How to migrate PWA to new responsive engine without disruption?

Need help New Responsive Engine
1

Have a PWA where app’s webpage is “Added to Home Screen” for all users. It looks and feels like an app…unless you navigate to a new page.

How could I upgrade to new responsive engine without creating a new page, and with minimal disruption?

2

Create a clone of the page, call it say page-new
Migrate it to new responsive engine.
Do all the work and testing.
Once satisfied, rename the page to page-old and page-new to page.

3

Thanks! have you done this successfully with a PWA yet?

I thought I’d have to set a proper redirect. I thought the PWA on iOS would save all types of data and the PWA would break if I did this. Maybe I’m over thiking it.

4

I think it would only save the path and page content on that path can surely change at any point of time. But if you still want to be sure, you can create a test pwa, migrate it to responsive and try it out.

Yes, I have migrated my pwa to responsive. But I did it one shot without changing to new page etc. Basically I changed the page and made it live only once I was sure.

Also, I now actually run my app as TWA and not PWA. (It is still PWA inside, but has TWA too which makes it installable from play store)

1 Like
5

happy it’s this easy! thought i had to research a lot. will def test it out and see how it performs before doing a real switch

6

Sure. Good luck.

Couple of tips on how to migrate to new responsive seamlessly (From my experience. Not necessarily what would work for you and not sure if this is best):

  1. Don’t choose the option of “restructure page to match existing responsive behaviour”. It adds a lot of clutter to your page with many unnecessary rows and columns.
  2. You can migrate and keep the layout of the page as “fixed” to begin with. That way everything inside it behaves as if it is in old responsive engine.
  3. And then bit by bit you can keep migrating pieces of the page by changing their layout from fixed to “column”, “row” etc.
7

thank you! I was actually thinking of starting from scratch, but this would be a lot faster since workflows would stay the same.

great tips!

8

Hey Brad, following up on this, how did it go for you? I spent a couple of days migrating everything to the new responsive only to find myself stuck in the final step of making it a PWA. Context, my original PWA was a single page app with pages triggered by hide and show but now when I test out the new responsive app with multiple pages, the PWA shows page reloads etc. Curious to hear how it went for you.

9

Still on my to-do list. I’ll let you know when I start it.