Investigate PWA Support

[amartin3225]

I see that Zulip Desktop 4.0.0 is still using Electron 3 (it looks like Zulip Desktop support for Electron 5 is coming) and that Chrome now has Progressive Web Apps; would it be possible to support Progressive Web Apps for Zulip to provide similar system integration but reduce the overhead and bugs of using Electron?

[timabbott]

I don't think Electron has any real overhead in the Electron app; it's really just Electron bugs (largely from Electron being forked off an older Chromium that has more bugs). Given that many users are very happy just using a pinned browser tab, it should be possible to have a good experience.

I think most of the criteria for PWAs have been true about Zulip for a long time because they're important for the actual user experience being good. I haven't done an audit through the list of what's required for Zulip to be in the Chrome PWA store, but if someone wants to do that investigation, it'd likely be helpful.

[ExpandingMan]

Hello all. I'm part of the Julia language open source community and we've recently been investigating zulip. Many of us noticed rather quickly that, while the web app is beautiful, the mobile apps seem to lag behind. I'm not sure exactly what would be involved in enabling zulip as a PWA, but as the web app already works wonderfully on mobile, I'd have to think not much. I think many users would greatly appreciate having the PWA, and I'd even wonder if, in the long run, it could replace the mobile apps entirely.

Note also that you don't need to be in any stores to be a PWA, firefox at least allows any website to be a PWA with a single button press, no stores required.

[timabbott]

@ExpandingMan thanks for the feedback!

I don't know a lot about PWAs myself; do you know what would be required to offer what you're looking for?

[ExpandingMan]

I'm in no way a web developer myself, so I'm afraid I can't give you much first-hand knowledge. Basically the idea is to just cache a website, run it in a browser engine, and call that an app. Obviously there are all sorts of reasons why you might want a native app, but most of those are negated by the iOS/android horrorshow anyway.

I realize that the zulip mobile apps are already JS. I'm not quite sure how this works but I assume they use some kind of browser engine anyway, maybe a PWA is a path toward merging your web and mobile clients (actually looking at the code base I'm not sure I understand why the web app and mobiles apps supposedly seem so different).

Anyway, some info from mozilla here. If you want to see an example, head over to your favorite discourse forum (some examples discourse.julialang.org or forum.manjaro.org) on firefox on android and click the button at the top of the browser that looks like a little house with a "+" in it. You can probably take a look at the discourse source code for an example of what's involved in enabling it as a PWA.

Anyway, for me personally the advantage of having zulip as a PWA would be caching it properly and probably better handling of notifications.

[YashRE42]

just going to make a quick link to #13088 which had a link to https://developers.google.com/web/ilt/pwa/lab-caching-files-with-service-worker

[IgnisDa]

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