PWAs are still a fairly new technology and some people might not be so sure whether they are yet mature enough for real life use cases. Maxim Salnikov (ForgeRock) adresses this and many other aspects of PWAs in his keynote from iJS Munich 2018: Is a new Cross-platform Development Era coming?

Having a single codebase for the main mobile platforms applications is a Holy Grail for many developers. There are some different approaches like using some existing programming languages (not related to mobile dev) and “compile” to native, or creating a synthetic language, or using JavaScript and wrap by the native code (or run in VM). The results are often slow, cumbersome and quite far from having real “native” feeling. What if we want to add more platforms like native desktop apps and web-based ones? The listed methods will not help us there at all. What could be the real unifying factor for the app platforms we have now, both mobile, desktop and web-based? Right! We have browsers everywhere, that means we can run JavaScript everywhere and the only questions are how to “unbind” it from online-only usage pattern, how to give an access to main hardware APIs without any plugins, and how to let the apps out from the browser UI.

Progressive web apps idea is gaining momentum among web developers, but let’s have a look at it from the mobile developer’s point of view. Is this a real new cross-platform silver bullet?