Progressive Web Apps Are the Future

The two-day Chrome Dev Summit at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View is a wrap! Vadim and I had a great time attending the summit, and this year, I even had the pleasure to share the stage with Alex Russell (thank you!) to speak about Progressive Web Apps, and specifically web manifests, which we’ve recently shipped support for in Opera for Android. (Since this was first published, Firefox announced plans to support Progressive Web Apps, too!)

You can check out the full video of our talk below:

“Progressive Web Apps” is an umbrella term for modern, performant web apps that cleverly take advantage of technologies like web manifest, push notifications, service worker, responsive web design, etc. to provide a top-tier experience on mobile.

The latest high-profile “progressive web app” example is of course the recently launched Flipkart Lite website, which was presented in a dedicated session at the summit.

And if you’re into little web games, also try adding this Inbox Attack demo to your home screen: it will lock to vertical orientation, and in Opera, the game will go full screen. I’ve even added vibration events to the buttons to make it more realistic :)

Here at Opera, we’re super excited about Progressive Web Apps and the role they will play in bridging the gap between web and native. We’re hard at work to further add installation prompting in Opera for Android, and support for push notifications and more is in the pipeline. Stay tuned, and if you’re curious to learn more, check out the other videos from the summit. We want your site to be a progressive web as well!