So PWA are all the rage.
And yesterday’s stream was essentially what I’ve expected, marketing babble.
Some key questions remain unaddressed:
Monetization via ads
On websites there’s google’s adsense and on Android and probably also IOS and Windows Phones there’s AdMob. What solution does ionic offer in that regard?
Authentication via openid-connect
I’m running my own keycloak based IDP, I don’t want to use .
Users equal money, so it nonsensical to outsource the userbase to a different provider.
How does ionic handle openid-connect?
Can I just use any angular compatible oidc package?
UX on mobile and desktop can’t be the same
My computer with a 4k monitor and mouse and keyboard has a different workflow than my 13xx*7xx chromebook and my 1080x1920 mobile.
Sure you can use a mobile view for the desktop browser, but swiping menus and back arrows, all those mobile typical things aren’t necessary on the desktop browser.
Creating sites the work, are efficient and with well placed ads is an art.
You can’t just take 1 layout and just apply it to the browser and call it a day.
This doesn’t work.
Essentially you have
mobile small
mobile large
mobile TV
browser
desktop
I don’t think that 1 fits all is proper here. PWA seems to be yahabw (yet another hype and buzz word).
I wish you and other developers would abstain from all the marketing crap and focus on facts.
…what? I don’t think you know what PWAs are, as I can’t understand how any of your points relate to them. PWAs aren’t marketing, not anymore than “responsive design” or “ES6” are anyway, it’s a technical term. Other than promoting their product Stencil as an easy way to create PWAs, I didn’t see any marketing at all. PWAs are webapps that use service workers to manage caching, background updating, push notifications, and more. They are still websites.
To your questions
Monetizaiton via ads
This as a concept has nothing to do with PWAs. You can use whatever ad provider you want, PWAs are still websites, whatever ads you use on your current website or web app will work. The only nuance to this is that PWAs can load their UI even if the user is offline, and exactly like today, if you load your app up without an internet connection ads won’t load. Requiring authentication or an internet connection to load can work around this (again, same as any mobile app, or even a web app that’s cached in more traditional ways), but usually your app has to have a connection to provide any meaningful functionality anyway, so this is rarely an issue.
As a separate issue though, if Ionic is trying to push Stencil as a way to make not just PWAs, but Android apps, iOS app, and PWAs all with the same codebase you are correct that there could be some issues here. As they said, you can only build PWAs if you don’t need native functionality. Mobile app ads are native functionality. You could possibly work around this by doing platform checks and serving different ads, but again, separate issue.
Authentication
PWAs are websites. Any method you can use to authenticate via a website can be done in a PWA. As they state at the beginning of the webinar, you can only use a PWA if your app only needs web technology. Meaning some more advanced security features are only available in native mobile apps. However OpenID and Oauth are not one of those.
Responsive UI
Responsive UIs are a completely different topic, just like everything else in this list, and are unrelated to PWAs. As they state during the Q&A section of the stream, they have pretty limited desktop support right now in Stencil /Ionic. That could change going forward. However, PWAs can be made with whatever UI you want, but generally modern web apps and sites are responsive, and do in fact work on multiple screen sizes.
Then what makes it different from regular Angular apps? If all you need is a webview on the mobile device and you essentially create an Angular app with components ionic provides.
A regular angular app can absolutely be a pwa, so… nothing, they are not different.
Whether or not stencil creates better/faster/smaller web apps compared to angular is another question. Whether stencils tooling makes things nicer is also a separate question. At that point you’d want to compare angular, stencil, vue, and possibly others. They definitely have competition.