Book Image

Progressive Web Apps with React

By : Scott Domes
Book Image

Progressive Web Apps with React

By: Scott Domes

Overview of this book

For years, the speed and power of web apps has lagged behind native applications. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) aim to solve this by bridging the gap between the web apps and native apps, delivering a host of exciting features. Simultaneously, React is fast becoming the go-to solution for building modern web UIs, combining ease of development with performance and capability. Using React alongside PWA technology will make it easy for you to build a fast, beautiful, and functional web app. After an introduction and brief overview of the goals of PWAs, the book moves on to setting up the application structure. From there, it covers the Webpack build process and the process of creating React components. You'll learn how to set up the backend database and authentication solution to communicate with Firebase and how to work with React Router. Next, you will create and configure your web app manifest, making your PWA installable on mobile devices. Then you'll get introduced to service workers and see how they work as we configure the app to send push notifications using Firebase Cloud Messaging. We'll also explore the App Shell pattern, a key concept in PWAs and look at its advantages regarding efficient performance. Finally, you'll learn how to add of?ine capabilities to the app with caching and confirm your progress by auditing your PWA with Lighthouse. Also, you'll discover helper libraries and shortcuts that will help you save time and understand the future of PWA development.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Making our app installable - iOS


Apple hasn't come out in support of Progressive Web Apps, as of the time of writing. There's numerous theories as to why (their revenue-generating App Store ecosystem, competition with Google, lack of control), but it does mean that the process of making our app installable is much more manual.

Let's be clear--the optimal PWA experience, as of now, will be for a user on the latest version of Chrome, on an Android device.

However, PWAs are also all about progressive enhancement, a concept we'll cover in more depth in the later chapters. Progressive enhancement means we deliver the best possible experience for each user on their device; if they can support all the shiny new stuff, great, otherwise, we do our best with the tools they are using.

So, let's go through the process of making our UX delightful for an iPhone user who wants to save our app to their home screen.

We'll use lots of <meta> tags to tell the browser that our app is installable. Let's start...