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Valeria
Valeria

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Day 15: To build or not to build ☃️

Have you ever wanted to build a mobile app? Or better turn your website into a mobile app? Well with PWA Builder you can turn any website into an app and even publish it on App/Play store!

Enter your website's url and press "Start":

PWA Builder homepage with https://valeriavg.dev

If your website, just like mine, doesn't have PWA manifest, you'll see all the things that are missing:

Errors saying that manifest data is missing

Click on "Edit your manifest" and fill in all the relevant information:

Form with manifest information

And finally get the file or it's contents in the "Code" tab (or just download it):

ValeriaVG dev manifesto

Add the file to your server and reference it from head section by adding:

<link rel="manifest" href="/manifest.json">
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Valid manifest alone would ensure that your app is installable!
But there's so much more you can do using PWA Builder:

  • Add service worker with push notifications and caching capabilities
  • Utilise many mobile native capabilities

You can use service workers outside of PWAs as well, but for mobile capabilities you'll need an app.

Not every website should be installable of course, for example my blog doesn't need any of that at the moment, but maybe you have a better use case for a PWA? Share your creations!

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