XF 2.2 Progressive web app

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Mobile app installation
Mobile first. We hear it again and again, and with over half of all web traffic coming from mobile devices, it's more important than ever to provide your mobile visitors with a great experience.

Of course, XenForo 2 is built on a fully responsive design that gracefully adapts to any display size and makes using XenForo a pleasure on all devices, but now we're taking it a step further by enabling any XenForo site to become a progressive web app.

Progressive web what?

Okay, let's back up a little. Imagine a technology that allows a web site to appear and behave like an app without having to produce native code for each platform, or go through any vendor's App Store equivalent.

Progressive web apps, or PWAs, aim to bridge the gap between websites and native applications on both mobile and desktop devices using a series of emerging web standards. Push notifications, a feature introduced in XenForo 2.1, are a popular example of one such standard. In XenForo 2.2, we're expanding our support for these standards by making XenForo installable, implementing more graceful offline handling, and adding support for the badging API.

Setting it up

It's important to note that, like push notifications, making full use of these features will require a few extra steps to set things up.

Additionally, as with push notifications, these features are only available on devices and browsers that fully support PWAs. Would you care to take a guess as to what the most notable exceptions might be? As you may have suspected, once again Safari on macOS and any iOS-based browsers are the culprits due to Apple's ongoing failure to implement industry standards. While Safari on both macOS and iOS does support graceful offline handling, it does not support installation or badging (more on that below) at this time.

We would encourage you to make your frustrations known in public by applying virtual tar and feathers to Apple employees online until they relent and get their act together... or at least voice your support for these standards by continuing to reach out to @webkit on Twitter or the webkit-help mailing list. Officially, the best place to communicate with Apple is via their product feedback channels, and presumably they won't be able to continue to ignore a deluge of feature requests for the same thing... 🤔

Requirements

To make full use of these features...
  • Your XenForo installation must be accessed over SSL / HTTPS
  • Your site must have a relatively short title of 12 characters or fewer
  • You must publish a pair of square icons for your site, one at 192px and another at 512px.

Setting a short title

Publishing a pair of icons

What do PWAs look like?

If your site meets the requirements, your visitors will automatically be given the option to install your 'app' on their device.

The precise details of the interface and the circumstances permitting installation can vary by browser and in some cases can depend on the degree of interaction with your site a user has had.

When browsing with Chrome on desktop or Android, the app can be installed via the address bar on both mobile and desktop devices. On supported mobile devices, we also display a conspicuous yet unobtrusive banner in the off-canvas menu.

Mobile app install banner
Mobile app installation

Desktop app installation

Once the app is installed, it is readily available in exactly the same way as a native app. On mobile devices, that means it can be opened via an icon on the home screen. On desktop devices, it can be opened by searching your system or even pinning the app to your taskbar or dock.

Mobile app home screen
Desktop app home screen

Some devices will display a splash screen while the app is being loaded. The splash screen is automatically generated from the icons and background color of your style.

Mobile app splash screen

For most devices, we set the app to display a minimal interface. The elements of this interface also vary by browser, but most importantly include navigation controls. For Android devices running Chrome, we are able to use the native pull-to-refresh and back-button navigation controls, so we do without any additional interface.

Mobile app
Desktop app

If a user tries to open or navigate the app without a proper network connection, we display a simple offline message.

Mobile app offline page
Desktop app offline page

Chrome-based apps recently introduced support for application badging, which allows the app to indicate unread messages or alerts directly on its icon.
We are hopeful more browsers will support the badging API in the future.

macos-badge.png
Desktop app badging (Windows)

Looking toward the future

The PWA specification and standards are constantly evolving. We will continue to monitor them as time goes on in order to always provide the best possible experience on all devices.
 
I use Firefox across all my devices and i miss the option to install the PWA using him.
Have you set Firefox as the default browser on your iOS devices?

I haven't yet tried to install a PWA but once I get a few other technical issues sorted out I am planning to try. But it may well be that Apple forces the use of Safari since of course they have more direct control over that browser.
 
Any further support related questions need to be posted in the relevant customer forum.

HYS threads are not for support.
 
Is there any way to determine how many users are using the PWA? I have yet to see any mention of our members finding it on their own.
 
Is there any way to determine how many users are using the PWA? I have yet to see any mention of our members finding it on their own.

This video has some information on getting tracking working with PWAs

The normal Google Analytics gtag library doesn't work on it's own as it requires the Window object, which is not accessible by service workers.

You have to create custom events that correspond with actions within the app using the gtag command and have the service worker hit the measurement protocol API with a post request.

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This video has some information on getting tracking working with PWAs
I'm guessing this is not something done/supported by xF when we have our GA property ID @ /admin.php?options/groups/seo/ and we'd have to manually edit the google_analytics template to add the event actions, and the service_worker.js file to add the appropriate snippets.
 
Google announced some changes to PWA discovery recently and I have been seeing related messages in browser console. The exact message is this:

Site cannot be installed: Page does not work offline. Starting in Chrome 93, the installability criteria is changing, and this site will not be installable. See https://goo.gle/improved-pwa-offline-detection for more information.

I do not see this here on XenForo community so not sure if I broke something on my own board. Or XenForo devs have made changes to the build running here. Just wanted to post this as a FYI. Though I imagine it could be moved to support node.
 
I do not see this here on XenForo community so not sure if I broke something on my own board. Or XenForo devs have made changes to the build running here. Just wanted to post this as a FYI. Though I imagine it could be moved to support node.
 
This is likely related to a recent bug fix related to attachment dimensions.

I've reported it internally.
 
Just checking in to ask if the recent iOS 15 release made any PWA changes or improvements?

Likewise, did Safari 15 bringing back real browser extensions, open any doors to push notification support? (Presumably from a 3rd party app.)
 
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