sure there have been others; it’s a popular idea. They frequently give up linkability in return for “appiness”: to work offline, be on the home screen, access system APIs, and re-engage users they have required apps be packaged, distributed through stores, and downloaded entirely before being experienced. Instead of clicking a link to access the content you’re looking for, these systems make stores the mediators of applications which in turn mediate and facilitate discovery for content. The hybridzation process generates applications which can no longer live in or with the assumptions of the web. How does one deploy to all of these stores all at once? Can one still keep a fast iteration pace? How does the need to package everything up-front change your assumptions and infrastructure? How does search indexing work? It’s a deep tradeoff that pits fast-iteration and linkability against offline and store discovery. Escaping the Tab: Progressive, Not Hybrid But there is now another way. An evolution has taken place in browsers. Over dinner last night, Frances and I enumerated the attributes of this new class of applications: Responsive: to fit any form factor Connectivity independent: Progressively-enhanced with Service Workers to let them work offline App-like-interactions: Adopt a Shell + Content application model to create appy navigations & interactions Fresh: Transparently always up-to-date thanks to the Service Worker update process Safe: Served via TLS (a Service Worker requirement) to prevent snooping Discoverable: Are identifiable as “applications” thanks to W3C Manifests and Service Worker registration scope allowing search engines to find them Re-engageable: Can access the re-engagement UIs of the OS; e.g. Push Notifications Installable: to the home screen through browser-provided prompts, allowing users to “keep” apps they find most useful without the hassle of an app store Linkable: meaning they’re zero-friction, zero-install, and easy to share. The social power of URLs matters. These apps aren’t packaged and deployed through stores, they’re just websites that took all the right vitamins. They keep the web’s ask-when-you-need-it permission model and add in new capabilities like being top-level in your task switcher, on your home screen, and in your notification tray. Users don’t have to make a heavyweight choice up-front and don’t implicitly sign up for something dangerous just by clicking on a link. Sites that want to send you notifications or be on your home screen have to earn that right over time as you use them more and more. They progressively become “apps”. add to homescreen Critically, these apps can deliver an even better user experience than traditional web apps. Because it’s also possible to build this performance in as progressive enhancement, the tangible improvements make it worth building this way regardless of “appy” intent. Frances called them “Progressive Open Web Apps” and we both came around to just “Progressive Apps”. They existed before, but now they have a name. What Progressive Apps Look Like Taking last year’s Chrome Dev Summit site as an example, we can see the whole flow in action (ht: Paul Kinlan): The site begins life as a regular tab.