Evaluation of progressive web application to develop an offline-first task management app

Abstract

Adding more features to web apps progressively to feel and work like native apps is a recent design philosophy. This research study was conducted on Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) to develop an offline-first task management app. The main idea of Pmain goalancing web apps gradually by adding new features to existing or new web applicenable developersowser support. Hence, the main goal of this study was to explore PWAs features available in the browsers,thoroughly reviewe developers to implement an offline-first web applications.

The study was carried out in two ways. The first part thoroughly reviewed theories about the web, native apps, and PWAs features that are available in browsers. An the thesisst task management app called Annual Clock was designed and implemented for Aalto universThe applicationd part of the thesis. To implement the app, React.js was used for the frontthe end and Node.js for the baa ckend. The application was fully impthe lemented using most PWA features to work offline, install on home screen, load fast, send push notification, etc.

To conclude, the implemented app presents solutions to most offline-first web app problems and will be used as a valuable reference for the university and other researchers who would like to develop an offline-first PWAs. Nonetheless, there are many areas left untouched and need to be solved in the future like saving images, audios and videos in browser storage, increasing the size of browser storages for large data and background synchronization support by all browsers.