Where can I find list of PWA features that are supported and under development for each browser?
This will greatly help to determine if I shall develop a native app or go directly for PWA. And also know upfront what to expect in the foreseeable future in terms of browser support so that I can enhance my app with newer features.
Thanks
Actually you can try
https://whatwebcando.today/
for test your browser first
Web App Manifest, and
Service Worker API
seem to be the key technologies to watch. Google's Progressive Web App Checklist mentions both of these technologies.
However, other technologies such as BeforeInstallPromptEvent, or PWA installation notifications, are explicitly discouraged by Mozilla Developer Network, MDN:
Do not use it [BeforeInstallPromptEvent] on production sites facing the Web
Also, as an aside, commercial incentives for PWA's appear to exist:
The Supreme Court signaled Apple could face a revived antitrust
lawsuit over its price control [...and 30% take] of the iPhone and
iPad App Store. -Fortune
Google indicates that a progressive web app, PWA, is:
Progressive - Works for every user, regardless of browser choice because it's built with progressive enhancement as a core tenet.
Responsive - Fits any form factor: desktop, mobile, tablet, or whatever is next. Connectivity independent - Enhanced with service
workers to work offline or on low-quality networks.
App-like - Feels like an app, because the app shell model separates the application functionality from application content .
Fresh - Always up-to-date thanks to the service worker update process.
Safe - Served via HTTPS to prevent snooping and to ensure content hasn't been tampered with.
Discoverable - Is identifiable as an "application" thanks to W3C manifest and service worker registration scope, allowing search
engines to find it.
Re-engageable - Makes re-engagement easy through features like push notifications.
Installable - Allows users to add apps they find most useful to their home screen without the hassle of an app store.
Linkable - Easily share the application via URL, does not require complex installation.
You can check this blog about the features of PWA. Also based from this documentation, Chrome, Opera and Firefox have all implemented support for service worker with Edge having positive public signals about interest in the feature. Safari briefly mentioned interest in it via one engineer's proposed five year plan. You can also check this related thread for more information.
Related
Can PWA access contacts, gps or use the phone camera?
Is this possible in any system (ios, android) ?
Is there any plan in development to implement any of these features ?
There are some restrictions that cannot be overcome with a PWA:
- you cannot access the contacts list on a phone. - On the other hand, you can take photos and use GPS location.
On whatwebcando.today web site you can have a list of APIs available via browser compared to native apps. If you click on one feature, you can see a sample snippet showing how you can implement it and also details about the browsers support.
UPDATE 30.09.2019
From Chrome v77 there is a new experimental API available: Contact Picker
The Contact Picker API is an on-demand API that allows users to select entries from their contact list and share limited details of the selected entries with a website. It allows users to share only what they want, when they want.
For example, a web-based email client could use the Contact Picker API to select the recipient(s) of an email. A voice-over-IP app could look up which phone number to call.
Hence it might be that the the remaining PWA restrictions will be solved in a near future.
It depends on the device the PWA is running on.
Camera and audio seem to be universally supported. Contacts, on the other hand, seem to be inaccessible regardless of platform.
Other features, such as GPS and geolocation may vary from device to device.
A good way to find out what your browser is capable of (and thus your PWA - it runs in a web browser) is to go to https://whatwebcando.today with the browser you want to support. Try visiting it with an iPhone, Android or other device for a list of enabled features.
This list changes as browser and OS developers increase access to native features, so there's a good change that if it isn't available now, it will be in the future. However, it's important to be aware that some features such as access to the wider file system and hardware configuration are likely to remain sandboxed for security reasons.
I want to give web applications running on foreign servers access to smartphone sensors and address book data. The W3C is working on a spec for that, called the Device APIs. However, it is not finished yet, and it will probably take quite some time until browser vendors provide working implementations.
But I need this functionality NOW (for a proof of concept). I do not care about portability, Android would be enough. Requiring the user to install special software first would also be OK.
Two solutions come to my mind:
Hack the APIs into the browser myself. Maybe I could take Phonegap and easily write a browser wrapper with it? That is, build a browser with Phonegap that exposes the Phonegap JS APIs to arbitrary sites (don't care about security for now)?
Write a server and run it on the smartphone localhost. This server would provide access to the resources via HTTPS and OAUTH2 (for example). Web applications could then reference this localhost server in their code (HACK HACK .. are there security mechanisms that prevent an arbitrary site from accessing a server running on localhost?).
Suggestions welcome.
