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Installing as app works great for our PWA: https://editor.construct.net/ https://editor.construct.net/ > Has anyone built PWAs, and if so, why? Do they work

Installing as app works great for our PWA: https://editor.construct.net/ https://editor.construct.net/ > Has anyone built PWAs, and if so, why? Do they work cross-platform/mobile well? Works cross platform great. Construct 3 is a sophisticated productivity app, although it works on mobile devices it's not the ideal environment to get lots of stuff done with it. Coming from a Windows native app, main advantage in developing a PWA is that it allows easy cross platform support (Chromebooks especially good for educational markets) and much more agility in developing compared to say a native app.

jatsign 8y ago
Very cool. Do you happen to have any links to read about getting started? Any specific technologies (frameworks/libraries/etc) that helped out? Any lessons learned?
- Scirra_Tom 8y ago
  My brother (and co-founder) actually develops the product with 2 other full time engineers, I'm not involved in the product development directly. It was all built from the ground up though. I think we were well ahead of the curve when it was started to be developed 3-4 years ago. Mentioned in another comment yesterday that we decided against using third party UI because we were worried about bloat, third party dependencies and general responsiveness. Whole app is usable in ~1mb of network load (less than lots of big-corp homepages) and we get comments from users saying after using it for a while they forget they are in the browser which is great and a strong indicator we've hit the mark. If we were to start again today, we'd still roll our own UI. My brothers blog is very good and often technical and goes into a lot of interesting web tech stuff relating to Construct 3 and PWA's: https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/ashleys-blog-2?orderID=1 https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/ashleys-blog-2?orderID=1 There are a whole raft of benefits of PWA's, probably too many to list especially coming from our native predecessor Construct 2. Auto updating users to latest versions, no download/installation which helps significantly with converting users into just trying the product, faster load times than our native Windows predecessor, easier distribution etc etc. Cross platform support is an incredible competitive advantage in some markets such as education where Chromebooks are common and competition is sparse/non-existent. It even runs on Raspberry Pi's and we're confident we're future proofed for new devices. Making your PWA fully functional online is tricky but doable and I believe particular care needs to be taken here from the beginning. Retroactively implementing offline support would be difficult. It's also important to not get too fancy and building it for offline use helps you avoid these traps. We've seen some PWA's record every user interaction within the PWA which appears to be the basis of some features such as undo - this brings in a huge raft of complexities. A few shortcomings, but the gaps are being bridged slowly but surely. For example copying images to clipboard: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=150835 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=150835

jatsign 8y ago

Very cool. Do you happen to have any links to read about getting started? Any specific technologies (frameworks/libraries/etc) that helped out? Any lessons learned?

Scirra_Tom 8y ago
My brother (and co-founder) actually develops the product with 2 other full time engineers, I'm not involved in the product development directly. It was all built from the ground up though. I think we were well ahead of the curve when it was started to be developed 3-4 years ago. Mentioned in another comment yesterday that we decided against using third party UI because we were worried about bloat, third party dependencies and general responsiveness. Whole app is usable in ~1mb of network load (less than lots of big-corp homepages) and we get comments from users saying after using it for a while they forget they are in the browser which is great and a strong indicator we've hit the mark. If we were to start again today, we'd still roll our own UI. My brothers blog is very good and often technical and goes into a lot of interesting web tech stuff relating to Construct 3 and PWA's: https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/ashleys-blog-2?orderID=1 https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/ashleys-blog-2?orderID=1 There are a whole raft of benefits of PWA's, probably too many to list especially coming from our native predecessor Construct 2. Auto updating users to latest versions, no download/installation which helps significantly with converting users into just trying the product, faster load times than our native Windows predecessor, easier distribution etc etc. Cross platform support is an incredible competitive advantage in some markets such as education where Chromebooks are common and competition is sparse/non-existent. It even runs on Raspberry Pi's and we're confident we're future proofed for new devices. Making your PWA fully functional online is tricky but doable and I believe particular care needs to be taken here from the beginning. Retroactively implementing offline support would be difficult. It's also important to not get too fancy and building it for offline use helps you avoid these traps. We've seen some PWA's record every user interaction within the PWA which appears to be the basis of some features such as undo - this brings in a huge raft of complexities. A few shortcomings, but the gaps are being bridged slowly but surely. For example copying images to clipboard: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=150835 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=150835