I've looked at PWA & working with offline, but it's an optimization I'd like to have, not one that we absolutely need. Right now, given how crunched we are for resources, everything I work on has to fall into the category of "absolutely need", otherwise I de-prioritize it.
For us, the reason why we don't necessarily "need" PWA or full offline is that we do have an initial online component that is dynamic, so fully supporting an offline mode (a la, full on iOS or Android app) would change a lot of assumptions & optimizations we've made with how our product works. PWA seems promising, but it still feels slightly early to me. It's not that I don't think it will eventually win, but right now it has just enough complexity with minimal payoff, that I've punted for now (although it's probably closest to what we're looking for).
Appreciate your detailed reply. I'm working on a problem with mobile, offline first as a key part of the solution and have been leaning towards vue if for nothing else it's appearing simplicity, flexibility, and ability for new devs to get up to speed on the project quicker.
The current incarnation / wave / interpretation of PWA still seems to be maturing. The js layer definitely brings its challenges and rewards, while browser innovation and evolution continues to better support PWA.
Still.. A bit of this PWA stuff makes me feel like we're going through a cycle from the past.
Syncing ones data and being offline for the majority of time to work on a mobile laptop or pda was normal with dialup, prior to wifi. Tools like Lotus Notes apps ran and synced data for offline use reasonably well including handling conflicts (while not so good at other things).
Offline first syncing is still largely a need inucrative remote industrial operations today and for the majority of countries in the world whom have much less bandwidth access, I'm glad PWA is emerging as a tool along with WebAssembly.
I found a few projects using vue and PWA and will try some things out - want to avoid any assumptions of adding PWA later as it's a key to my problem set.
For us, the reason why we don't necessarily "need" PWA or full offline is that we do have an initial online component that is dynamic, so fully supporting an offline mode (a la, full on iOS or Android app) would change a lot of assumptions & optimizations we've made with how our product works. PWA seems promising, but it still feels slightly early to me. It's not that I don't think it will eventually win, but right now it has just enough complexity with minimal payoff, that I've punted for now (although it's probably closest to what we're looking for).