TL;DR - please like/share/comment on this post if you'd like once again to use our beloved dev.to as a PWA

So... I just got a new phone and was going through the motions of setting stuff up as I like it. One of the last things I set up was actually one of my most frequently used apps - dev.to - as a standalone app of course! Imagine my surprise and dismay when I discovered that the site is no longer installable in this manner.

One word sprang to mind...

At first I thought I must have done something wrong... so I checked again... and again... and again... on multiple mobile browsers. No success - it simply produced a link that opened the site inside the browser. I even powered my old phone back on to check I wasn't going mad. Yep, the PWA version was still there... and it still worked just fine!

Next up was more investigation - what was going on? The most obvious thing was to check if the website was still serving up manifest.json - a key ingredient of a PWA. As it turned out, it wasn't 😢. A json response was received, but it just indicated a 404.

OK, so the manifest file was missing... maybe a temporary glitch on the site? I decided to use the Wayback Machine at the internet archive to see when this important element had gone missing...

Turned out to be around mid-March 2021. It's been gone for over a year!

Why would the good people at dev.to remove such a useful feature? What was the significance of that date for switching it off? I've been using dev.to like this for years with no issues or problems whatsoever!

I looked into this a little further... and... surprise surprise, it almost exactly coincided with the release of the Forem Android app - an app where you can visit all your favourite Forem-based sites in one convenient app. However, the app is not that convenient, even somewhat cumbersome, if you are only using one forem site... this was even mentioned in the comments of the app's release post on dev.to:

José Aponte • May 2 '22 • Edited on May 2 • Edited

I can agree on this. I'm a dev.to user and I'm not registered to other Forems. So, basically:

• If you belong to multiple Forems: You can benefit from this app.
• If you only use Dev.to or another forem (but just one): Use the PWA itself.

For a single site, the PWA version of it was simply far more useable than this app.

It would seem, from the above investigation, that the main reason (there may be more) for switching off the installability was to drive adoption of the Forem app. Now, if I could fathom some kind of financial motive for this switch I might be able to understand why it was done... but the app is totally free on all platforms.

So, my question for dev.to remains...

Why would you remove such a useful piece of functionality from such a good site just to try and drive uptake of an app that simply causes inconvenience for users interested only in using dev.to, and not other Forem sites?

It just makes absolutely no sense, and seems to run counter to the ethos and culture of the site. It can't even be argued that it is difficult to resurrect the PWA, as reinstating the serving of a simple small file is (as we all know) extremely easy.

Dear dev.to - please re-instate the PWA functionality!

Please like/comment if you too would like to see this feature return.