What, Exactly, Makes Something A Progressive Web App?

September 12, 2016 – 6:49 pm

Since Frances and I published a blog post last year introducing Progressive Web Apps, a healthy conversation has started about what is and isn’t a PWA. There are a lot of opinions and many shades of gray. What are the hard requirements? Which requirements are marginal? What’s aspirational? This article outlines these requirements, attempts to classify them, and provides a baseline for “what is a Progressive Web App?”

Browsers gate Progressive Web App installation prompting and badging on criteria that they detect when users navigate to sites. These criteria have been designed to ensure that sites which invoke prompts are reliable, fast, and engaging.

Chrome's Progressive Web App Install prompt on the Polymer Shop demo.

Chrome’s Progressive Web App Install prompt on the Polymer Shop demo.

I’d know. In January 2015 I designed the criteria that Chrome uses to trigger “Add to Homescreen” prompts. These prompts are what let users know that a site is a Progressive Web App. Sites that earn a spot on the homescreen report increased long-term engagement with these users.

Questions remain about what criteria browsers should enforce to gate prompting; that conversation is healthy, but this article isn’t a contribution to it. Similarly, per-browser criteria are not cataloged. Instead, this article focuses on the strictest common criteria to ensure broad installability as of late 2016. Proprietary and legacy technologies (e.g., AppCache) are also out of scope as they don’t contribute to prompting. This article is a time-capsule. The set of things you need to do today to cause your site to be recognized by browsers and bots as an installable Progressive Web App.

In general, installability criteria are tightening. Today’s Good-To-Haves may become part of tomorrow’s baseline. The opposite is unlikely because at least one major browser has made a strong commitment to tightening up the rules for installability.

Baseline Appyness

A Progressive Web App is functionally defined by the technical properties that allow the browser to detect that the site meets certain criteria and is worthy of being added to the homescreen. These criteria are motivated by user-experience concerns. Apps on the homescreen:

  • Should load instantly, regardless of network state. This isn’t to say that they need to function fully offline, but they must put their own UI on screen without requiring a network round trip.
  • Should be tied in the user’s mind to where they came from. The brand or site behind the app shouldn’t be a mystery.
  • Can run without extra browser chrome (e.g., the URL bar). This is a potentially dangerous permission. To prevent hijacking by captive portals (and worse), apps must be loaded over TLS connections.

These concerns give rise to today’s Baseline Criteria. To be a Progressive Web App, a site must:

Browsers do not enforce these requirements uniformly but if a browser does prompt for installation, sites that do these things will be installable today.

Plugged-in readers may note that no browser enforces the requirements about loading quickly on flaky connections or loading while offline. Enforcement is coming shortly; at least to Chrome.

Good-to-Haves

Some criteria are situational or specific to particular form-factors. For example, an immersive game may need to run full-screen and may only want to work in a single orientation. That set of choices is an anti-pattern for a news app. Similarly, not every app needs to send users Push Notifications. This means that the following should be thought of as a score over-and-above the lowest passing grade. In US educational terms, doing well in these criteria will be the difference between a C- and an A-:

  • Mobile-friendly design.
    • From correct viewport specification to tap-target size, it’s important that PWAs work well across form factors and screen sizes. Responsive Design can reduce the time and effort required to achieve this.
  • Near-instant loading.
    • Progressive Web Apps should be interactive (loaded and free of long-running scripts) in less than 5 seconds on a representative connection on a representative device (see below) before a Service Worker is installed.
    • Once the Service Worker is active, apps should load (be interactive) in less than a 2 seconds. This should not vary with network state.
  • Work across devices & browsers.
    • A well-built site must work for 90+% of all users in its market.
    • While Progressive Enhancement is ideal, it’s possible to meet this requirement with multiple versions, although having multiple domains (e.g. “m.*”) is something to avoid if possible.
  • Fluid animations.
    • Visual transitions should not stutter or jank.

A+ Progressive Web Apps

A+ apps need to meet the highest experience bar. To hit this bar, A+ Progressive Web Apps (in addition to the above) should:

  • Be mobile-friendly, not mobile-only.
    • For most sites Responsive Design is appropriate. Teams that do not build multiple versions of their site should ensure their apps work equally well in desktop, mobile, and all form-factors in between.
  • Implement high quality UI/UX that makes the experience feel highly interactive.
  • Communicate offline state appropriately.
    • Users should be able to understand what actions they can take while offline. They should not get “stranded” tapping on links to sections of an app that can’t work.
  • Be thoughtful about use of Push Notifications and Background Sync.
    • Web Push Notifications and Background Sync can enable timely experiences and thoughtful “outbox” functionality provide a delightful improvement on the status quo.
  • Use Contextual introduction of permission requests.

