What happened to Progressive Web Apps?

Coffee Lounge
#1

A couple of years ago Progressive Web Apps were a big hype, solving so many problems related to configuring for Android & Apple devices & bypassing the proprietary/mandatory Stores regulations to publically distribute an App.

Supposedly a perfect Category for Wappler projects and Developer Demos, Tutorials, Showcases, Forum discussions.

WHAT HAPPENED in 2021-2022 regarding Wappler focuses & experienced Developers pumping out Progressive Web Apps?

These forums from what I can see Searching the Posts don’t reflect Developers talking about their PWA projects. Random questions out of the blue every few months but no dedicated Category, no significant feedback. Latest I see is a question that @ben answers with a reference to his 2 year old GitHub PWA Starter Template

Aside from that very helpful reference – the subject of Progressive Web Apps tutorials, Wappler PWA tutorials, platform enhancements for PWA development, Developers Talking About PWA projects they’ve completed seems like walking through a deserted village and wondering why the town died here on Wappler.

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#2

I’m hoping and guessing there will be a lot more interest and discussion on PWAs and other mobile development in the near future with all of Wappler’s mobile app related updates recently and possibly upcoming.

I can only speak for myself and I serve a small market in the US; our clients haven’t been asking much about apps over the last year or two and I’ve never had a single customer ask for a PWA by name or description.

With Android and iOS supporting web clip type apps (with no huge success that I know of), I don’t know what to think of PWAs future outside of tech circles knowing and leveraging the tech.

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#3

I think one massive factor of PWA is Apple they have held out on advancing it for years now they still don’t even have push notifications which are supposedly coming in 2023 but even then google is miles ahead in PWA.

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#4

Thank you for posting the update about 2023! It’ll be here before we know it, hopefully! Here’s the full announcement if anyone else wants to dive in: https://webkit.org/blog/12945/meet-web-push/

Importantly:

As long as you’ve coded your web application to the standards ... You don’t need to join the Apple Developer Program to send Web Push notifications.

Based on the poor reliability/deliverability of Android push notifications, if Apple pulls through on the promise of reliability (see statement re APN/reliability at 1:40 in this video https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10098/), then I’d say this is still a huge deal for PWAs in my market.

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#5

Well the PWA support is slowly progressing thanks to Apple… but bit by bit it is getting there

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#6

Well, NO, I can believe that. Most corporate clients are never going to ask about a PWA or Progressive Web App by name. Most Corporate clients just know they want an App of some sort or a “website”.

Why I brought up this topic today is that I was hearing about a German company whose new client wanted a campaign of notifications to all Invitees who responded to a QR code they captured on their phones from a brochure or sheet of paper left in their pharmacies.

The client just knew they wanted the Opt-ins to get a daily “notification” on their smartphones until the marketing campaign expired in March 2023.

So the German company working to satisfy this client contacted a team of young “app” developers and gave their specs & wanted to know developer reccommendations.

Developers now have pitched an Android phone app and an Iphone app to do the same thing. Must be installed on subscribers phones and will have to pass the Google & Apple regs to be included in the Stores.

To me, because they will only have a few hundred subscribers, the notifications and audience are always private, the whole campaign only lasts maybe 60 days, this would have been simpler as a PWA offered at an initial Login and Form website.

And, yes, the public is pretty well sated on APPS, in general, and particularly apps that have to be accessed via a Google or Apple Store.

I posted here to see what You Folks are DOING and Thinking these days.

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#7

PWA solutions have stalled due to lack of support for notifications on iPhones. Also, they have very limited access to a phone’s features (ie.- camera, map gps, gyro, etc.). PWA apps seemed like a perfect solution to many needs that can available on android, apple and web. New visual UI/UX front end tools like Flutterflow ease the development of cross platform apps from a single base code. This has been my recent go-to for no code mobile development. I am STILL evaluating Wappler for the web component ( admin pages, Saas, landing pages) - currently using Wordpress. I would welcome any alternative recommendations.

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#8

That’s what I meant by saying “PWAs by name or description,”; in other words I think we see eye to eye here :slight_smile:

We have a MacStadium mini (2018 model) for sending iMessages (therefore reliability is good). The AppleScript powering the thing takes approximately 2 seconds per message during peak sending, which is a problem that wouldn’t be solved with a faster machine.

For all other purposes where an SMS or email would work, we use Twilio/Mailgun to keep in touch. I can’t wait for real PWA notifications and have a use case just waiting for them to get here.

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#9

flutterflow seemed promising to me, but being locked in to firebase was awful. I’m sure it’s a great product but then you have to add to your stack to integrate with other non-firebase related projects, which we do often. So it was a no go for me. If they add sql support or even airtable I’ll look at it again.

After initially being frustrated with wappler, i tried 14 other solutions. Wappler was the best choice. While I don’t always agree with how it does things, for us it beat all other no/low code solutions.

As for PWA, if someone wants an actual app i the app store we just explain the difference in price, maintenance. there are also options to package nodejs apps for the app stores. Never done it and don’t know what apple’s likelihood of denying them is.

Also find it interesting that initially Steve Jobs wanted the iphone to use html based apps, not locked into any one vendor. I think his vision will come to fruition eventually. I know iOS 15.4 ad better support for pwa.

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#10

Could you not use the Web Push API in a PWA …?

#11

Without iOS Safari support, currently web push api methods leave us needing these workarounds. Can’t wait for whatever version of 16.x unlocks this feature for iPhones.

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