How To Develop A Progressive Web Application On An Android Device

In the past few weeks, I’ve been wondering how the whole eco-system of a Progressive Web Application (PWA) works. Of course, I need to get my hands dirty and code something to understand it.

My main goal is to provision a local development environment, which hot-reloads (code changed) the application on a physical Android device.

The main challenge was figuring out a way to access the PWA, which runs on my local machine from my Android device (Samsung Galaxy S10). Why? Because PWA requires HTTPS access so using IP addresses is not an option.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you - unfor19/pwa-quasar-local

This project demonstrates how to develop a Progressive Web Application (PWA) locally on an Android device, using the Quasar Framework v2.

Final Results

IMPORTANT: Images may look weird on DEV.to; unsure why. Go to the GitHub repo unfor19/pwa-quasar-local if you experience funny widths and heights

I took screenshots with my Android device to document the whole user experience of installing a PWA for the first time.

Accessed PWA From Android Device

The Add to Home Screen popup appears!

Clicked Add To Home Screen

Clicked Install

Installation Completed

PWA Appears On The Device’s Apps List

PWA Has A Cool Splashscreen

That is thanks to Quasar which does it, as always, automatically.

First Run After Installation

The application runs on the device as if it were a “normal application”.

Final Words

It was a true joy to work with Quasar since it made the whole process of generating a PWA out-of-the-box without writing a single line of code. So head over to unfor19/pwa-quasar-local and do your PWA magic!