My understanding is that progressive web apps still rely on the site's server, it's basically a way to show the website as fullscreen like it was a native app, though there are a few things that PWAs are allowed to do that a normal website doesn't.

The nornal Lemmy site is a PWA as well, so that can be installed the same as wefwef.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Only for the initial download depending on their service worker (annoyingly it's super site dependent). I'd need to see dev tools to be sure but I'm pretty confident all the JS assets and stuff are being served locally from my phone.

There's a distinction between being able to install a site to your homescreen, adding a shortcut to the site (which opens in full screen), and installing a site to your homescreen which uses their service worker to effectively be a full local server for the site.

Setting up the service worker for my note taking app was very painful haha

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Interesting! I guess it depends on the site as to whether anything needs to be processed on the server.

I'd think typically most JS and images are cached in the browser for any site though, right?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In general yes, although the root HTML document might not be.

Service workers can do more than caching though, it's effectively a full web server just for that web app that runs on your device. If it's installed I'm pretty sure the data they have will never be cleared by the OS unless you uninstall the app too.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Oh thats interesting, I wonder why the wefwef.app server was struggling so much if it doesn't do any processing just serving static content that gets stored on the client. I guess just wasn't prepared for the rush of people checking it out.