Great UIs take effort to build and polish, but the results can be incredible both for users and businesses. Frameworks are starting to adapt to these demands, e.g. the PRPL pattern and similar architectures for high-performance app loading, making it easier than ever to deliver amazing experiences on the web that hit all of the PWA high notes.

Getting Ready For Prime Time

That’s a lot to think about!

Verifying that your PWA meets some of most of these criteria, specifically the baseline requirements, has required a great deal of manual testing…until recently. Thanks to the new Lighthouse project, it’s possible to automate checks for many of these properties. You can even integrate Lighthouse into continuous integration systems to catch regressions.

DevTools is also improving rapidly to help you see the impact of changes. The new Security and Applications tabs allow quick diagnosis of common gotchas at development time.

Building a high-quality Progressive Web App has incredible benefits. A great experience can delight users and improve business outcomes. A bit of up-front planning, on-device testing, and iteration with Lighthouse can make it easier to realise them.

Endnote: Representative Devices

Performance testing is difficult!

A primary issue is the broad diversity in network and device performance. Developers tend to own devices (both desktop and mobile) that are significantly faster than the devices their apps will be experienced on. Many developers I’ve spoken with have never used chrome://inspect. They are frequently surprised to find their applications to be unacceptably slow on real phones.

To avoid this, it’s imperative to be testing on real phones. But which ones? In an ideal world, automated testing of real-world performance would be trivially available in our continuous integration systems. Lighthouse attempts to emulate some aspects of mobile devices to provide actionable insight, but teams who are striving for A+ status need mid-tier devices to verify these results on.

Which ones to buy? The answer is market-dependent. The broader a service’s reach, the lower-end the target phone should be. Networks also differ by market. “3G” often means something wildly different in practice in different geographies and even when users may have access to LTE service in theory, changing network conditions frequently put users into slower connections.

In late 2016, the following phones & testing settings strike a decent balance for their markets:

These recommendations attempt to be middle-of-the road in terms of price and capability. If your team is going for the best possible experience, don’t be afraid to standardise on cheaper or older devices!

By alex | Posted in programming, PWA, webdev | Comments (7)

PWA Discovery: You Ain’t Seen Nothin Yet

June 5, 2016 – 12:18 pm

Ada pitched into the conversation about the state of PWAs — particularly Chrome’s heuristics which prompted a Twitter discussion about some of the finer points of the user and developer experience. The background to these conversations is that today, the way users learn that they can install a Progressive Web App is via a prompt browsers decide to show at their discretion. The reason for heuristics is the quality bar that Ada so deftly summarized (and which Remy had an “aha!” moment about recently):

In the case of Chrome it encourages web app developers to build using newer Web Technology such as Service Workers and Web App manifest. It is great because it encourages the building of Web Apps as opposed to native by greatly reducing the barrier to getting your company’s app on the user’s home screen.

Andrew called this a “bag of carrots” and he’s not entirely wrong. When I designed the heuristics that Chrome uses to designate something worthy of prompting it was with the user values of reliable performance, ease of recall, and long-term security in mind. Any site can continue to live all its days in a tab; nothing is taken away from that mode. PWAs are about adding new capabilities to existing ones.

The browser’s goal is clear: create a hurdle tall enough that only sites that meet user expectations of “appyness” will be prompted for. Maybe Chrome’s version of this isn’t great! Feedback like Ada’s, Andrew’s, and Jeremy’s is helpful in letting us know how to improve. Thankfully, in most of the cases flagged so far, we’ve anticipated the concerns but maybe haven’t communicated our thinking as well as we should have. This is entirely my fault. This post is my pennance.

Prompting: The First, Worst Guess

The prompting solution to PWA discovery was our first, worst guess at how to communicate to users that they are on a site that can act like an app. Despite the prompt’s defects, it bootstrapped what we now think of as “Progressive Web Apps” with Chrome, Samsung Internet, and Opera all implementing versions of it in their Android browsers (note: no browser on iOS supports this as Apple [prevents meaningful competition][13]).

Getting just this much done was an enormous lift. The team had to overcome organisational skepticism that, bluntly, was daunting. Like “when this is all over I’ll write a book and it will not be a comedy” daunting. If you think Google is a one big happy family or has “A Plan (TM)“…um…well…I encourage you to apply! They can’t fire me for encouraging smart folks to work here, right? Regardless, we pulled it off. But an early first attempt, no matter how difficult, isn’t going to be where PWA discovery ends.

