I have mixed feelings about PWAs. They're the best way to get an app on a user's device right now (no app stores!) but the hoops you have to jump through...
@tomayac I built a #Dropserver app for myself that is just a simple notification thing. It's a list of events that happen on a server I have. There are 0 to <10 of these per day.
I wanted to use periodic background sync to fetch these every 15 or 30 minutes, which you would think I could do.
Just one problem: I spend no time on this site. It takes 5 seconds to look at the events to my satisfaction. I don't scroll bc latest are at the top. There is nothing to tap.)
Result: my site engagement is 26/100, and consequently my minimal interval allowed by Chrome for a refresh is 24 hours. In other words, completely useless. I manually open and refresh x times per day instead. 😤
@tomayac Addendum: This site says there is a minimum of 12 hours (though they don't provide a reference for that number):
"To prevent websites from abusing this, the frequency of those synchronizations depends on the site-engagement score, which the browser sets for every website. If you open a specific web app a lot, this frequency can go up to a maximum of 12 hours."
@teleclimber Feel free to submit a https://new.crbug.com and post the URL here for triaging. The initial idea of the indeed arbitrary limit was to prevent abuse. I agree it makes the API less useful than it could be in theory. Time to visit the limit discussion again maybe.
@schizanon Yes I did notice I can manually change the numbers there, and they survive a refresh. I don't know if this has an impact on anything bc of course Chrome doesn't tell you "you're limited to 12 hours because of ...". It's quiet on the server these days so it may take a while for me to find out.
In any case this is such atrocious #UX it doesn't solve the problem for regular users. I can only hope some of this will go away or be improved significantly in time.
@teleclimber well, to be fair, it's good that any website you visit can't just make as many background requests as it wants. That would be bad for people's battery life and data plans.
Speaking of, could your phone be limited by battery saver/data saver settings?
Is there always new data that you app needs to load? Even if the user isn't using the app? Why can't you just load it when the user opens the app, or use webPush to push new data to it instead?
I just wish there was a way for me to say "I'm OK with this app making these requests every 15 minutes". Maybe instead of watching metrics this could be implemented as a permission:
"SomeApp wants to contact the server at <URL> when the app is not in use. Deny|Allow"
Add comment