Use a WebView:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebView.html
This class is the basis upon which you can roll your own web browser
A WebView has several customization points where you can add your own behavior. These are:
Adding JavaScript-to-Java interfaces
with the
addJavascriptInterface(Object, String)
method. This lets you bind Java
objects into the WebView so they can
be controlled from the web pages
JavaScript.
You'd need to create an application that acts as the browser, (by implementing a custom WebView). Then in that application, create a java object for the web view that will fetch the sensor information. In the server output, write javascript that tests for and accesses this object.
For android, I believe you can expose custom local functionality to javascript either by wrapping a webview in your own lightweight "browser" application or by building a plugin for the supplied browser. As pointed out in this question How to develop plugins for the native Android browser there is an example in the sdk samples.
But I for one would be rather upset if you enabled a website to access my device's contacts, and would probably refuse to install your application on my device.
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I tend to believe that developing mobile applications in an enterprise environment is best suited by developing intranet web applications. That said I have been asked to think about whether there are specific enterprise applications that could only be accomplished or would be more successful as native applications. I am curious as to what the Stack Overflow community thinks.
Note: As an organization we primarily use BlackBerry devices but are other platform curious.
A few of domains seem better suited to native apps off the top of my head:
Applications with disconnected data sets. Mobile apps cannot always count on having an Internet connection. Native apps handle that case well. This is especially true for data entry tools. If you receive a call in the browser while entering data, the work may be lost if the page reloads after relaunching Safari.
Apps that need the user to upload media like photos, videos, and sound recordings. Currently, there is no way to upload local iPhone media via MobileSafari. Native apps handle this case. Insurance and real estate might be good markets to target with this.
Advanced processing apps. For example, if you wanted an inventory management app that could read barcodes using an iPhone's camera, a native app can process imaging data much faster. Any augmented reality app would run best as a native app.
High memory apps. When other apps run, Safari still chugs along in the background. If those apps need more memory, Safari will release the RAM allocated to a "tab's" page contents. That page then reloads the next time a user opens Safari. If your app needs lots of RAM, then making it a native app gives you higher priority than remaining a web app.
Needs to run in the background as a service. Starting with 4.0, of course, you can build IT asset tracking services, GPS logging, corporate messaging (think Microsoft Office Communicator for iPhone, etc.), regulatory compliance monitoring, order notifications, custom SIP/H.323 endpoint for a VoIP switch, etc.
Large datasets. I believe Safari limits SQLite databases to 50 MiB max. For a native app, the available space will be constrained primarily by the available space on "disk."
Actually, just looking through the API. Any API not available via a webapp would be a good place to start. I'm being coy, here, regarding 4.0 API's that are currently under NDA. :)
That said, SproutCore Touch provides a good web platform that is specific to touch interfaces.
While there may be some specific enterprise applications that are best as a native app I can't think of any concrete examples.
However while I agree with you about intranet web apps are typically better, I think that all depends on who its better for. Obviously intranet web apps are better for development, and better since they can be cross playform, however I think that virtually all apps are better native for the end user. Don't agree? Look at the number of successful iPhone and Android apps that are out on the market that are just native portals for some site's data. Users far prefer the way a native app works over a mobile browser.
Also another thing I would take into consideration is if the app already has an intranet web app in use designed for desktop systems. If there is one, I would go the native app route since the users on the other mobile platforms can still access the desktop version. However if there is no universal portal I would consider doing that vs native.
The ideal would be to do both.
Have something like a secure restful interface that feeds json or xml to a native mobile application. The restful interface would be easier to start with, easier to test, easier to prototype, and easier to change. It would also make life infinitely easier when the data needs to be synchronized, backed up, cloned, or when the phone gets lost/broken/stolen/upgraded.
And then, having a native application built in addition to the restful interface would also allow for the use of the Native UI environment. It could allow the app to work offline. It could use its own notification-system, without going through SMS/push-mail. And if some of the relevant data was indeed mirrored offline, the application would become also more responsive, and much easier to use with other apps (where it comes App-functionality sharing, I'm only speaking for the Android SDKs here, and mostly the future version of the iPhone SDK, not the Blackberry yet). The end result would probably a much cleaner and much more pleasurable application to work with, assuming it could also be done as a Native Application.
I would recommend that the decision regarding whether to create a web application, native client, or both, should be made after understanding the problems you intend to solve and examining the needs of the end users of the application. It would be impossible to suggest that you can answer the technology question without understanding the user problem.
In Chapter 8 of "About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design", Alan Cooper talks about software postures. One of these postures is called the "Sovereign Posture." This posture represents an application that is typically used full screen and for long periods of time, and represents the primary application for a given user. Visual Studio and Eclipse are good examples of sovereign applications for developers. If the interface in question is a sovereign application for a user, that strongly favors a native client.