Obviously I can’t talk about what Chrome will or won’t ship — I have neither the power nor the crystal ball required to make statements like that — but I can outline a few alternatives to the current “go to example.com, use it for a while, do a jig, pray for the prompt” approach to PWA discovery. I’ll also take a moment to cover some of the FAQs about the current design, including Ada’s.

Engaged-user Prompting

“Engaged-user prompting” is the current (and in Chrome today, only) way to discover that a site you’re on is a Progressive Web App. Remy recently noted why it wasn’t a crisis that this doesn’t mirror app-store listing: the main action that users need to perform to discover the content is the same thing they do to use the site/service. Progressive Web Apps cut out the App Store middle-man. If you can convince a user to visit your site, you have an opportunity to help them engage with your service. The prompt builds on that engagement and lets users who are engaged choose to keep the experience to the homescreen, where it can then launch in a more immersive mode.

Alone, though, this has major drawbacks.

First, users have been trained for the past decade to look for “apps” in App Stores and might not understand the install prompt. This is part learning-curve and part legitimate concern. To the extent that users encounter these prompts and try them out, we just need to wait for time to pass before the App Store expectation is dampened. To the extent that users and developers truly want App Stores, it’s possible in the future. More on that below.

Next, in today’s Chrome, there isn’t any way other than the prompt for the user to understand that the site they’re on is an app. If the user rejects the prompt there isn’t much the site can do about it. Yes, there’s the “Add To Homescreen” menu item, but it doesn’t differentiate between plain-old-websites and PWAs in any visual way (despite using PWA metadata if available…very confusing). As a user, I’d love a visual indicator that let me know if sites I’m on are PWAs that I could keep; this is what “ambient badging” (the next section) is about.

Lastly, as Ada noted, developers aren’t in control of the prompting timing. This is intentional. In conversation with developers and users, we came to understand 2 things very clearly:

  1. Users bloody hate the web’s cesspool of prompts and interstitials. It got so bad that Search finally had to do something about it, marking sites that prompted users who did nothing other than land on a page not mobile-friendly. It’s hard to see how an experience like that is anything-friendly, but I digress.
  2. Web developers do not feel as though they are doing anything wrong — or worse, feel powerless to prevent their businesses from — prompting users in ways that create horrible experiences.

The predictable result of this situation is that if a browser allowed users to be prompted to add something to the homescreen whenever the developer wanted, the overall experience of using the web would suffer. This isn’t academic: we did this wrong with Geolocation and now we’re having to walk it back; through pleading, data, and yes, breaking changes. As a team that cares most about users and a healthy web ecosystem, repeating mistakes like this simply isn’t acceptable. The predictable result of designing the API the way Ada and others have suggested would be that we’d have to change it later. That change would likely have been of the form “you can call this API all you want, but the prompt isn’t going to show until the user has engaged with your site”.

What we went with in the end is simply the same thing, but inverted: by doing all the work to make your thing a Progressive Web App, you’ve signaled to us that you really do want users to keep this thing to their homescreens. If the timing isn’t right, Chrome, Samsung Internet, and Opera let you delay the prompt and show it at a time of your chosing later using onbeforeinstallprompt.

Where the prompt design ended up is exactly where it would have come to rest anyhow; we just short-circuited user pain and spammy experiences.

One final point on prompting: the browser controlling when prompts happen was inevitable, but doing it this way has also allowed us to iterate and experiment. Chrome continues to change the engagement heuristic used to trigger the prompt. In the last year it has fallen from requiring 3 navigations with an hour between 2 of them to only requiring that the user scroll and tap while in a site for a few minutes. All of this is a direct response to developer feedback that they’d like the prompt to trigger more often, which we’re balancing with user feedback about when and how often they’re prompted. We’re also watching the rates at which users accept the prompts. A fall in those rates would signal that we’re being too aggressive, but thus far we haven’t seen a drop.

The net effect, then, has been that PWAs haven’t been introduced to users as a way that they can be spammed or which they (in general) resent. This mirrors how we designed Web Notifications: unlike native apps that frequently take the installation step as carte blanche to spam users with notifications, Web Notifications are always opt-in and easily user-controlled. This sort of careful API design that takes the cumulative experience of users into account is what sets the web apart. Unlike other software ecosystems, the web is not predatory by default and we aim to keep it that way while extending its capabilities further.

Ambient Badging

But enough about what we’ve done; what’s next? Ambient badging!

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a button in the URL bar that appeared whenever you landed on a PWA that you could always tap to save it to your homescreen? A button that showed up in the top-level UI only when on a PWA? Something that didn’t require digging through menus and guessing about “is this thing going to work well when launched from the homescreen?” Such a button/indicator would let us do things like say to friends, colleagues, and customers “to get the Example app, go to example.com and tap the Frobulate button”.

