3 ms·

What are some examples of progressive web apps?

untog 9y ago
mobile.twitter.com is one that comes to mind - it uses push notifications, lets you add to your home screen and caches at least some stuff offline, though I don't know how much.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  If it's hard to think of examples, I'm skeptical that PWA means anything.
  - untog 9y ago
    ...I just gave an example?
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      All I meant was, if someone asks "What's a desktop app?" or "What's an iOS app?" or "What's a website?" you can rattle off 100 examples without breaking a sweat. "What's happiness?" on the other hand is subjective. You could describe things that make you happy, but it wouldn't make sense to point to a banana and say "That's happiness." And if you ask "Am I happy?" the answer probably isn't boolean. "What's a PWA?" seems to fall into the latter category. If so, then we're treading into philosophy territory, which has claimed countless victims over millennia. You can spend a lifetime trying to define love, but at the end of it, you probably won't produce work that can be built on and extended, the way scientific papers can. It's notoriously difficult to pin down philosophical concepts into discrete buckets of meaning. We have to operate at the resolution of words. They break if you push them too far. I think it's important to distinguish these two domains. If we can't effortlessly point to dozens of examples of PWAs, it might be better to reject the notion that PWAs can be defined at all.
- cat199 9y ago
  so, like, it's like a WAP portal site? hmm..
- evv 9y ago
  Another fun thing about mobile.twitter.com: it is built using react-native-web, so it uses <View /> and <Text /> instead of <div /> and <span />. In theory it could share code with a React Native app. That would meet the true definition of a PWA in my mind. Ideally, a PWA could utilize everything the platform has to offer by running as a native app, but can also run in the browser for an install-free experience.

mobile.twitter.com is one that comes to mind - it uses push notifications, lets you add to your home screen and caches at least some stuff offline, though I don't know how much.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
If it's hard to think of examples, I'm skeptical that PWA means anything.
- untog 9y ago
  ...I just gave an example?
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    All I meant was, if someone asks "What's a desktop app?" or "What's an iOS app?" or "What's a website?" you can rattle off 100 examples without breaking a sweat. "What's happiness?" on the other hand is subjective. You could describe things that make you happy, but it wouldn't make sense to point to a banana and say "That's happiness." And if you ask "Am I happy?" the answer probably isn't boolean. "What's a PWA?" seems to fall into the latter category. If so, then we're treading into philosophy territory, which has claimed countless victims over millennia. You can spend a lifetime trying to define love, but at the end of it, you probably won't produce work that can be built on and extended, the way scientific papers can. It's notoriously difficult to pin down philosophical concepts into discrete buckets of meaning. We have to operate at the resolution of words. They break if you push them too far. I think it's important to distinguish these two domains. If we can't effortlessly point to dozens of examples of PWAs, it might be better to reject the notion that PWAs can be defined at all.
cat199 9y ago
so, like, it's like a WAP portal site? hmm..
evv 9y ago
Another fun thing about mobile.twitter.com: it is built using react-native-web, so it uses <View /> and <Text /> instead of <div /> and <span />. In theory it could share code with a React Native app. That would meet the true definition of a PWA in my mind. Ideally, a PWA could utilize everything the platform has to offer by running as a native app, but can also run in the browser for an install-free experience.