After reading a bit about Progressive Web App support in Android (having just switched from iOS) i spent a few minutes and PWAified an internal site of mine.
Considering how easy it is (a few lines in a manifest using https://app-manifest.firebaseapp.com/ and a dummy service worker that essentially just does a nop), i think it would be great if we could get OzB done into a PWA, then maybe eventually even adding push notifications as well.
Why ?
What benefits would we get out of that?
For starters, on android, it wouldn't be a tab in chrome, and as i understand it, its a starting point to getting notifications via the website, ive tried a few apps for ozb, but they all seem rather unfinished and not as good as BigBargain used to be on iOS (even though that had its issues as well).
on android, it wouldn't be a tab in chrome
We had that for a period of time — no need for PWA but just a header setting so it can be launched directly from the home screen without being inside Chrome. People don't like it so we got rid of it after a while.
starting point to getting notifications via the website
No need for PWA either as it's just worker thread + push notification. There are still a lot of work with our web notification to let users fine tuning their experience. Really don't want to push out something that bombard users with notifications.
While I think PWA might be a good idea for a new site/app, it's quite a bit of work for us. Not saying never — it's still more likely that we'll get a PWA version of OzBargain than an OzBargain app.
I didn't know that, i guess ill have to go back to PWA school and find out what its really good for then (beyond the splash screen and dedicated icon in the window manager and throwing around buzzwords).
When i was on iOS i was sure that a bookmark on the home screen opened a new tab, and i ended up with lots of tabs for the same site, doesn't seem to be an issue for chrome on android, that was one reason i was pro apps over websites on mobile.
In my very short experience with PWA its a hell of a lot better than Apps (for websites sites anyway) so i think PWA being more likely than app is great (write once run anywhere). All they need is the ability to list PWAs in the stores for discoverability.
Thanks for your response, and keep up the great work.
My head hurts now….