Ask HN: Thoughts on PWA?

7 points·valehelle··7 comments

To people who have experience in using PWA, what is your opinion on it? Can it replace apps? What about the user behaviour, Do people add your PWA to their home screen?, especially iOS users since they have to do it manually?

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This article might be helpful.

https://medium.com/@firt/progressive-web-apps-on-ios-are-her...

A PWA can be a good supplement to an existing application, but only in certain contexts could it fully replace.

We (mostly my colleague) implemented one for a mapping application that was previously browser based online-only.

It allowed you to download what you saw on screen, +/- a series of zoom levels. It also brought a lite functionality of the main app over.

People were using it for reference when they went out into the field. We had people adding it to their homescreen, as it was more accessible to them that way, but we had to have a little guide on how to do so.

Most of our users are older folk in government posts, so stuff like that needs a help guide in our context.

PWAs make a lot of sense.

But users go to the app store when they want an app so some consumer education/push is still required.

Twitters PWA is awesome and i assume its been pretty successful for them.

I made one for a client on IOS. It has location / camera access and service workers work well. Biggest limitation is notifications are not possible and cache size can only be 50mb i think?

I don't even consider pwa works for ios at all

The support is still not there

Even big player like twitter doesn't put their twitter lite on appstore

As for android just go for it

What do iOS users have to do manually?

Check for notifications, as there is no web push for Safari (or other browsers) on iOS.

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