A brief discussion of PWAs vs. native or hybrid native apps in the OC WordPress Developer meetup last night prompted me to take another look at this topic even though the consensus was that few people understood or actually used PWAs.

I found this article on Medium from 2018 which gives a really good rundown: Progressive Web Apps on iOS are here.

I was aware that if you built an app in Gatsby you get a progressive web app (almost) for free, but I embarrassingly was not able to figure out how to install this on my iPhone SE, so I gave up trying. Then last night I revisited this and was successful!

A PWA icon on my cluttered iPhone screen.
Behold! A PWA icon on my cluttered iPhone screen!

If what was said in the meeting is true a PWA might not be a viable commercial option to a native or hybrid app, but for my own personal satisfaction I at least get to enjoy the fireworks reward from running Lighthouse on my little demo app.

Lighthouse rewards you with Fireworks for creating a perfect PWA with Gatsby!

More info on PWAs from Web.dev: https://web.dev/progressive-web-apps/

And also from Mozilla: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps

Plus there are a crapload of courses on Udemy fwiw: https://www.udemy.com/topic/progressive-web-app/

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