A progressive web application (PWA), or progressive web app,[1] is a type of application software delivered through the web, built using common web technologies including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and WebAssembly.[2] It is intended to work on any platform with a standards-compliant browser, including desktop and mobile devices.
Since a progressive web app is a type of webpage or website known as a web application, it does not require separate bundling or distribution. Developers can simply publish the web application online, ensure that it meets baseline installation requirements and ensure that users will be able to add the application to their home screen. Publishing the app to digital distribution systems like the Apple App Store or Google Play is optional.[3]
As of 2021, PWA features are supported to varying degrees by Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Firefox for Android, and Microsoft Edge[4] [5] but not by Firefox for desktop.
| Support | Comment | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Windows | macOS | Linux | Android | iOS & iPadOS | |||
| Chromium-based | Includes Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi,[6] and others. | ||||||
| Firefox | |||||||
| Safari | [7] | [8] |
At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in 2007, Steve Jobs announced that the iPhone would "run applications created with Web 2.0 Internet standards".[9] No software development kit (SDK) was required, and the apps would be fully integrated into the device through the Safari browser engine.[10] This model was later switched to the App Store, as a means of appeasing frustrated developers.[11] In October 2007 Jobs announced that an SDK would be launched the following year. As a result, although Apple continued to support web apps, the vast majority of iOS applications shifted toward the App Store.
Beginning in the early 2010s dynamic web pages allowed web technologies to be used to create interactive web applications. Responsive web design, and the screen-size flexibility it provides have made PWA development more accessible. Continued enhancements to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript allowed web applications to incorporate greater levels of interactivity, making native-like experiences possible on a website.[12]
In 2013, Mozilla released Firefox OS. It was intended to be an open-source operating system for running web apps as native apps on mobile devices. Firefox OS was based on the Gecko rendering engine with a user interface called Gaia, written in HTML5. The development of Firefox OS ended in 2016,[13] and the project was completely discontinued in 2017,[14] although a fork of Firefox OS was used as the basis of KaiOS, a feature phone platform.[15]
In 2015, designer Frances Berriman and Google Chrome engineer Alex Russell coined the term "progressive web apps"[16] to describe apps taking advantage of new features supported by modern browsers, including service workers and web app manifests, that let users upgrade web apps to progressive web applications in their native operating system (OS). Google then put significant efforts into promoting PWA development for Android.[17] Firefox introduced support for service workers in 2016, and Microsoft Edge and Apple Safari followed in 2018,[18] [19] making service workers available on all major systems.
By 2019, PWAs were supported by desktop versions of most browsers, including Microsoft Edge[20] (on Windows) and Google Chrome[21] (on Windows, macOS, ChromeOS, and Linux).
In December 2020, Firefox for desktop abandoned the implementation of PWAs (specifically, removed the prototype "site-specific browser" configuration that had been available as an experimental feature). A Firefox architect noted: "The signal I hope we are sending is that PWA support is not coming to desktop Firefox anytime soon."[22] Mozilla still plans to support PWAs on Android.[23]
Since a progressive web app is a type of webpage or website known as a web application, it does not require separate bundling or distribution. In particular, there is no requirement for developers or users to install web apps via digital distribution systems like the Apple App Store, Google Play, Microsoft Store, or Samsung Galaxy Store. To varying degrees, the major app stores support the publication of PWAs. Google Play, Microsoft Store,[24] and Samsung Galaxy Store support PWAs, but Apple App Store does not. Microsoft Store publishes some qualifying PWAs automatically (even without app authors' requests) after discovering them via Bing indexing.[25]
Progressive web apps are all designed to work on any browser that is compliant with the appropriate web standards. As with other cross-platform solutions, the goal is to help developers build cross-platform apps more easily than they would with native apps. Progressive web apps employ the progressive enhancement web development strategy.
