At rosaly.com we've built our "app" with something similar
we didn't go the PWA way (because of app store), but something quite similar to the article
1. we have a symfony website with simple web pages but with a "app look" (yes no react , no api, like it's the 2000s all over again)
2. we have a think react native wrapper (at first 17 lines, no it's 90s as we support push notification, hardware back button etc.) that embed a react-native webview
so we have nearly no javascript, just modern css and we pay really attention to performance and it's a dream
1. no javascript removes a lot of hassle
2. no api removes a lot of hassle too
3. html+css and we support all platforms, so a good design and backend engineers is all you need
we're live for a year, have raised money and have customers. We've been through several store update (to keep react native up to date and put some changelog).
" we pay really attention to performance and it's a dream"
Does this include in low-connectivity environments? The biggest advantage of api-driven PWAs is that it supports no-connectivity and low-connectivity nicely, assuming you put effort into enabling it (having an offline cache of data) and having loading indicators visible to the user. With a regular page-load-driven application, if i'm on 1 bar of 4G I might get the TTFB for a page load and then be waiting as page assets slowly load in, staring at a white or half-blank screen the entire time.
Ironically though, phones usually struggle more with single-page apps / Javascript heavy sites which have all the client-side application logic, 3rd party libraries, and DOM re-renders based on state changes.
exactly !
most browser will wait for the next to load before unloading the current one so with a little css trick you can do a nice transition between pages
While most SPA will put you on a weird state (of course you can handle it nicely too, but it requires effort for something you had for free in the first)
Looking at the app reviews looks like it's also a dream for the user (only 5-star ratings!). Kudos to you!
Please consider a blog post with more details or even open source some of your stack (especially the react-native bits). Like others users here, I'm also very interested in your "retrogressive" approach!
we didn't go the PWA way (because of app store), but something quite similar to the article
1. we have a symfony website with simple web pages but with a "app look" (yes no react , no api, like it's the 2000s all over again)
2. we have a think react native wrapper (at first 17 lines, no it's 90s as we support push notification, hardware back button etc.) that embed a react-native webview
so we have nearly no javascript, just modern css and we pay really attention to performance and it's a dream
1. no javascript removes a lot of hassle
2. no api removes a lot of hassle too
3. html+css and we support all platforms, so a good design and backend engineers is all you need
we're live for a year, have raised money and have customers. We've been through several store update (to keep react native up to date and put some changelog).
I call it "retrogressive-app"