Momemtum for PWAs builds relentlessly
Safari service workers and other PWA good news stories
Progressive Web Apps are the future!
December 9, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
It’s an exciting time for Progressive Web Apps right now. The term Progressive Web App refers to a group of technologies, such as service workers, and push notifications, that can bring native-like performance and user experience to web apps. (We've written about them before here and here)... Read More
That shrinking feeling—Apple losing dominance in global web traffic
December 9, 2015, by ronan
For many years now iOS has led Android in web traffic in many countries around the world, even in countries where Android devices are more popular. There have been several explanations proffered for this... Read More
Google AMP: Coming to your search results early next year
November 26, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
It’s been just a month and a half since the world got its first taste of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), a technology from Google that aims to speed up the web. By embracing AMP, and following its rules, you can enjoy a performance boost to your web pages that will download in a fraction of the time than without. The demos and case studies are pretty impressive... Read More
4.7 inch phones drive the most web traffic, according to the new DeviceAtlas report
November 24, 2015, by Pawel Piejko
The team at DeviceAtlas has put together a new report that reveals the latest statistics on the mobile web browsing trends in Q3 2015. A large part of the report is focused on screen sizes and screen resolutions. We learned that the humble 4.7 inch screen size is today the most popular. The report also covers the most used MNOs, device diversity, screen resolutions, as well as mobile OS, smartphone and vendor popularity. Screen sizes driving the most traffic... Read More
HTML5 for the mobile Web: the Network Information API
November 24, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
The Network Information API is a HTML5 API for acquiring information about a device’s network connection. Despite not being a standard, it enjoys decent support across the main mobile browsers. It’s a pretty simple API to use, particularly in comparison with some of the HTML5 APIs we’ve looked at recently on this site (Service Workers, I’m looking at you!)... Read More
Measure your Website Performance on Mobile
November 23, 2015, by Martin Clancy
Mobile Web - Bigger than Apps Back in 2008 (yes, it was that long ago), Mary Meeker made her famous prediction that mobile would eclipse desktop by 2014. Fast forward more than half a dozen years and the latest KPCB mobile statistics show that mobile now accounts for 51% of time spent online in the USA. Mobile traffic growth still ramping... Read More
Google AMP is aimed to help you build rich sites that load fast on mobile devices
November 12, 2015, by Pawel Piejko
Smartphones are the main way to access websites for a growing number of users, even though the website content is often bloated with images, scripts and ad trackers that aren’t tailored for mobile devices. Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) initiative is aimed to tackle these issues by introducing a set of rules and restrictions for websites sent to mobile devices... Read More
Web app manifests usher new wave of progressive apps to your homescreen
November 3, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
One can’t deny the irresistible convenience of using a homescreen launcher icon to fire up a web app. Variously referred to as a bookmark icon, shortcut, or homepage icon, why shouldn’t such an icon be able to launch a web page, as well as a native app? And of course it can: this functionality has been available in Android and iOS for years. Indeed, the notion of a desktop shortcut has been around since the first GUI interfaces were developed. So why are we still talking about them in 2015?... Read More
Bluetooth beacons beckon bold builders
October 28, 2015, by ronan
Bluetooth beacons have always been an alluring prospect for developers. Small, cheap and with a long battery life, they brim with potential save for one fatal flaw: they generally require users to have an app installed on their device to be noticed. Without a beacon-aware app, their presence generally goes unnoticed entirely... Read More
Taking the web offline with service workers
October 21, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
You’re probably already familiar with the idea of offline web apps, web apps that can continue to work in the face of intermittent network connectivity. This concept has been around for a while, and various technologies have been developed along the way to achieve offline web apps, (Google) Gears, and Appcache for example, but none of these addressed the offline challenge quite as well as service workers... Read More
