The recipe is small: a web app manifest (name, icons, display mode) plus a service worker that can serve the app offline. Installed, the site lives outside the browser chrome — its own icon, its own window, its own place in the task switcher.
The honest scope: a PWA is the right answer when the product is web-shaped and 'install' means convenience, not when it must reach platform APIs the browser hides — heavy offline data, background sync, deep hardware. Many products need the web version anyway; the manifest plus service worker costs days, the native app costs months and an app-store tax.
Related terms
Service worker
A script the browser runs between your page and the network — intercepts requests to cache, serve offline and sync in the background.
HTTP caching
Headers that tell browsers and CDNs how long a response may be reused — the cheapest performance optimization that exists.
Client-side rendering (CSR)
Sending a JavaScript bundle that builds the page in the browser — flexible, but the first paint waits for the code to download and run.
The bench this belongs to
Full-stackIf you can describe it, we can build it. React and Next.js on the front, Python or Node behind, Postgres underneath, shipped to somewhere you can afford to run.
