Last year a group of us, folks who are working on the PWA platform, got together to discuss putting on a conference. When we reflected on what we were hearing in the PWA community, we heard lots of excitement, use cases, feedback, feature requests, etc., but we’d also hear questions like Are PWAs a thing? more often that we would like.

We realized that to make PWAs better, we needed to listen directly to the people creating the apps. So we decided to create a platform for the PWA community to share their vision for and experiences with creating powerful, capable, multiplatform web apps.

That is how the PWA Summit, a conference to empower everyone working with PWAs, was born. You can participate in this year’s edition by submitting a talk to the call for speakers.

The first edition

Given that the event was put on by people who build browsers, you’d think the conference would be looking to answer the question: What are vendors doing for PWAs? That wasn’t our focus though. Instead, we wanted to learn What is the community doing with PWAs and what do they need to improve the experiences? We also wanted the community to know that PWAs are part of the open web, that they build on patterns that are not owned by a single company, and that those patterns have support across multiple companies.

One of the reasons we love working on the web is its reach, the web is a truly global phenomenon and we wanted the voices on the conference to reflect that. We cast a wide net in looking for fresh perspectives. We reduced bias in our selection process by anonymizing proposed sessions. We ranked the talks exclusively by their proposed content. And we provided coaching so that new speakers would feel comfortable and welcome at the conference.

We are happy to report that the community response exceeded our expectations. The community showed up and demonstrated their belief in the value of being able to create app experiences in a global, stable platform with patterns that are supported by web standards.

Our keynote, delivered by Ire Aderinokun, demonstrated how much more powerful PWAs are nowadays compared to their humble beginnings. They have more integrations with operating systems, CSS has improved, making it possible to create app-like interfaces for PWAs. Taken all together, this takes a PWA from a shortcut on home screens to an app that blends seamlessly with the other apps on your devices.

We heard about the importance of enabling an offline experience, not as a requirement for being an app, but as an opportunity to serve your users. We learned how to build authentication while offline and the cool use case from Airbnb where users can save the Wifi password for their destination and easily connect to the Wifi when they arrive, even when they might not have mobile data available.

We learned that the community is really interested in patterns to create user friendly, interoperable, cross-platform UIs. We had a whole talk dedicated to UI tips and there are other user experience considerations were spread throughout the other talks. We also learned a lot about the tools that developers can use to make their web apps accessible for more users and much more.

What’s in store for 2022?

We’re gearing up to deliver another amazing PWA Summit this Fall. We’re creating the space and opening it up to you to share your knowledge. We believe the community is interested in leveraging the web reach, its multiplatform ubiquitousness, and the resource saving technique of creating a single code base to serve users wherever they are.

The content we offer really is up to you. Why do you think PWAs are great? What needs to be built to make them better? What new PWA capabilities were (or are being) released that finally unblocked your use cases? What can improve the developers or business leaders' experience in leveraging the web to create apps? Come share your story.

Our call for speakers is open until July 20th, 2022 and the event will be livestreamed on October 5th & 6th. We are looking forward to seeing you there!

- Adriana on behalf of the PWA Summit Organizers