When and how does a PWA update itself?

Question

As far as I know, once you click \"add to homescreen\" on a PWA\'s website, the browser generates an .apk using the provided manifest file and sources and installs it like a

Answer 1

No cache scenario (No Service worker): Your PWA app will be cached only when you use Service worker. Manifest.json will help adding your web app to home screen with a icon and open without address bar. If you don't have a service worker or if your browser don't support it, web page will be loaded fresh every single time. No Cache.

Cache-On Scenario (With Service worker): Assuming you have service workers configured, service workers can cache by lazy loading or prefetching the files that are configured for caching (You can include or exclude caching anything from html, CSS, images to JSON/XML API responses).

After the initial cache, service worker will use the cache to serve your apps network request based on cache approach you have implemented from below ones.

• cache falling back to network
• Network falling back to cache
• Cache then network

Most apps choose to precache due to performance benefits and look for new files on loading, if any changes found will be loaded on next session or prompt user to refresh. With this solution, each file will have a long Hash string for each file cached by service worker. On load of each application, hash code from server will be fetched to match and find what file needs to be updated and the same will be updated in a separate service worker thread. You can notice this in network tab -> service worker response in chrome developer tools.

If you choose network-first approach, you can avoid showing old content on initial load, but loose significant performance benefits that comes with caching.