Retire the PWA (ADR-0059), and fix two docs describing a deleted provider layer

[jeffcrouse]

Proposes ADR-0059: The Web App Is Not an Installable App, and ships it.

The PWA

The web app still shipped as an installable PWA — manifest, apple-mobile-web-app-* meta tags, a Workbox service worker precaching the shell, runtime caches, and a popup encouraging people to install it to their home screen. Every premise of that was reversed one ADR at a time (0001, 0013, 0050, 0057, 0058) and the site was rewritten to stop mentioning it. Nobody removed the PWA itself.

Gone: InstallPrompt, InstallStatus, the manifest, the meta tags, isPWA(), vite-plugin-pwa, and the backend routes for manifest.json / registerSW.js / workbox-*.

/sw.js stays, and serves a tombstone — this is the load-bearing part

Deleting a service worker does not remove it. A browser that registered /sw.js keeps running the installed Workbox worker, which serves the shell cache-first — so it keeps serving the old index.html and the old bundle indefinitely. Unregistration code in main.tsx never runs, because the code that runs is the cached code that predates it. Removing the file cannot fix it; nothing would be left to notice.

What works is the browser's own update check: it re-fetches the worker URL, byte-compares, installs the difference. The tombstone claims its clients, deletes every cache, unregisters itself, and reloads open tabs. It must not 404 — that falls through to the SPA catch-all and hands the browser index.html as its service worker.

Verified, not assumed:

caches before: [ 'workbox-precache-v2-test' ]
registered: true
registrations after tombstone activated: 0
caches after: []

The cost, named rather than argued away

A browser-only listener loses offline access to tracks they already downloaded. The tracks are untouched in IndexedDB; the shell no longer loads without a server. That's correct for a tool whose entire subject is that server, and ADR-0058 point 5 already schedules the offline settings to leave with the player.

MobileAppRedirect and the apple-itunes-app Smart App Banner stay, and are the point: retiring the PWA isn't retiring mobile, it's sending mobile to the real client (ADR-0050).

The two stale docs

• docs/OTHER_LLMS.md deleted — it planned a Gemini provider "alongside the existing Anthropic and OpenAI-compatible providers", naming providers_openai.py and providers_anthropic.py as templates. ADR-0048 deleted those, plus service.py, providers.py and both SDKs.
• CLAUDE.md said llm/ holds service.py and providers.py — two of four names gone since ADR-0048.
• README.md linked the deleted doc and repeated its false claim. Replaced with what's true: no built-in provider, an MCP server, bring your own client.

Also found, deliberately not fixed here

isNativeApp() tests for window.Capacitor, and the Capacitor app was deleted 2026-08-11 — so it is always false. That makes {isNativeApp() && <ServerSettings />} on the Server destination unreachable, along with branches in FullPlayer, colorExtraction, and the "Connect to Server" screen. Same shape as this ADR (a platform layer outliving its platform), recorded as a follow-up because it touches the player.

Verification

• pnpm test — 63 files / 956 tests passed
• tsc --noEmit — 14 errors (unchanged baseline)
• eslint, audio guardrails, dependency boundaries — 0 errors
• ruff, mypy, both OpenAPI scripts — clean
• E2E run as CI does (CI=1, --grep-invert=screenshot) against a built frontend and a real backend — 16 passed, 0 failed
• Built output contains no Workbox chunks, no manifest.json, no registerSW.js; /sw.js serves the tombstone as application/javascript

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