Should every site be an installable PWA? - a podcast by Kent C. Dodds

from 2021-04-08T04:20:27

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Hey there friends, so I have a question somebody's asking on the KCD office
hours channel in discord and I decided this is something that I can answerin the three minutes with Kent alright podcast, so the question is what are
my thoughts on PWAs nowadays should all websites be PWAs are there constmaking your site's PWAs so in general or to be clear a PWA stands for
progressive web application and normally when we're talking about this
we're talking about something that can be like installed.
You can have background notification like push notifications and stuff likethat works offline, in fact Chrome recently started requiring or is going
to require offline functionality to be present for your app to beinstallable as a PWA, so I have actually had my website installable as a
PWA before and I've had a couple other a little apps or sites that I've
made PWAs installable and it's kind of cool.
I would caution people against just saying let's make everything a PWA
because I have had some sad experiences with service workers with Gatsby inparticular it was just so easy to turn on offline capabilities, which is a
plug-in but unfortunately that plug-in had a dependency that had a funnyproblem with it and so I ended up having testing JavaScript.com install
a,Service worker that would never get updated ever and so we launchedtesting JavaScript.com, it's like here's this is coming soon and then when
it was officially launched a ton of people did not see the update and sothey couldn't buy the course and it was just a total nightmare disaster.
I had some frustration and annoyance with the PWA I had for my website andbecause people would come to see my blog and then I do an update between
the last time they saw the flag and this time and so let's see old.Content
and I'd have to do a notification that said hey there's some new content
downloaded now and most the time people don't really care to have it
offline and so it was just an annoyance so I would say that unless you're
doing some offline support stuff then there's not really a great reason to
make it installable and and whatever you have to have a good use case for
your thing to actually be like an app and useful in that sort of contextfor making it a PWA, those are my thoughts on it.
I hope that's useful in interesting take care.

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