What does Progressive means in the PWA (Progressive web app)

Question

I have started to building PWA without understanding the internal meaning of it. When I searched, PWA gives a native app like look and feel to web apps progressively using the following technology

1. Manifest
2. Service workers
3. Designing App shell
4. Push notification support for web apps

I found difficult to understand the inner meaning of Progressive in PWA. Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

"Progressive Web Apps" has been foisted on the Web App development community by those of the left (especially California) who equate "progressive" with "liberal".

Most everyone else uses just "Web App" or "Ultimate Web App" to be annoying.

The "progressive" adjective could apply to the best-endeavour nature of a PWA in that it will degrade gracefully if certain functionality is unavailable or if that functionality is embargoed due to lack of User Permissions. Analogous to the limp-home-mode in your car.

I am told that Chrome now treats pWAs as first-class Android apps but I have yet to experience them in the App Drawer. Lighthouse struggles to distinguish an elbow let alone a PWA and is more someone's little red book of Web-Apps.

IMHO if it launches from the Homescreen or Desktop via and icon then it is a Web App.

Answer 2

From what I have understood a progressive web app needs to support progressive enhancement.

Progressive enhancement is a strategy that begins with common browser features, and then adds in functionality or enhancements when the user's browser supports more modern technologies.

Features like service worker, notifications will be added only if the browser supports it and not break the application in older browsers.

This enables your application to run properly in a wide range of browsers with decent user experience.

You can find more details here

Answer 3

As explained in this answer , all PWA features are not supported in every browser/platform yet (mar-2018). Also, new PWA features will be keep coming as the technology evolves. Said that, for you to have a PWA site, you don't have to implement all PWA features to take advantages it provided or to call it a PWA site.

This is not like a standards compliance, where you have to be 100% compliant to call it a "Compliant" site.

You can start with the basic things like having a manifest file to support "Add to home screen" and may be offline capability using service workers and your site is already taking good advantage of PWA.

You can keep "Progressing" on more features as you continue to develop your app. And hence its "Progressive" web application :)