What's the state of PWA - Progressive Web Application
I'm leading a group of college students to build a visualization applications for a Solar panels system.
- A data API already exists
- We need to build it for a Kiosk. So we only need to support a single platform
- Users need to interact with the app in the Kiosk
- We have experience building native mobile apps
- We're considering PWA but we don't have much experience with it.
We're trying to choose between Android and PWA. What are you thoughts? Is PWA still a `thing` or the industry has moved on to something else? Thanks.
2 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 10.7 ms ] threadGoogle has shown some investment in PWAs on Android with the development of "WebAPKs", a way to manage the installation of progressive web apps through the Play store.
However, this mechanism is not entirely public: Chrome for Android will create a WebAPK when asked to add a PWA to the home screen, but currently you cannot create a WebAPK yourself and list it in the Play Store.
The point I'm trying to make is that while PWAs are slowly gaining technical abilities, Google hasn't yet gone "all in" wrt PWAs being a true form of "app". It's not clear where exactly they're headed; there are some indications that there is a kind of "cold war" between the Chrome and Android teams.[0]
Microsoft has shown much more commitment to PWAs by making them available in the Windows app store. I believe Firefox has some support, and I'm only aware of Safari recently starting development of Service Workers, a necessary component for PWAs.
As far as adoption in the wild:
- Google has created a PWA version of Maps, Maps Go, available in the Play Store. This shows that PWAs are technically capable, but still not "blessed", in that you couldn't make a PWA and list it in the store like that.
- Twitter Lite in the Play Store is a WebView wrapper around a PWA, getting around the restriction I just mentioned.
[0]: https://medium.com/@firt/is-there-a-cold-war-between-android...