In a specific enterprise example, a service desk application is a sovereign application for technicians, but it is a transient application for users. I would suggest that an ideal factoring of such an application would be a rich native application for both desktop and mobile devices for technicians, and a self service web interface for users. For the technician, the advantages of a native application outweigh the costs of deployment, given that there are generally fewer technicians. Also, the technician may be working on a network problem, and the offline reliable nature of a native client allows the technician to continue using the application even when the network is unavailable.
If the user spends more than a few hours a day interacting with the application, then strongly consider the advantages of a well designed native client. If there are multiple users, consider how each role uses the application, and perhaps you end up with a hybrid model. Your UI strategy should always be based on examining use cases over following gospel from either camp, and should be focused on the user experience, not developer convenience.
The pros of native app development are primarily around getting access to hardware features that aren't accessible through web APIs, obtaining native performance benefits (such as in action gaming), instant access to paying customers through a platform store (such as iTunes), and security situations where you don't trust the browser or how it's handled.
The cons of native app development are that you lock yourself into a potentially proprietary code platform, write a bunch of device-specific code, and you're vendor locked. Code is harder to write, much harder to deploy, and you stand the chance of having the rug pulled out from under you. (Yes I'm looking at Apple, but could happen to any proprietary platform.)
Web apps by contrast are based on technologies that are widely known and easy to deal with - HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and excellent libraries such as JQTouch are available to help. Well-designed web apps for the most part will not care if you're on a Blackberry, Android, or iPhone, and will work on many of the older and less capable models as well as the newer ones and devices we haven't even encountered yet, without having to recompile or refactor (or at least without having to do a great deal of recompiling or refactoring...) And there are some hardware features accessible, such as GPS through the geolocation API.
But on the other hand web apps may not perform well with large data sets or high computational requirements. If you're building a commercial app with financial transactions, you very likely will have to roll your own payment system. And you have to trust the browser security as well.
All in all, most apps are going to make the best sense as web apps. However, many web apps can be made to function to be almost indistinguishable from client apps. With some HTML5 offline storage, CSS3 and JS functionality for transitions and behaviors, many business apps can be made to be indistinguishable from native clients.
In iPhone's case we can take it further: Adding a 57x57px icon apple-touch-icon.png to your web app’s root directory will provide iPhones with a nice custom icon when users add an app to their home screens (iPhone will take care of the rounded corners and glossy visual effect) and you can make an iPhone app go full screen when clicked from it’s home screen icon by adding . At this point, the app has it's own icon and runs full screen - the user doesn't know it's web based.
And if you do want to go native but don't want to abandon web standards, most native APIs provide the ability to develop native clients based on HTML/CSS/JS using a simple wrapper, such as the UIWebView in Objective-C. PhoneGap is an excellent cross-platform framework enabling standards-based web development practices to be deployed on iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.
We have a web application and we've built phone applications (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry) to be companions to the site. The usual workflow is that an existing user of the site gets a phone app and then plugs their existing credentials into the phone app and they are off and running, but more often now we are seeing folks who are downloading the app and then (and this should not surprise anyone) don't read the help screen that explains they need to go and get credentials at the web site and therefore cannot connect to the application which does require registration to manage their content. This is a giant usability fail condition.
So we know that we need to put user registration workflows on the phone app.
Other than the obvious solution of duplicating our registration page on the mobile, does anyone know of a better identity solution for the phone? For example, on the desktop we also use Facebook Connect as an identity server and the users love it. I'm looking for something that simple that we can implement across the major smartphone platforms.
Clarifying note:
I should add here that this registration mechanism is likely to; and it would be desirable if it did, go hand in hand with a general identity/authorization mechanism such as the Facebook mechanism mentioned below.
One other place I'm poking around is to see whether there's an openId solution that does not require a browser to pop up.
Restful service might be the e asiest way for you to achieve this, you can use it on any device that can make http requests, so you can make your own login screens and talk to the s ervice that way...
Facebook has a Connect API for the iPhone. Integrating it into your iPhone app is very smooth.
http://developers.facebook.com/connect_iphone.php
On the BlackBerry we were able to build a fairly robust REST pipeline between the client apps in the field and our servers. We primary use the framework for updates, but the device API is generic enough to be able to build almost anything you need via standard HTTP/HTTPS GET/POST calls.