Some progressive web apps use an architectural approach called the App Shell Model.[26] In this model, service workers store the Basic User Interface or "shell" of the responsive web design web application in the browser's offline cache. This model allows for PWAs to maintain native-like use with or without web connectivity. This can improve loading time, by providing an initial static frame, a layout or architecture into which content can be loaded progressively as well as dynamically.[27]
The technical baseline criteria for a site to be considered a progressive web app and therefore capable of being installed by browsers were described by Russell in a follow-up post[28] and updated since:[29] [30]
name or short_name, start_url, and display (with a value of standalone, fullscreen or minimal-ui), and icons (with 192 px and a 512 px versions). Information contained in the manifest makes PWAs easily shareable via a URL, discoverable by search engines, and alleviates complex installation procedures (but PWAs still be listed in a third-party app store).[32] Furthermore, PWAs support native app-style interactions and navigation, including being added to the home screen, displaying splash screens, etc.In 2017, Twitter released Twitter Lite, a PWA alternative to the official native Android and iOS apps. According to Twitter, Twitter Lite consumed only 1–3% of the size of the native apps.[33] Starbucks provides a PWA that is 99.84% smaller than its equivalent iOS app. After deploying its PWA, Starbucks doubled the number of online orders, with desktop users ordering at about the same rate as mobile app users.[34]
A 2018 review published by Forbes, found that users of Pinterest's PWA spent 40% more time on the site compared to the previous mobile website. Ad revenue rates also increased by 44%, and core engagements by 60%.[35] Flipkart saw 60% of customers who had uninstalled their native app return to use the Flipkart PWA. Lancôme saw an 84% decrease in time until the page is interactive, leading to a 17% increase in conversions and a 53% increase in mobile sessions on iOS with their PWA.[36]
There are many technologies commonly used to create progressive web apps. A web application is considered a PWA if it satisfies the installation criteria, thus can work offline and can be added to the device's home screen. To meet this definition, all PWAs require at minimum a service worker and a manifest.[37] [38] [39]
The web app manifest[40] is a W3C specification defining a JSON-based manifest (usually labelled manifest.json) to provide developers with a centralized place to put metadata associated with a web application including:
This metadata is crucial for an app to be added to a home screen or otherwise listed alongside native apps.
iOS Safari partially implements manifests, while most of the PWA metadata can be defined via Apple-specific extensions to the meta tags. These tags allow developers to enable full-screen display, define icons and splash screens, and specify a name for the application.[41] [42]
See main article: WebAssembly. WebAssembly allows precompiled code to run in a web browser, at near-native speed.[43] Thus, libraries written in languages such as C can be added to web apps. Announced in 2015 and first released in March 2017, WebAssembly became a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation on December 5, 2019[44] [45] [46] and it received the Programming Languages Software Award from ACM SIGPLAN in 2021.[47]
Progressive Web App execution contexts get unloaded whenever possible, so progressive web apps need to store the majority of their long-term internal state (user data, dynamically loaded application resources) in one of the following manner:
See main article: Web storage. Web Storage is a W3C standard API that enables key-value storage in modern browsers. The API consists of two objects, sessionStorage (that enables session-only storage that gets wiped upon browser session end) and localStorage (that enables storage that persists across sessions).[48]
See main article: Indexed Database API. Indexed Database API is a W3C standard database API available in all major browsers. The API is supported by modern browsers and enables storage of JSON objects and any structures representable as a string.[49] The Indexed Database API can be used with a wrapper library providing additional constructs around it.
A service worker is a web worker that implements a programmable network proxy that can respond to web/HTTP requests from the main document. It is able to check the availability of a remote server, cache content when that server is available, and serve that content later to the document. Service workers, like any other web workers, work separately from the main document context. Service workers can handle push notifications and synchronize data in the background, cache or retrieve resource requests, intercept network requests and receive centralized updates independently of the document that registered them, even when that document is not loaded.[50]
Service workers go through a three-step lifecycle of Registration, Installation and Activation. Registration involves telling the browser the location of the service worker in preparation for installation. Installation occurs when there is no service worker installed in the browser for the web app, or if there is an update to the service worker. Activation occurs when all of the PWA's pages are closed, so that there is no conflict between the previous version and the updated one. The lifecycle also helps maintain consistency when switching among versions of a service worker since only a single service worker can be active for a domain.