One page per question people actually ask. Each opens with the answer — no preamble.
Maskable icon: 41%. An id: 11%. Shortcuts: 8%. Screenshots: 11%. We fetched and parsed the manifest of every app in this catalogue and counted what was actually there.
Most lists of PWA examples are lists. We opened all 578 apps in this catalogue in a real browser, cut the network, and recorded which ones survived.
Microsoft Copilot cited this directory 3,800 times in three months and sent zero visits. ChatGPT sent 136 without being measurable at all. Here are both sides of the chain.
Four PWA directories still answer. We fetched each one the way a crawler does — no JavaScript — and counted what came back. One of them serves 33 bytes.
iOS treats installed web apps differently from every other platform. Four differences explain almost every report, and none of them produce an error message.
Android installs web apps more willingly than any other platform, which is why its failures are quieter — a wrong icon, a stale name, an update that never arrives.
Not loading and loading blank are different failures with different causes. Here is how to tell them apart in thirty seconds, and what each one means.
An installed PWA that opens white is almost always one of four things. Here they are in order of how often we actually see them, with the check for each.
Chrome only offers to install an app when a specific list of conditions is met. Here is that list, in the order they actually fail, and how to see which one is blocking you.
You deployed. Installed users still see the old version, sometimes for weeks. Two different causes, one of which permanently orphans everyone who installed before the change.
Android puts your square logo inside a white blob because the manifest has no maskable icon. It affects most PWAs — we measured. One extra icon fixes it.
Everyone answers this with an opinion. We opened 386 installable web apps in a real browser and cut the network. Here is what the ecosystem actually looks like.
We opened 386 installable web apps and read every manifest we could reach. Most have at least one defect their author does not know about. Here is the breakdown.
Being installable and working offline are different things, and most installable apps do not do the second. We measured 386 of them to find out how many.
The question is asked constantly and answered with opinion. We measured 386 installable web apps. The failure is real, but it is not the one people describe.
Chrome withholds the install option silently when any one condition fails. Here is the list in the order they break, where the browser names the culprit, and what it never tells you.
Yes. Excalidraw keeps working with no internet once you install it as an app, and your drawings stay on your device. Here is how to set it up, and what stops working.
There is no official Excalidraw installer for Windows, macOS or Linux. Installing it as an app from your browser takes ten seconds and gives you the same thing: an offline icon in your dock.
Yes — Photopea keeps editing with no connection once it has loaded, because the whole editor runs in your browser. Here is how to install it, and the one condition that trips people up.
Excalidraw is free and open source under the MIT licence, commercial use included. The paid tier, Excalidraw+, adds hosted collaboration features — the editor itself costs nothing.
You can send a 10 GB file to someone without it ever being readable by a server. Here is how browser-side encryption works, and which tool to use.
Trim, fade and normalise audio without installing anything, and without uploading your files to a server. What browser audio editors do well, and where they stop.
Chrome, Safari, Edge, Android, iOS — the exact steps to turn a website into an app with its own icon and window, and what changes once you do.
A Progressive Web App is a website that can install itself and keep working offline. Here is what actually makes one, and how to check whether a site qualifies.
Games that install from the browser and keep working with no connection. What makes a game genuinely offline, and which ones are worth the home-screen slot.
Resize, compress and convert images entirely on your own machine — no upload, no account, no watermark. How browser image tools work and when they beat desktop software.