Show HN: Pep – Turn your site into a fast, installable Progressive Web App (PWA) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Pep – Turn your site into a fast, installable Progressive Web App (PWA)

pep.dev

59 pointsgrun21 comments

Hey guys! I'm Ansgar (https://github.com/gruns). I built Pep because I believe Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are the future. They turn websites into apps that load quickly, work offline, and can be installed like native apps.

But they they can be a lot of work. And hard to get right.

We built Pep to solve that.

I'd love to hear your thoughts -- good and bad. Feedback is how good products become great.

Will try this soon! Did a vue app before semi-manually, was quite a hassle

Awesome!

Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions. Feedback is how good products become great.

I will get back to you

What's actually involved in turning your site into a PWA? I don't see why this needs to be a subscription service vs a one-off or javascript library I can manage myself.

Our goal is for you drop Pep in your website and Pep does everything it can to make your website the best it can be. That includes all aspects of speed: minified assets, responsive images, global CDN (Google), etc. The subscription covers those, as they incur ongoing costs for processing and distribution.

This is interesting, though. Would you be more interested in Pep without all the additional, ongoing improvements? Akin mto a client side only version of Pep?

Thank you!

Cool, it actually does what it claims to.

I just added pep.dev/pep-sw.js to my site and am digging into the minified javascript. Confirmed my images are on the CDN and resized for the device, which should save a ton of bandwidth.

The offline native feature seems super cool, going to try it out...

Sorry, I understand you want this to be done for every website, but personally I hope this will not get wide spread. It reminds me of browser notifications and newsletter signups. Another thing I have to click away: 'please install our website as PWA NOW'.

Ya. I feel you.

We think every site knows their audience best and leave it up to sites to decide how lightly, or heavily, they want to encourage their users to install their PWA.

By default, Chrome's UI is quite light. http://i.imgur.com/PkWjXie.png

It's not clear what this involves. Do I have to upload my site to your server?

Nope! You just

1) Add a <script> tag to your site.

and

2) Host Pep's Service Worker (https://pep.dev/pep-sw.js) on your site.

That's it. Pep takes care of the rest, thanks to the magic of the Service Worker. Everything just works.

Great stuff man. Even if it is that simple some documentation (and/or a video) is still nice. It appears for the target audience the offer sounds much to good to be true.

To author, I added for my blog, https://www.boxpiper.com/. It works as you said, but it slows down the website a bit.

Can you have a look why exactly it happens?

Installation feature is cool. Kudos.

How does this work with complex frameworks like React? Does it manipulate components themselves to allow them to work offline, or does it just check for/cache the production JS/HTML/CSS? If so, how would it compare to a server-side rendering framework like Next.js?

How is it different from modern browsers' built-in `turn a site in a PWA` feature? Chrome allows to install several sites as PWAs, Yandex Browser allows that for any site.

Our goal is for you drop Pep in your website and Pep does everything it can to make your website the best it can be. That includes all aspects of performance: minified assets, responsive images, global CDN (Google), etc.

So Pep goes far beyond just adding a shortcut to a website to open in its own window.

I have only given it cursory look thus far, but I would certainly like to thank you for including what seems a decently functional free tier (IMO).

No, thank you!

If/when you give it a shot, let us know what you think. Feedback is how good products become great.

Love the idea, the second P in “pep” is cutoff on the homepage using an iPhone SE2.

Awesome. Fixed!

Thank you!

P.S. Nice username. =]

Another thing, as evidenced by the confusion in this thread:

The homepage is kind of lacking. I’d suggest linking to some docs that explain the things you have in this thread so potential users can evaluate the product better.

Right now your homepage is:

- company name

- sign up button (which looks weird for me on mobile FYI)

- what is a PWA

- benefits of PWA

- companies using PWAs that don’t use our product for their PWAs

- sign up button

- team

- contact

Include a docs section or something near the top seems like a good idea IMO

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