This blog post discusses the evolution of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) since their inception in 2015. While PWAs offer numerous benefits like offline functionality, push notifications, and installability, the author observes that adoption hasn't been universal. Many developers and businesses misunderstand PWAs, sometimes treating them as separate products or focusing on single features like push notifications. The post argues that the focus should shift from "apps" to user experience. It proposes a set of principles for modern web experiences: discoverable, safe, fast, smooth, reliable, and meaningful. These principles aim to guide developers towards building better web experiences that naturally embody the core values of PWAs, benefiting both users and businesses.
We rebuilt Pinterest's mobile web experience as a PWA and the results after one year have exceeded our expectations. Weekly active users on mobile web have increased 103% year-over-year, with even higher growth in Brazil (156%) and India (312%). Engagement metrics also saw incredible growth: session length (+296%), Pins seen (+401%), and Pin saves (+295%). Perhaps most importantly, logins increased by 370% and new signups by a staggering 843% year-over-year, making mobile web our top platform for new signups. We've seen 800,000 weekly users add the PWA to their homescreen in under 6 months. Beyond performance, this new platform supports right-to-left languages and night mode, making it more accessible. We're proud of this user experience and excited to continue building on this foundation.
In this post, I discuss a new routing framework I've added to my service worker. It's based on my older LeviRoutes project and allows me to handle different URL patterns separately. This is much cleaner than a complex onfetch handler, and lets me easily manage things like requests to analytics services and my caching strategy. While sw-toolbox is a great alternative, I enjoyed the flexibility and learning experience of building my own. I encourage you to check out the code and consider routing in your own service workers.
