11 · An app instead of an app

At some point the question of a phone app came up. The answer is: there is one, it just is not in a store. The site is a progressive web app — it installs from the browser, gets an icon on the home screen, opens full screen and works with no signal.

The arithmetic here is one-sided to the point of being suspect. A native app is a separate project in a different technology, fees to two stores, a review on every update, and a second body of code to maintain for years. A progressive web app is a few files added to a site that already exists: an app manifest, a background script and notification handling.

For a project run by one or two people that is not a compromise, it is the right choice. Three things it unlocks beyond an ordinary site: installation with no store, reading with no signal, and notifications about a new text. The third is the one that genuinely brings a reader back — an RSS feed does not.

There is one thing a progressive web app will not give: presence in a store as a discovery channel. For a site that builds its reach through links and search anyway, that loss is notional.

Every file in this layer — the app manifest, the background script, the offline page — is now generated at build time from the instance configuration. Previously they were three copies of the same data, with the name and colours hard-coded separately into each.