The Guardian Release Progressive Web App to Coincide with Rio Games

Ah, it's supposed to detect that you're on desktop and redirect you to https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/aug/06/rio-running-ap.... Obviously getting a false positive – thanks, we'll look into it!

It's not using React, it's using Ractive (http://ractivejs.org), which we use for all of our projects. It was designed with that goal (among others) in mind – making cross-browser DOM quirks something we don't need to worry about.

Just a white screen for me too, Safari on a Mac.

It's, err... a running app. Most people don't go running with their desktop!

We'll definitely be writing about this in the next few days or so. The two biggest hurdles were getting our heads around service workers – which prompted me to write https://gist.github.com/Rich-Harris/fd6c3c73e6e707e312d7c5d7... – and audio.

Audio on mobile is just a disaster, because you can't trigger media playback without a user gesture unless you use an AudioBufferSourceNode, which we found can easily crash a phone (because the entire clip has to be decoded and held in memory, and we can have several clips that are several minutes long in playback or standby at any given moment). We created a library called Phonograph to work around these limitations by decoding small snippets of audio on the fly (using the fetch API to stream, where possible): https://gitlab.com/Rich-Harris/phonograph