This sort of badging doesn’t require any engagement from the user; it’s a non-invasive signal that says “hey, this is something you can keep!”.

We’re actively working on ambient badging in Chrome for Android, but I’m honestly surprised that no other browser has beat us to the punch. When combined with prompting, ambient badging solves (or I hope it will solve) the inability to “verb” PWAs, to have a common visual and conversational vocabulary around “keeping” PWAs, and dealing more elegantly with discoverability for developers who feel frustrated by the prompt’s capriciousness.

App Stores

App Stores have been part of my thinking around PWAs long before they were called “PWAs”. All of the technology that we use for PWAs — Manifests, Service Workers, and URLs — are compatible with any store that wants to list them. This, I think, is a major un-tapped area of exploration and it’s not exclusionary to ambient badging or engaged-user prompting. It’s possible for a browser or platform to implement one, two, or all of these mechanisms in parallel.

Imagine a future version of a desktop OS you use every day. In our ever-more App Store-mediated desktop OSes, it seems natural to go looking for apps to “keep” there. In this sense, App Stores are search engines for “keepable” experiences. PWAs are exactly that: keepable experiences. The meta-data around listing and installation are all available and no separate bundle or package needs to be made. All the app store in question needs to do is to verify that the person listing the app is actually the owner, that the app meets whatever legal guidelines they enforce, and that the site meets the PWA criteria. Most of this is automatable and all of it is possible with the PWA technology we’ve deployed already. To the extent that changes are necessary to support it, the Manifest spec is explicitly designed to be extensible.

App Stores are another area where I’m surprised that we haven’t seen more non-Chrome innovation. Can’t wait to see what happens there next. PWAs are great fit for these “keepable experience” search engines.

Search

If PWAs are by-design App Store-compatible — assuming those stores want to allow them to be listed and “kept” and aren’t just pursuing proprietary visions where businesses pay exhorbitantly to re-develop for each platform and form-factor — then Search engines are the proto-App Store.

It’s possible to imagine Bing.com supporting specially highlighted & badged links that can be opened stand-alone by default if the resulting URL is a PWA…say a separate “open standalone” link next to a result. It’s also possible to imagine separate “keep and visit” buttons in search results for URLs that are part of PWAs. Again, this future has been part of my thinking around distribution for PWAs for a long, long time, but it has only relatively recently become possible for crawlers to detect and enforce the quality bar that PWAs set.

Obviously, I have no inside information about what Bing’s engineers think the future should look like, but if it seems natural for search engines to list Native Apps (which they do today), then this also seems mighty reasonable.

The Limits of “Keep” Are PWAs Strength

We’ve got pretty strong data from native app ecosystems that users don’t use many apps, uninstall heavily, and in general find installation frustrating and taxing.

What’s important about PWAs, then, is that they are OG “streamable apps”. Most users won’t install most PWAs most of the time, and that’s fine. Hoping for more is how the tech industry found itself over-funding a gold rush only to reap the predictable consequences. The notion that native apps are “better” has largely been a self-reenforcing mantra borne of a Silicon Valley monoculture wherein the needs of billions are simply presumed (without investigation) to be the same as the behaviors of VC’s kids, nephews/nieces, and close associates.

It’s maddening. It’s idiotic. But it’s also why the web has a shot. Bubbles burst and the web will finally be ready to pick up the slack when this one does.

[13]: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#functionalito https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#software-requirements

By alex | Posted in PWA, webdev | Comments (3)

Not The Post I Wanted To Be Writing…

May 31, 2016 – 3:29 pm

I was on holiday after I/O last week when Jeremy wrote up some of his thoughts on the current state of PWA UI treatment for URL access. We chatted on Twitter (apologies to Frances) and he followed up here.

A few things seem obscured by the debate so far:

  • Most “opens” of PWAs happen in tabs through normal navigation. This has multiple causes, including an inability (which we’ll resolve at some point) for Chrome to be able to open navigations to PWAs from external sources in non-browser mode.
  • Very few sites were using display: "browser". This means that the change Jeremy objected to affects a minuscule number of sites (today). Now, obviously, Jeremy could go and evangelize all PWA developers to use display: "browser", but that sort of seems misguided because…
  • It doesn’t solve the problem of URL access or Sharing for sites that chose a different mode (e.g. fullscreen, standalone, or minimal-ui).

