PWAs Five Years On

A presentation at An Event Apart Spring Summit by Ire Aderinokun

When the concept of Progressive Web Apps was introduced in 2016, the world of frontend development seemed changed forever. Websites could be “installed” to devices and, better yet, they could be available offline! Surely, this would be the death of native? As we know, that isn’t exactly how things went. PWAs weren’t really able to live up to the ideology at the time. The groundwork was there but, as with everything else on the web, it was to be a slow process of incremental improvements.

Now, five years down the line, things are different. PWAs are truly installable, reliable, and capable. In this talk, we’ll look at how PWAs have matured over the years and just how capable they’ve become.