Twitter and Instagram progressive web apps

Since support for service workers landed in Mobile Safari on iOS, I’ve been trying a little experiment. Can I replace some of the native apps I use with progressive web apps?

The two major candidates are Twitter and Instagram. I added them to my home screen, and banished the native apps off to a separate screen. I’ve been using both progressive web apps for a few months now, and I have to say, they’re pretty darn great.

There are a few limitations compared to the native apps. On Twitter, if you follow a link from a tweet, it pops open in Safari, which is fine, but when you return to Twitter, it loads anew. This isn’t any fault of Twitter—this is the way that web apps have worked on iOS ever since they introduced their weird web-app-capable meta element. I hope this behaviour will be fixed in a future update.

Also, until we get web notifications on iOS, I need to keep the Twitter native app around if I want to be notified of a direct message (the only notification I allow).

Apart from those two little issues though, Twitter Lite is on par with the native app.

Instagram is also pretty great. It too suffers from some navigation issues. If I click through to someone’s profile, and then return to the main feed, it also loads it anew, losing my place. It would be great if this could be fixed.

For some reason, the Instagram web app doesn’t allow uploading multiple photos …which is weird, because I can upload multiple photos on my own site by adding the multiple attribute to the input type="file" in my posting interface.

Apart from that, though, it works great. And as I never wanted notifications from Instagram anyway, the lack of web notifications doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, because the progressive web app doesn’t keep nagging me about enabling notifications, it’s a more pleasant experience overall.

Something else that was really annoying with the native app was the preponderance of advertisements. It was really getting out of hand.

Well …(looks around to make sure no one is listening)… don’t tell anyone, but the Instagram progressive web app—i.e. the website—doesn’t have any ads at all!

Here’s hoping it stays that way.

It’s Time to Build a Progressive Web App. Here’s How – The New Stack

Much as I appreciate the optimism of this evaluation, I don’t hold out much hope that people’s expectations are going to change any time soon:

Indeed, when given a choice, users will opt for the [native] app version of a platform because it’s been considered the gold standard for reliability. With progressive web apps (PWAs), that assumption is about to change.

Nonetheless, this is a level-headed look at what a progressive web app is, mercifully free of hand-waving:

• App is served through HTTPS.
• App has a web app manifest with at least one icon. (We’ll talk more about the manifest shortly.)
• App has a registered service worker with a fetch event handler. (More on this later too.)

Getting Started with PWAs [Workshop]

The slides from Aaron’s workshop at today’s PWA Summit. I really like the idea of checking navigator.connection.downlink and navigator.connection.saveData inside a service worker to serve different or fewer assets!

Works offline

How do we tell our visitors our sites work offline? How do we tell our visitors that they don’t need an app because it’s no more capable than the URL they’re on right now?

Remy expands on his call for ideas on branding websites that work offline with a universal symbol, along the lines of what we had with RSS.

What I’d personally like to see as an outcome: some simple iconography that I can use on my own site and other projects that can offer ambient badging to reassure my visitor that the URL they’re visiting will work offline.

How creating a Progressive Web App has made our website better for people and planet

Creating a PWA has saved a lot of kilobytes after the initial load by storing files on the device to reuse on subsequent requests – this in turn lowers the load time and carbon footprint on subsequent page views, making the website better for both people and planet. We’ve also enabled offline access, which significantly improves user experience for people in areas with patchy connections, such as mobile users on their commute.

New Adventures 2019 | Part Two: Progressive Web | Abstrakt

Here’s a thorough blow-by-blow account of the workshop I ran in Nottingham last week:

Jeremy’s workshop was a fascinating insight into resilience and how to approach a web project with ubiquity and consistency in mind from both a design and development point of view.