That last point is the high-order bit for me. Like Jeremy, I’m agitated over the lack of access to URLs for PWAs launched in a more immersive mode. That seems to be the thing to be frustrated about if you care about URLs and sharing and it’s my concern too — so much so that our team prioritized fixing it this quarter. New UI and gestures are hard to get right which is why I’m excited that Owen and Rebecca have been looking into how to make URLs accessible to PWA users no matter what display mode they’re in. We’ll have more to show on this front soon.

This matters because URL sharing is the proto-social behavior. It’s what enabled the web to spread and prosper, and it’s something we take for granted. In fact, if you look at any of my talks, you’ll see that I call it out as the web’s superpower.

We’re going to do something about this imminently because web developers who are building PWAs tend to forget about sharing. It’s been painful in our audits of partner apps to have to remind them to “build a share button” and then make sure it’s available on-screen in the right modes. It sucks to implement and it’s harder to use than a ubiquitous UI contract. At the same time, successful PWA developers are striving for UI consistency with the native platform their apps run on. They want their Web cake and the want to eat it like an App. The onus, then, is clearly on the browser to bring URL access back in ways that developers can’t defeat and can’t forget.

Which brings us to a final point that seems to have been lost: browsers can fix the real issue — sharing of PWAs and access to URLs — without anyone changing anything about their apps, and can do it out-of-band. Obviously, this is only true for browsers that support PWAs and have fast update cycles which, today, is all PWA-supporting browsers; namely Chrome, Opera, and Samsung Internet. The folks who work on these browsers — including myself — care as much as Jeremy does about the health and future of the web. I’m grateful to him for highlighting this issue and hope we can work together in the future to figure out ways to keep the best bits of the web healthy as PWAs become a common way to get back to sites users love.

By alex | Posted in openweb, programming, PWA, webdev | Comments (9)

Service Workers and PWAs: It’s About Reliable Performance, Not “Offline”

May 4, 2016 – 11:55 am

A lot of smart folks keep asking me why AppCache isn’t a good enough solution for “offline” and why it was necessary to invent Service Workers. It’s a great question!

Motivated by the regrettably uneven browser support landscape for Service Workers, there’s a real incentive to “just make something work offline” on iOS or old-IE. This phrasing obscures the primary experience difference between native apps and web content: native apps always “boot” when you tap on them. The legacy web, however, can take as long as the TCP timeout (2 minutes in many devices) to end in failure. That’s a looooong time to be looking at a white screen.

But doesn’t AppCache let you cache documents you might want offline? Sort of. Kinda. Ish. Turns out this only works in trivial cases. The issue is that the AppCache design only allows you to do “routing” using the FALLBACK section, and to trigger the FALLBACK URL (which can boot up, inspect it’s environment, and do something custom) the request needs to have actually failed. To handle the general case — a site with an unbounded set of URLs — that means users are waiting on a flaky, slow network for minutes (if they’re patient) before the the router page starts, which might then forward them on to content or a custom offline experience.

“But wait!”, you say, “doesn’t AppCache also allow you to put documents in the cache directly, bypassing all of that?”. Yes, it does, but because of AppCache’s atomic update system and practical limits to storage space, this means that the set of URLs in this list needs to be low and change infrequently. You see this play out, for example, in the AppCache manifests that major Google services like Google Docs generate. These services wind up with major complexity related to creating manifests on a per-user basis and managing the entries in them. Those entries are carefully curated from amongst the entire set of possible URLs to ensure high performance for the entries users are likely to visit offline, but this still leaves everything else at the mercy of network flakiness.

It’s hard to stress enough how much better reliable performance is. Think of it this way: the first load of a native app sucks. It’s gated by an app store and a huge download, but once you get to a point where the app is installed, that up-front cost is amortized across all app starts and none of those starts have a variable delay. Each application start is as fast as the last, no variance. What native apps deliver is reliable performance.

Until Service Workers arrived, it simply wasn’t possible to achieve this and that’s why I designed Chrome’s Add-to-Homescreen prompting behavior to require a Service Worker that responds quickly for the URL listed in the Manifest’s start_url. The heuristic is designed to only promote experiences that are “app-like”; recognizing that a key differentiator between the “old web” and native apps is reliable performance.

Remy Sharp blogged about the experience and expectation differences that we’ve worked hard to bake into Progressive Web Apps. Reliable performance is the most important of these and the reason Progressive Web Apps require Service Workers. It isn’t that “offline” support doesn’t matter — it does — but apps that work well offline are a subset of things that are apps, experiences you can trust to start any time, anywhere, on any connection.

I’ll be speaking more about this at Google I/O in a few weeks, and I’m hugely excited about the ways that the web is going to get better this year; starting with experiences that always work.

By alex | Posted in openweb, programming, webdev | Comments (3)