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wow, I can't believe some of the attitude here in the comments. PWA is not an all fit solution. It's still in the early stages but it's pretty good at taking ad

wow, I can't believe some of the attitude here in the comments. PWA is not an all fit solution. It's still in the early stages but it's pretty good at taking advantage of your browser. It covers a high enough minimum of capabilities that's enough to replicate an app like experience. The big pluses are the add to home feature as well Service Workers that lets you run your code after the browser is closed (this part freaks me out and saw something here about sw botnet lol) and SPA pretty much replicates UI of any native app. Think of the chrome browser on Android as another app you are constantly going to compete with in which it's capability is getting more and more absurd until it inevitably covers almost all native capability. It's only a matter of time and seeing how quickly Chrome moves, I'm not surprised. I think this is fucking great. I was going to learn Xamarin but now I won't have to. That's fucking huge. I've been putting off mobile dev for a while because I found working with Java and Swift clunky. So I waited and waited....and now my dream is coming true. It's pretty amazing that it's Javascript that unites them all. But ES6 is a serious contender...especially that ... operator that expands the JSON objects, it makes working with REST API which almost always involves JSON, it's a heaven to work with. Hell, I shunned ES5 and was actually learning clojure and maybe using Clojurescript with Om, but even though I really love clojure es6 seems like the much perkier option. I wonder if there's any nice frameworks that can generate some scaffolding and UI kit and stuff for PWA. I'm learning React & Redux but I personally think Vue.js will outpace it...

debaserab2 10y ago
But your dream isn't really here. There's a ton of bugs with this experience. It's just not on par with it's native counterpart. Yes, you, as a developer, can enjoy some major shortcuts in your development workflow to get an app like experience in people's hands - that does not, however, make it a better user experience. Until the user experience has parity with native apps, I don't see it filling anything other than the niche that the Xamarin/Cordava's of the world already fulfill.
- tluyben2 10y ago
  Not sure if you have any experience, but Cordova and Xamarin are not the same kind of thing. In Xamarin you (and I would recommend that in most cases) get to use the native APIs of your platform of choice. Aka when targetting iOS you will be using UIView and when Android View. And all methods on those objects are the same ones you would use in Swift and Objective C for iOS and in Java for Android but then under a thin wrapper of C# or F#. Cordova is very much not that. I am not sure where the confusion under devs comes from but Xamarin generally is not used to run the same GUI codebase on two platforms like one would do with Cordova.
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  I know it's not perfect but it's good enough for most cases. It no longer makes sense to completely discount PWA when native apps have long suffered from app install friction. It's never going to beat typing a domain name vs going to play store, searching for app, clicking install, asks for overreaching permissions (why the fuck does a QR reader need access to my contact list), and after all your visitors drop off, the final nail is the loathed uninstall. http://pwa.rocks http://pwa.rocks have some pretty nice looking examples, and to most users, they wouldn't have a clue if it was native or not if they didn't see the Chrome Browser. But the add to home screen is the true killer app feature here, now your native apps are competing with Chrome Browser apps which is good enough for most use cases.
  - debaserab2 10y ago
    It's good enough when you can't afford to build native or your intended audience/product isn't primarily mobile, sure. Just clicking through the samples at pwa.rocks - a good portion of these are demos/prototypes. Some are just well designed responsive websites that aren't much else than a brochure/ecommerce sites. Sure, it's not hard to format content for mobile and make it look nice. There's a couple of good ones on this list, but for the most part I wouldn't put this list against a list of top ten well designed native apps. They're just not comparable. That said, I'm not arguing against building out nice mobile responsive sites (and this is something that I think gets forgotten way too much with "rich interface" single-page app designs that are all the craze on desktop). I'm a strong believer that every site should be written with mobile in mind first unless there are strong use cases to argue against it. Don't ever force your users to install an app to consume your product unless the product itself is the app.
thro32 10y ago
"native apps are dead" is pretty loaded statement. Something "pretty good" in "early stages" does not cover that.
- ericelliott 10y ago
  I didn't say dead, I said doomed. Meaning the demise is in the future, not the present.

debaserab2 10y ago

But your dream isn't really here. There's a ton of bugs with this experience. It's just not on par with it's native counterpart. Yes, you, as a developer, can enjoy some major shortcuts in your development workflow to get an app like experience in people's hands - that does not, however, make it a better user experience. Until the user experience has parity with native apps, I don't see it filling anything other than the niche that the Xamarin/Cordava's of the world already fulfill.

tluyben2 10y ago
Not sure if you have any experience, but Cordova and Xamarin are not the same kind of thing. In Xamarin you (and I would recommend that in most cases) get to use the native APIs of your platform of choice. Aka when targetting iOS you will be using UIView and when Android View. And all methods on those objects are the same ones you would use in Swift and Objective C for iOS and in Java for Android but then under a thin wrapper of C# or F#. Cordova is very much not that. I am not sure where the confusion under devs comes from but Xamarin generally is not used to run the same GUI codebase on two platforms like one would do with Cordova.
brilliantcode 10y ago
I know it's not perfect but it's good enough for most cases. It no longer makes sense to completely discount PWA when native apps have long suffered from app install friction. It's never going to beat typing a domain name vs going to play store, searching for app, clicking install, asks for overreaching permissions (why the fuck does a QR reader need access to my contact list), and after all your visitors drop off, the final nail is the loathed uninstall. http://pwa.rocks http://pwa.rocks have some pretty nice looking examples, and to most users, they wouldn't have a clue if it was native or not if they didn't see the Chrome Browser. But the add to home screen is the true killer app feature here, now your native apps are competing with Chrome Browser apps which is good enough for most use cases.
- debaserab2 10y ago
  It's good enough when you can't afford to build native or your intended audience/product isn't primarily mobile, sure. Just clicking through the samples at pwa.rocks - a good portion of these are demos/prototypes. Some are just well designed responsive websites that aren't much else than a brochure/ecommerce sites. Sure, it's not hard to format content for mobile and make it look nice. There's a couple of good ones on this list, but for the most part I wouldn't put this list against a list of top ten well designed native apps. They're just not comparable. That said, I'm not arguing against building out nice mobile responsive sites (and this is something that I think gets forgotten way too much with "rich interface" single-page app designs that are all the craze on desktop). I'm a strong believer that every site should be written with mobile in mind first unless there are strong use cases to argue against it. Don't ever force your users to install an app to consume your product unless the product itself is the app.

thro32 10y ago

"native apps are dead" is pretty loaded statement. Something "pretty good" in "early stages" does not cover that.

ericelliott 10y ago
I didn't say dead, I said doomed. Meaning the demise is in the future, not the present.