On the RIM platform, look into the HttpConnection API as a starting point. There is also an example on the BlackBerry Developer's site which will help. Finally, I believe there are several examples inside the sample package that comes with every BlackBerry JDE (IDE + API download).
I've been doing mobile app development for a long time (2001?), but the systems we worked with back then were dedicated mobile development environments (Symbian, J2ME, BREW). iPhone SDK is a curious hybrid of Mac OS X and Apple's take on mobile (Cocoa Touch).
But it is missing some stuff that other mobile systems have, IMO. Specifically:
Application background processing
SMS/MMS application routing (send an SMS to my application in the background)
API for accessing phone functions/call history/call interception
I realize that Apple has perfectly valid reasons for releasing the SDK the way they did. I am curious what people on SO think the SDK is missing and how would they go about fixing/adding it, were they an Engineering Product Manager at Apple.
The biggest shortcoming in my opinion is support for separating licensing from distribution.
What I mean by this is that it should be possible to download a trial version of an application and later purchase a license for that application (from an API call inside the application or from the app store). This would make it much easier to try-before-you-buy and get rid of the current duplicates of many applications with 'lite' versions.
I think lack of push notifications for apps is the big thing we're missing right now. With push, you can register your application to perform a task (like getting the most recent data from a web service) even when it's not running, at a time and frequency the OS decides is best. In an ideal world, along with the existing concept of iPhone apps loading quickly and resuming where you last left off, this solves the problem of not running in the background. I know some tasks will be more difficult or maybe impossible with this strategy, but it's still a pretty good compromise between third party applications and the iPhone's limited hardware.
Originally push was scheduled for last September, but it was removed from the beta SDK and not spoken of since then.
API's I'm personally looking for:
Apple80211 as a public API (private, current API is fine if documented)
Access to Volume buttons (semi-accessible via Celestial, private, needs new API)
Access to Calendar (private, API status unknown)
Access to Bluetooth + SPP profile (status unknown)
Access to Camera (directly, API status unknown)
Access to JavaScript runtime (directly, not through UIWebView, API status unknown)
WebKit access that's lower-level than UIWebView (private, current API is fine)
Access to Music Library (private, current API is fine)
Garbage Collection.
CoreData is missing.
You've mentioned some of the big ones - copy & paste (or in fact any way for apps to collaborate) is another huge omission.
It also seems to lack a desktop synch framework (at least if it exists I can't find it).
Language independence and especially lack of scripting is another pet peeve - objective-c is all very well but more languages to choose from would be good.
Inability to dynamically extend apps, via scripts or otherwise, is another big omission. This is partly an SDK/OS issue, partly licensing.
My list ordered by priority:
Mapping abstraction (the MapKit looks awesome), but that would require a new Google Maps TOS
Music library
Camera (photo + video) Access to more
UIViews, Apple designed some pretty nice custom ones for their apps
Better UIWebKit abstraction
The features I see missing that it should have is
Access to SMS
Direct Access to Google Maps App. You should be able have access to this so you could extend your application to use the built in features provided by Google Maps.
Access to the Bluetooth functionality of the phone.
Access to the Calendar. Why not allow access to simply post a calendar event for the user.
Access to Active Sync. It would great if we could directly access this and communicate back to the Exchange Server.
Core Image. They provide Core Animation but Core Image is missing. I hope that this is added to the API soon.
These are some of the features that my clients have access for in the past and are supprised when they are not available.
We definitely miss a Calendar API and SMS access. So many applications could leverage such APIs. The iPhone allows users to have everything in their pocket, but it's almost useless as long as developers cannot leverage this integration in their apps.
A language with proper namespaces.
A limitation that bugs me is lack of access to system features that require root or setuid. For example: opening privileged IP ports.
I'm not sure there is a good solution to this, as long as Apple's policy is to keep the device locked-down.
Allow program to set some kind of local timed event for your application to bring up an alert and launch your app if the user agrees (like any calendar app). You could do that with push notifications but there are many cases I'd hate to have to rely on a whole server infrastructure and network connectivity just to basically do some timed thing.
Some idea of what direction the user is facing. I cannot believe the GPS chip the newer iPhones use are not capable of reporting direction.
I would personally love to see
Access to the CoreTelephony Framework (Currently private). Which allows access to all the phone functions (Especially sending MMS / SMS).
Some sort of ability to run stuff in the background. While push notifications is ok for most things, but it is a bit hard to leverage CoreLocation (i.e. have the app show a notification at a certain location). Of course this would probably need an on/off button or app specific like push is.
animation view which will be reduce developer to make a cool app , of course the core business local still need consider more , but the view layer could more easy to use ....