I have been pretty interested in PWA’s lately. In case you don’t know, PWA is a progressive web app. The progressive part is about how the app reacts with more or less capability in the host browser. It also gives the web app some native capabilities such as notifications so that the app appears almost like a native app.

As a bit of a fun side project, I thought I would take a transit status app that I have in UWP and rewrite for Xamarin Forms across Android, iOS and UWP. Then I would rewrite it as a PWA. Fun!

I think this one will take a while to complete though. We shall see. Hopefully what comes out of this are some cool things I learn with each approach and some informative blog posts. On the Xamarin Forms side, I am going to use the latest release of Prism for Xamarin Forms. The Prism team has been doing some amazing work and have recently set themselves up on Patreon for funding.  I signed up for funding them, if you use their libraries, please consider doing the same.

On the PWA side, I will use Angular as a framework. I know some people don’t like any frameworks (too much weight), but I think it is worth it, at least for my target. Perhaps if your target is a local app in a region that doesn’t have very good connectivity, Angular or React is not your choice. For this app, it is only useful in Metro Vancouver and the service is good across multiple providers. But that is your choice to make. I will also find a template that I can use that is ready for my business logic. I don’t have an eye for colors and site design, so I prefer buying a template whenever I make any kind of web app.

At the end of this, I hope that I have learned lots of new things and that I have a number of functioning apps. If they turn out ok, I will submit them to the store for publishing.

Time to start work!

p.s. this will take a while to complete!