Ask HN: State of PWA?

12 points·jstummbillig··3 comments

You are looking to bring a web app (think gmail) to the phone, including installation/icon, notifications, maybe some offline/cache capabilities, to both iOS and Android.

What is your experience doing that as a PWA over going native? Does it work? What are the pitfalls?

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PWAs continue to expand and there are new features constantly being added. You can even customize the full menu overlays now to replace tools like Electron, but the biggest pitfall is there still isn't an API to pass messages between a native app and a web app.

Once that is done I think most of the Electron and similar bloat will go away and hopefully Firefox will jump on board to have at least a few options to use as the web app backend.

> there still isn't an API to pass messages between a native app and a web app

What do you mean?

How would this work the same every platform that the web targets (many OS)?

Imagine you want to create a Rust or Go backend for a web app that runs locally so you can manage OS components. Maybe a graphical package manager. There isn't an easy solution for this currently to communicate with a native app without using a browser extension with Native Messaging API. It something like this gets implemented then it would eliminate the need for Electron and similar apps as you could use whatever browser your OS uses for web apps.

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